On the 9th April 2025, the Starmer Government formally abandoned its pledge to hold five statutory inquiries into the grooming gangs scandal that has been live in the north of England for at least three decades. The announcement passed with some notice from the mainstream press, though with barely a sigh of regret from those same institutions that for years had colluded in the cover-up. It was not a great betrayal, because no one with a brain had ever really believed the promise. Because it was one, it can be called an act of gross depravity. Of greater present interest, however, it can be seen as an act of terminal stupidity by a regime that has failed to hear the new music played for the political dance.

Now, because about two thirds of those who visit this blog come from outside the United Kingdom, I need to begin with a short explanation. For more than thirty years, a form of industrial-scale sexual slavery was practised in several English towns and cities, almost all of them in the North. Thousands—some estimates say tens of thousands—of underage English girls, mainly from poor backgrounds, were groomed, raped, tortured, prostituted, and in some cases murdered, and perhaps even eaten. The perpetrators were overwhelmingly Pakistani Moslems. This was not some generic issue of child abuse, and it was not a matter of race alone. It was a religious, ethnic, and cultural pattern of behaviour, facilitated by a state terrified of upsetting a favoured minority and indifferent to the suffering of its native people.

There are reports throughout this period—and it may not have ended—that show local police officers, teachers, and social workers aware of the abuse, but unwilling to act. The excuses vary, and none of them stands up to scrutiny. Some were afraid of being called racist. Some feared Moslem unrest if arrests were made. Some, it seems, were compromised themselves—either as clients or members of the gangs or as ideological collaborators. They were all working within a bureaucratic system that regards white working-class girls as expendable. These are a low priority. Their suffering has been a regrettable but tolerable cost of multicultural harmony.

Eventually, the crimes became too visible to ignore. A few trials took place, mostly in towns like Rotherham and Rochdale, where the extent of abuse could no longer be hidden. Some men were imprisoned. The usual excuses were trotted out: a failure of communication, a lack of training, resource shortages, and so on. But none of this answered the growing demand for a national, statutory inquiry—one with the power to compel testimony, to cross-examine under oath, and to name the institutions and individuals who allowed this to happen.

Under public pressure, even the Johnson and Sunak Governments had begun to make vague commitments to such an inquiry. When Labour took office under Keir Starmer, a more definite promise was made. There would be five statutory inquiries, each in a separate region, each with full legal authority. That promise has now been broken. There will be no inquiries. There will be no accountability. The matter is, in effect, closed.

Why? The answer is obvious, and it comes in two parts. The first is electoral. In a normal election, Labour depends on the Moslem vote in dozens of marginal constituencies in the North. Without this bloc vote, it would have no hope of a majority. It will get none from the white working classes, which increasingly understand that Labour is not their friend. That vote has become restless in recent years, particularly over foreign policy. Many Moslems in Britain felt betrayed by Tony Blair’s support for the Iraq War. The recent blanket endorsement of Israel’s conduct in Gaza has added to their alienation. Mr Starmer cannot afford to lose these voters—and he certainly cannot afford to alienate them further by airing a scandal in which the culprits were, almost entirely, Pakistani Moslems.

The second reason is institutional. If these inquiries had gone ahead, they would have shown beyond all doubt that the police, the social services, and the local councils in towns like Bradford and Oldham were, and remain, institutionally anti-white. They would have exposed how Labour-controlled authorities not only looked the other way, but sometimes actively enabled the abuse. They would have forced uncomfortable questions about why so many of the implicated officials are still employed, or quietly retired on generous pensions. They might even have drawn attention to the fact that several senior figures in these councils were not merely negligent, but active participants in the criminal enterprises.

Labour cannot allow this. Its reputation as the “party of the people,” already crumbling, would not survive the truth. The myth of multicultural harmony would not survive the truth. The police could not maintain their pretence of political impartiality if the truth were known. So the inquiries have been cancelled. The past is buried. The victims—what remains of them—are left to rot in their silence.

So much for the evil side of what has happened. I now turn to the stupidity. In walking away from these inquiries, the Government may have committed an act of self-harm greater than anything the grooming gangs scandal in itself might have inflicted. I do not suppose there will be any explosion of public anger. There will be demonstrations. There may be sporadic rioting. But the British people as a whole have been drugged for too long on reality television and cheap sugar. The greater threat to Labour is not a mob that does not exist. It is that the Starmer Government does not understand that the political calendar is flashing red on Thermidor.

Here again, I need to explain. Some of our readers have objected to my use of the word “Thermidor” to describe present developments in Britain and America. They call it an obscure and pretentious reference to events that no one bothers to study. I disagree—well, perhaps no one does bother to study them nowadays. Even so, Thermidor is the key to understanding everything.

The French Revolution began in 1789 as an attempt at liberal constitutional reform. By 1792, it had collapsed into chaos. The monarchy was overthrown. The Jacobins took power. What followed was a carnival of murder and ideological madness. Priests were butchered, churches torn apart. Towns were destroyed. Farmers were hanged for hoarding grain. The guillotine became a sacred instrument of virtue. The Reign of Terror—so they called it—lasted until the summer of 1794, when France was in a losing war with every other great European power, and in a civil war at home.

At that point, a group of saner republicans, partly sickened by the bloodshed, though fearing more for their own necks, staged a coup. Robespierre was arrested and guillotined. His more replaceable colleagues followed. This was the Thermidor Reaction—named after the month in the revolutionary calendar when the coup took place (July 1794, in our terms). It was a reaction not against the Revolution itself, but against its suicideal excesses. France did not return to monarchy, and monarchists continued to be persecuted. But there was a return to normality, and France began to recover as a power in the world. The army was reorganised. The civil war was ended. The foreign enemies were pushed back. The Republic was made into a going concern.

The Marxists use “Thermidor” to describe any moment in a revolution where the crazies are deposed by pragmatists—where the ideological fever breaks, and the competent step in to clean up the mess. And this is where we may be. There are obvious differences. It is hard to disagree with the early objectives of the Revolution. The Old Order was radically bad, and probably unreformable. The ideals of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, as reasonably understood, are fine things. The French Revolution is to be denounced for its means, not for its ends. Our own revolution is a different matter.

The British and American revolutions, evident at least since the 1990s, have not involved guillotines or show trials—though the British version of the latter sometimes appears in crown courts when Twitter users are prosecuted for misgendering. As the front men for this revolution—more properly perhaps this revolution, as the similarities are not accidental—stand the usual coalition: politicians, academics, the media, the police, the churches, and a vast NGO-subsidised apparatus. These have declared war on the past, on the family, on national memory, on local loyalties. They have imported millions of foreigners. They have taught children to hate their ancestors. They have destroyed people for making jokes. They have silenced dissent through shame and, when that failed, through prosecution. The goals were plain: the destruction of the native working classes, the erasure of historical memory, and the replacement of an organic society with a managed population—a diverse mass ruled by an unaccountable elite.

The revolution has served two overlapping purposes: first, to enrich a small and globalist elite; second, to dismantle any sense of national cohesion that might resist their control. That is what the past thirty years have been about.

But the revolution has gone too far. Its agents—third-world immigrants, sexual minorities, neurotics, feminist ideologues, green bureaucrats—were expected to be obedient foot soldiers. Instead, they have developed agendas of their own. The Moslems, in particular, have refused to play along. They want power, not accommodation. They want the benefits of liberalism without the duties. They take the welfare, but not the feminism. They demand respect, but not tolerance. And now, with the Islamic world in flames and the government spouting pro-Israel clichés, they are not even loyal.

Meanwhile, the ruling class in Britain has begun to realise that the country is no longer strong enough to act as an enforcement agency. It has no army. Its economy is hollowed out. Its youth are drugged and demoralised. And China is rising. It is hard to run a global rent extraction empire when your domestic base is on the verge of collapse.

So the elite has split. One faction—the crazies—wants to keep pushing. More immigration. More censorship. More carbon taxes. More gender ideology. The other faction—the moderates—wants to stabilise the situation. They want working industries. They want young white men willing to fight again. They want safety valves for dissent. This is not because they are patriots, but because they are realists. And these appear to have won the argument.

Here, for the avoidance of doubt, I will emphasise the distinction between the ruling class and the mere government. In both Britain and America ultimate power lies with a largely invisible monied interest. In each country, there is a cartel of approved politicians who compete with each other for who fronts the operations of the monied interest. The winning politicians are neither holders of real power nor helpless puppets, but somewhere between. They have no control over the final agenda, but much over how and when it is carried out.

In America, which has suffered a similar decline, Donald Trump and his associates have heard the new music. Therefore the theatrical purge of the more obvious crazies and the resulting signals sent out to the ruled. In Britain, the Starmer Government seems to have been deaf. The purpose of a Thermidor reaction is to stop the ideological frenzy before the entire apparatus of power collapses on itself. But instead of moderation, instead of calculation, instead of the cynical turn of direction that Thermidor demands, The Starmer ministers are still living in Year II of the Revolution. In a move of almost transcendent stupidity, they have decided to suppress an investigation that might have allowed them to pose—however fraudulently—as friends of justice and national healing.

They could have used the grooming inquiries as an example of Labour’s willingness to face hard truths. They could have turned them into a public purge of minor officials. They could have sacrificed a few scapegoats and claimed the mantle of reform. Instead, they have chosen silence and denial. They have chosen to tell us that they value the Moslem voting bloc above the rape and destruction of white girls.

In political terms, this is not just evil: it is stupid. The signs of what is expected ought to be plain. Look at the Blue Labour project. Once a marginal curiosity, Maurice Glassman has begun to attract money and media attention. He offers nothing fundamentally different from the regime. But he does offer the appearance of difference. Mr Glassman speaks of restoring national pride, of strengthening the working class, of rebuilding community. It is nonsense, of course. He is no friend of English identity. But he is a useful signalling device. The Starmer ministers have not taken any of the private hints about a change of direction. Instead, a public messenger has been sent. If the ministers ignore that, they will be in trouble—rather, the troubles in which they already find themselves will multiply until they are pulled down. They will be replaced not by another team from the political cartel: the Conservatives are broken; Reform is not ready. Instead, there will be a dribble of resignations and sackings until a new and more obedient set of ministers are in place.

I now turn to the Moslems. I do not pretend to understand their communities in detail. I have no great desire to understand them. But one thing is clear: their institutional behaviour in this country has been foolish. They are a marginal and resented group. That resentment may be suppressed, but it is deep. It runs through millions of people who no longer say what they think, but who think what they cannot say with growing ferocity.

In a position like this, common sense would suggest a policy of discretion. Keep your heads down. Enforce discipline within your own ranks. Avoid any action that stokes anger among the natives. Above all, you do not rape the daughters of the people who gave you refuge. You do not gang up in fast-food joints and car parks. You do not peddle heroin to children. You do not act like conquerors when you are, in truth, only guests tolerated by a host whose weakness may be temporary. And if some among you break these rules, you do not shield them. You do not demand silence. You do not accuse your hosts of racism when they demand justice. You go out of your way to apologise. You organise public vigils. You offer assistance to police and victims. You make it clear that your community rejects the abusers.

But the Moslem leadership in this country has done none of these things. Instead, they have leaned on Labour to cancel the grooming inquiries. They have used their electoral weight not to demand justice, but to suppress it. They have acted like kings of the country they entered as beggars. And they have done so with the enthusiastic assistance of a political class too cowardly or corrupt to resist. This is folly, because their position is not secure. Their influence is not real. It exists only because the ruling class finds it convenient. And when that convenience ends—as it soon will—they will be cast aside without ceremony.

Do I predict pogroms? No. But I do predict marginalisation. I do predict a hardening of public opinion. I do predict a time, not far off, when being Moslem in Britain will be no asset to one’s career, no shield from criticism, no guarantee of indulgence. There will also be fewer Moslems than are here now. The word remigration is so much more gentle than compulsory repatriation. It seems almost designed for use by a government still formally committed to multiculturalism. It probably is.

That is enough of the Moslems. Their problems are not mine or my people’s. Let me return to my main argument. Thermidor, I repeat, is not a counter-revolution. It is a consolidation. It is the moment when the true believers are shot in basements, and the realists take over the ministries. In Britain, this will mean the end of the woke utopia. There will be no return to tradition, but an attempt to stabilise what now exists. There will be fewer diversity officers, fewer “safe spaces,” fewer hate speech arrests. There will be reindustrialisation and national unity campaigns. There will be more of Mr Glassman’s sermons about dignity and work, and a stab at Orwellian sincerity. It will all be a lie. But it will be a more competent lie—a lie dressed in realism; a lie you can believe if you squint; a lie designed not to address discontent, but to control it.

This will be our Thermidor when it comes. And Mr Starmer has missed it. He still thinks people will cheer for “anti-racism” while burying their daughters. He still thinks the system can go on running just as it did under Tony Blair and Boris Johnson. He does not understand that his masters have changed or are changing their minds. A wiser government would have held those grooming inquiries. It would have followed the lead of Donald Trump. But we are not ruled by wise men. A government does not collapse because it is wicked. If that were the rule, no government would last more than a fortnight. It collapses because it fails to understand the bounds within which it is allowed to be wicked. The Starmer ministers do not seem to understand that those bounds have changed.

The wages of stupidity are oblivion. As said, one way or another, this Government will be replaced. Those who replace it will be less direct, more competent, no less ruthless, but more careful. They will not abolish the leftist state, but use it more sparingly. And they will open the grooming inquiries—not for justice, nor for truth, but for narrative control. They will sacrifice those councillors and police chiefs. They will apologise with solemn faces. They will express horror. They will speak of lessons learned. They will name the dead girls. They will erect plaques. They will build memorial gardens. They will pay off survivors with taxpayer money.

They will do all of this to preserve their own power. It will be a disgusting spectacle. But it may be the best we get. Or it will be the best until we take something better for ourselves. Until then, we should welcome any return towards sanity. Some prosperity is better than none. Some free speech is better than none. Some security for our people in our own homeland is better than none. But we should, at the same time, see this for what it is. It is not a true reaction to where we stood in the early twentieth century. It is the equivalent of the Perestroika and Glasnost by which the Soviet ruling class in the 1980s tried to stop the terminal decline of the base from which they hoped to export Communism to the world. There was never any intention of giving liberal democracy to Russia—only of reversing or sometimes moderating a set of policies that were taking the Soviet Union and its ruling class towards destruction.

And that was the end of that. Will it be for us?