Elon Musk thinks there is a hidden grooming scandal in Oldham. Why can’t the police find it?
This week’s controversy can be traced back to a vicious online campaign that has terrified politicians – but struggled to substantiate its claims
Sometimes it’s impossible to trace where an idea originated, and sometimes it’s very easy. The idea that something incredibly dark happened in Oldham – that the local authorities and police covered up the mass grooming of white girls by Asian men, and that only a public inquiry can get to the bottom of it — began six years ago, and it began with a man called Raja Miah.
I haven’t written about Miah for two years now, and with good reason — I didn’t think there was anything else I could profitably say. Back in 2021 and 2022, I spent months reporting on his successful campaign to take out a series of Oldham’s council leaders at the ballot box; how he had waged a remorseless information war to persuade people in the town that the authorities had concealed an epidemic of grooming from them. But except for during local elections periods, interest in Miah seemed to be dwindling as the pandemic drew to a close. I began to wonder if my stories about him were giving him more publicity than he actually deserved.
Then Elon Musk got involved. This time last week, I noticed Miah had tagged me in a tweet. “I exposed the industrial-scale gang rape of my town's children that authorities had ignored for years,” the post said. “I refused to look the other way. And for that, a network of politicians, press, police, Islamists and gangsters decided I was a problem that needed to be eliminated.”
In a video interview, he described me as part of the “fake liberal metropolitan elite” who protect the interests of the Labour Party over the plight of “working class white girls”. But this time, the post had hundreds of thousands of views, vastly more than Miah normally gets from ‘Raja’s rabble’, his local band of followers. Then, on Thursday morning of this week, he addressed the billionaire Musk directly.
“Dear Mr. Musk, I, and the people of my town, owe you our gratitude,” he wrote. “For six years, we have led the campaign for a Public Inquiry into the cover-up of the grooming and gang rape of Oldham’s children.” Soon, Musk retweeted Miah’s post to his 211 million followers, and within hours it had more than three million views. Miah, long a fringe curiosity in the life of Greater Manchester, had gone global.
The dossier
Back in September 2019, long before Musk kicked off a political firestorm by tweeting that safeguarding minister Jess Phillips should be jailed for her decision not to back a new inquiry into grooming in Oldham, a small spark was lit in local politics. Liberal Democrat councillors, who then represented the opposition to Labour in Oldham, asked the council’s chief executive to look into allegations that were spreading on social media. The allegations were about historic child abuse and a cover-up by senior Labour councillors and council officers dating back to 2013. The Liberal Democrats wanted to know “how the Council intends to deal with these allegations in order to restore public confidence.”
Whatever you think of what has happened in Oldham, one thing is for sure: public confidence was not restored. Quite the opposite. For more than half a decade now, Oldham has experienced almost unbelievable political instability, with three council leaders deposed by voters in consecutive elections; council meetings frequently interrupted by members of the public shouting about child abuse; and an atmosphere so toxic that a local MP was threatened with being shot when she met a voter on the doorstep.
The man driving that instability has been Raja Miah, without whom it’s very unlikely that this week’s national controversy over grooming gangs would be happening. In July 2021, we published a long read about how Miah’s claims had upended Oldham’s politics. Starting in 2019, Miah had been telling his followers in weekly broadcasts on Facebook that he had a dossier of evidence about widespread sexual abuse and council coverups in Oldham. Sometimes he went further than that, suggesting that the politicians themselves might be paedophiles. “I now genuinely fear at the thought of an organised paedophile ring operating out of the Civic Centre [Oldham’s council HQ],” he wrote in a comment on Facebook.
Miah often told his followers about the MBE he was awarded in 2004 for his work prompting community relations after the Oldham Riots and he soon went on to found two free schools with a similar mission. What Miah did not tell his followers is that he had a personal grudge against Oldham Council, whose leader Jim McMahon had written publicly about a government report that found major failings at Miah’s schools.
The schools – one in Oldham and one in Manchester — closed with debts of more than £1 million and the government probe found these same schools had paid more than £2 million to multiple companies linked to Miah for various services he had supposedly performed. Within months, Miah started blogging about grooming gangs, a network of shisha bars used to sexually exploit white girls and Labour purposely covering up these abuses because of its reliance on Asian block votes.
His blogs and videos spread rapidly on social media and the council found itself under pressure. Some of its response was cack-handed and seemed to lend credence to the idea that it had something to hide. Feeling that he was being harassed by an online army of trolls, the then council leader Sean Fielding wrote letters to the employers of a few of Miah’s supporters warning them that their staff were spreading far right or defamatory material. Fielding had been pushed to the edge by Miah, who had taken to calling him — without providing any evidence — “a corrupt paedophile-protecting politician”, resulting in one incident where a man angrily confronted Fielding near his home and accused him of covering up for abusers. But writing the letters was a move that Miah capitalised on for years, citing it as an example of how the council was willing to abuse its power to shut down dissent.
Another thing Fielding did which would have wider ramifications that continue to shape local politics to this day: in 2019, he asked Greater Manchester’s mayor Andy Burnham to include Oldham in his ongoing multi-part inquiry into how the authorities handled sexual abuse. The mayor’s “assurance review” had been set up after the BBC documentary Three Girls depicted the horrendous grooming that had taken place in Rochdale, which neighbours Oldham. Burnham had appointed two experts, childcare specialist Malcolm Newsam and former detective superintendent Gary Ridgeway, to examine how the authorities had failed victims in Rochdale and in south Manchester. After Fielding’s request, they were now asked to look into Oldham too.
Allies of Miah hoped that he would hand over his dossier to the investigators and the cover-up would finally be blown open.
The review
On the morning Newsam and Ridgeway’s Oldham review was published, around two dozen journalists from the local and national media arrived at the offices of Burnham’s Greater Manchester Combined Authority and were led into small meeting rooms. When we sat down, we were handed the 202-page report, far too long to read in the two hours we were given before the press conference began.
One of the journalists I spoke to was unhappy about the two-hour window, and wondered if it meant the press wouldn’t be able to digest some of the grislier details. But watching the way the news was reported later that day, I came to the opposite conclusion: most of the write-ups and broadcast reports focused very heavily on the worst findings – the specific headline cases that were deeply shocking but relatively easy for journalists and their audiences to understand. To me, the real outcome of the report was more subtle: it had directly debunked both pillars of the story Miah had been telling about Oldham for years.
The report came out in June 2022 and its authors had been working on it for two and a half years. While their initial remit had been to examine the alleged cover-up of grooming that took place in between 2011 and 2014, Newsam and Ridgeway had been allowed to range further than that, and the most shocking case they highlighted came from 2006: a woman referred to as “Sophie” in the report, who was assaulted by several men when she was 12 years old. She had tried to report sexual abuse at an Oldham police station but was told to return when she was “not drunk”, after which two men had picked her up in a car and raped her nearby.
It was an appalling case and the report found that both the police and the council missed chances to protect Sophie. In May 2007, a man was found guilty and sentenced to six years for raping her, but the police never conducted a follow-up investigation after the man mentioned at his trial two others who had allegedly also assaulted Sophie.
That wasn’t all. Newsam and Ridgeway confirmed that one of the worst offenders from the Rochdale grooming scandal had worked as a welfare rights officer for Oldham Council. And the review identified a “structural flaw” in the design of the council and the police’s multi-agency “Messenger” service that was supposed to tackle child sexual exploitation (CSE), meaning that some cases were not properly managed. The report had uncovered “historic failings” in the protection offered to “specific vulnerable children at that time”.
Naturally, those details led the news coverage, along with fulsome apologies from Burnham as well as the leader of Oldham council and the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police. But the less newsworthy aspects of the report were significant. The review did not find any evidence of widespread grooming in Oldham nor any evidence that the council had sought to cover things up. When I asked Ridgeway — a former detective superintendent for Cambridgeshire Police — whether he had encountered anything in Oldham that compared to Rotherham in terms of scale, he didn’t prevaricate: the answer was no. “My judgement would be that it’s apples and pears,” he told me. In the press conference, Newsam said the sexual abuse numbers he found in Oldham were "very typical" compared to other local authorities around the country.
Far from covering up abuse, the review team actually found “significant evidence that the Council did everything possible to publicise the threat of child sexual exploitation”, and said Oldham’s senior leaders “were ahead of many local areas” in this respect. Services for tackling CSE in Oldham were better than what was available “in other local authorities” and the area saw “significant investment by senior officers and councillors”. The council had gone to unusual lengths to highlight the problem, even commissioning a play about sexual abuse that was seen by more than 3,000 school pupils in Oldham. An evaluation found it to be “highly effective” at making children aware of the threat of sexual exploitation.
A story that had spread widely on social media suggesting that in 2010, Pakistani men would drive around a particular children’s home in Oldham waiting for girls to come out, and that staff inside the home were “not allowed to detain the girls” was looked into. Newsam and Ridgeway interviewed staff and managers from the home who “completely disputed” the allegations and said men who appeared outside the home were confronted and girls were discouraged from going with them. Ofsted had inspected the home 12 times between 2009 and 2015 and consistently found it either good or outstanding.
What had happened to Miah’s dossier of evidence? The review team had invited him to speak to them, but it didn’t happen. Miah’s condition for meeting Newsam and Ridgeway was that his evidence session had to take place in the Council Chambers with a live stream running and members of the public in attendance. Miah must have known that the review team could never agree to those terms – for starters, victims of sexual assault have a legal right to privacy and so a public evidence session was out of the question. Miah told the review that “I have absolutely nothing to hide and I sure as hell don't fear any paedophile protecting politicians or their Council stooges.” But his refusal to appear suggested he didn’t want the same scrutiny that he had spent so many years ostensibly courting.
This pattern had also been noticed by his allies in Oldham, including the former police officer Mark Wilkinson, who was running to unseat council leader Fielding in his ward in Failsworth. Wilkinson had been drawn into Miah’s online campaign and wanted to help him expose the sinister cover-up that Miah had meticulously identified. But he struggled to persuade his new friend to hand over his dossier to the authorities. “I specifically wanted him to go into the police,” Wilkinson told me back in 2021. “I even said, I'll come with you”. But Miah wouldn’t budge. “When he wouldn't do it, I felt let down, to be honest,” said Wilkinson.
The backlash
The week that the 2022 assurance review came out, the Labour MP Debbie Abrahams was door knocking in her constituency of Oldham East and Saddleworth when a man appeared at his door and shouted at her. He told her to get off his drive and if she didn’t, he would get his shotgun. Abrahams reported the incident to the police, who visited the man and noted that he was a licensed gun owner. The MP was convinced the gun threat was linked to anger that had been churning in Oldham since the report came out.
Within hours of being published, Miah was ferociously attacking the review, calling it a whitewash and saying it had been designed to miss the real scandal from the start. The fallout from the review is critical to understanding why the story of grooming in Oldham has blown up again in the past ten days, but it’s also not easy to neatly characterise. That complexity probably explains why it has received so little consideration in the national press coverage since Musk set things off last week, let alone in the viral tweets that have made the running in this story. But having spoken to half a dozen people this week who have followed this saga closely – including MPs, council officers, journalists and people at the GMCA, among them people who were sceptical about the review and the council’s response – I have sketched out the arguments.
The case against the 2022 review is that it was cursed from the beginning by what Newsam and Ridgeway were asked to investigate. The criticism is that they were focused on too narrow a period of time — 2011 to 2014 — and were only asked to examine sexual abuse claims relating to shisha bars, children’s homes, taxi drivers and specific offenders who had been employed by Oldham Council. Later the authors were asked to consider allegations relating to “Sophie”, which went back to 2005.
On top of that, critics made an obvious point: a local review like this simply didn’t have the heft of a statutory public inquiry. It couldn’t compel witnesses to appear or force organisations to hand over documents. Which meant that when Greater Manchester Police refused to provide some of the documents that the inquiry team asked for, it resulted in months of negotiations between lawyers, and Newsam and Ridgeway never got everything that they wanted.
At the time, a cold war had broken out between Andy Burnham’s office and the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, Ian Hopkins. Hopkins was said to be furious that Burnham’s review was poking around in his force’s affairs. The mayor and his team regarded Hopkins as old fashioned and intransigent, a leader who was unwilling to examine GMP’s mistakes. Insiders suspect the fractious Burnham-Hopkins relationship played a part in the force’s lack of disclosure.
The third main criticism of the review came from the former police officer Maggie Oliver, who had had a hand in exposing the Rochdale grooming scandal and who now represented survivors of abuse via her charity. Oliver said that it was only through her “personal advocacy” that the woman referred to as “Sophie” was allowed to give evidence, and that other victims should have been invited to give evidence. The suggestion was that Sophie’s experience was merely the tip of the iceberg and that the review had failed to dive under the surface to see the rest.
Anyone following Oldham politics will be familiar with those arguments – they have been aired in the media and in Oldham’s council chamber on an almost monthly basis since the review came out in the summer of 2022. And in fact, they were in the ether before the report landed. Ever since the terms of the review were announced, Miah had been telling his followers it was designed to further the cover-up rather than expose it. In a sense, anyone who followed Miah had been primed to dismiss Newsam and Ridgeway’s work before they had even put pen to paper, which they duly did.
Less well-aired are the arguments in favour of the review. For one thing, Newsam and Ridgeway were considered exceptionally credible investigators, having worked in senior positions in child protection and CSE-centred policing in other parts of the country. Not just that, but the first part of their review had been widely praised for highlighting the case of Victoria Agoglia, a 15-year-old girl who died in 2003 two months after reporting that she had been injected with heroin and raped, part of a major grooming scandal in south Manchester that was unpicked by the report.
The remit of their investigation may have seemed narrow, but that 2011-2014 period was a function of the allegations that Miah himself had been touting: that was when the police operations in local shisha bars had been taking place, and was the same period when Miah claimed that Oldham council had been in cahoots with the BBC to prevent coverage of the story.
Advocates of the review point out that it wasn’t limited in terms of the time period it scrutinised at all – evidenced by the way it looked at the case of Sophie, which took place much earlier, in 2006 – and that it was never set up to investigate all historic sexual allegations in Oldham, which is the job of the police. Instead, it was there to answer specific allegations about how the authorities had responded to such allegations.
When the publication date of the report was twice delayed, Miah implied in his weekly broadcasts on Facebook that a further cover-up was under way. But a former senior council officer says it was quite the opposite: the delays came about because the council was “proactively bringing more and more to the review team”, a claim that seems to be corroborated by the report itself, which talks about an increasing flow of information from the council after a slow start.
Greater Manchester Police argued that they couldn’t hand over extensive documents to the report for legal reasons: that doing so could have jeopardised ongoing police investigations. In fact, they were about to launch a big new probe into historic grooming in Oldham – one that might leave Newsam and Ridgeway’s review as something of a footnote.
The arrest
At an Oldham Council meeting in July 2023, Lewis Quigg, the burly Conservative councillor for Royton North and a close ally of Miah’s, got up to make the case for a more extensive inquiry into sexual abuse. As he spoke, members of the public were shouting from the public gallery, which had become normal in Oldham’s council meetings since the report came out a year ago.
By this point, momentum was building for a new inquiry in Oldham, including from some of the local survivors of CSE. Both Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors had written to the then-Home Secretary Priti Patel urging her to set up a new probe backed by statute. Quigg agreed, and his argument for why that was needed drew on a leap of logic that I’ve come to see as the key to understanding this story.
Referring to ten cases of sexual abuse that Newsam and Ridgeway had examined in their report, plus the case of “Sophie”, Quigg told the chamber: “It can’t be the case that Oldham finds 11 but Rochdale, Telford and Rotherham find thousands”. He wasn’t saying that he had seen evidence suggesting there were dozens of unprosecuted cases in Oldham. Quigg’s point seemed to be different: if places like Rochdale and Rotherham – relatively deprived towns with large South Asian populations – had played host to extensive networked grooming gangs, surely Oldham must have done too?
Labour figures in Oldham could tell the winds were blowing against them. The 2024 local election was coming into view and after Miah’s campaigning had helped to unseat three council leaders already, some councillors were panicking. Many insiders saw no merit in the calls for another inquiry but felt the pressure was becoming unbearable. Officers who worked for the council were getting threats – one says she was told via email by one of Miah’s followers that she was a child rape apologist and wasn’t fit to have kids.
The council’s leader Arooj Shah considered backing the calls for a new inquiry in order to “get ahead” of the story, but was talked out of it by a member of Burnham’s team, who encouraged Oldham’s Labour councillors to hold the line and continue to support the review process, which was about to publish the segment of its inquiry focusing on Rochdale. "At that point, it was felt important to maintain support for the ongoing process so as not to let down victims who were cooperating with both Operation Sherwood and the Rochdale report,” says a spokesperson for the mayor, confirming that the meeting took place.
Eventually, Shah’s hand was forced by politics. For several years, Labour’s previously dominant position on the council had been chipped away by losses to the other major parties and local independents, in no small part because of Miah’s energetic campaigning. When Shah’s party lost control of the council last year, she needed the support of some of the independents to get things done. And that support came with a price: backing the call for a new public inquiry. It was that request to the government, made last year, that was rejected recently by the safeguarding minister Phillips, setting off the current controversy.
An insider in Oldham says the Labour leadership of the council bungled its response to calls for a further inquiry and should have changed tack earlier. “We should've said ‘there is clearly a strength of feeling that the scope of this one wasn't broad enough and so we would like the government to commission one to take it out of our hands,” they told me. “Repeatedly blocking it was politically stupid.” What they’re describing here is political tactics rather than the substance, but the politics mattered a great deal. “Keeping going, meeting after meeting, and having the energy of the council, covering a place that has enough problems to deal with, sapped by the ongoing soap opera, was worth making a cynical move to make it go away”.
But what about the substance itself? Is there enough evidence of a much wider and undisclosed scandal in Oldham to necessitate spending millions of pounds on a new inquiry? Some people point to the case of “Sophie” and say yes. If something that horrific happened in Oldham and the police and social services didn’t respond adequately, what else might be found?
What gets little mention in these debates – in fact, I’ve barely seen it mentioned in all of the press coverage in the past week – is that an inquiry into historic sexual abuse in Oldham is going on at the moment. It’s called Operation Sherwood – the police investigation that was announced with great fanfare on the day the 2022 review.
Its initial remit was to look into exactly the cases mentioned by Quigg – the ten historic cases that had been highlighted by the review. But Burnham said it would go beyond that. “As well as reviewing cases in the review, Operation Sherwood will also explore any further lines of enquiry which result from their investigations. No stone will be left unturned,” the mayor wrote in a letter to the residents of Oldham.
What has Sherwood uncovered? When I asked Greater Manchester Police earlier this week, they told me that in the two and a half years since Sherwood was launched, it has only made one arrest. That was back in August 2023, when a 52-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of rape, sexual activity with a child, trafficking, and grooming. He has not been charged and remains on bail. Work on the investigation is said to have been “very, very slow”.
In a public statement given to The Mill, assistant chief constable Steph Parker didn’t directly address the lack of progress made by Operation Sherwood, but told us: “We have a number of ongoing victim-focussed investigations by our specialist unit investigating non-recent CSE, which has 100 dedicated detectives working at a pace survivors are comfortable with when the time is right for them. This has seen more than 100 arrests, with suspects continuing to be taken to court to face justice.”
Apart from one, the rest of those more than 100 arrests have been within other investigations, notably Operation Lytton, which was set up in 2020 to examine historic offences in Rochdale and which has already resulted in 37 men being charged and five already convicted. In fact, one of the trials resulting from Lytton is taking place next week, and two more are scheduled this year. The investigation is the second major police probe into historic grooming in Rochdale and it has been a major policing success.
Operation Sherwood’s single arrest can’t tell us everything. Sexual abuse inquiries are notoriously complex and traumatised witnesses and victims don’t always want to revisit what happened to them many years ago, or don’t trust the police for understandable reasons. Officers emphasise the importance of working at the pace of survivors and say it can take years to get to the point where the evidence is sufficient to bring suspects in. And of course, given the proximity of the two areas, some of the offenders arrested in the Rochdale investigations have likely either lived or offended in Oldham.
But anyone seeking to argue, as Miah does, that the police are continuing to cover up abuse in Oldham has to reckon with the fact that the same force – in fact, the same unit – has rounded up dozens of offenders in Rochdale in the past few years, while seemingly finding it very difficult to make any headway in Oldham.
For years, Raja Miah has promoted the idea that there is a massive and undisclosed grooming scandal in Oldham’s past, one being covered up by a corrupt and ruthless political class. He says he’s been ostracised by the establishment for “refusing to look the other way to the industrial scale gang rape of little White girls”. But he’s being ostracised no longer. This week, because of Elon Musk, his theories have gone mainstream – he was even invited by the Spectator magazine to appear as an expert in a video about the need for a public inquiry. Promptly after Musk’s tweet, Miah also found the time to share a link allowing his newfound followers around the world to send him money.
When a social media user linked to one of our previous long reads about Miah to make the point that he may not be the unimpeachable authority that some journalists think, Miah shot back with an angry tweet. “When a Public Inquiry comes, JOSHI HERMANN will have to explain who paid him to come after me,” he tweeted on Thursday night. Perhaps I have something to fear from an inquiry, then. But on balance, I suspect it’s Miah who fears one most.
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Excellent piece Joshi. My worry is the endless enquiries, and their limited scopes, and the complexity of them only feeds the story that this is a cover up being buried by bureaucrats. The politics of populism, by its nature, is a demand for easy answers to complicated questions, of which this is one depressing example.
This is journalism at its best, whether local or otherwise.