The Failures of Multiculturalism in the United Kingdom | Peter McIlvenna

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] A series of devastating inquiries have documented how networks of men—primarily of Muslim Pakistani heritage—groomed, trafficked, and gang-raped thousands of children, mostly white girls, in English towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford for decades.

Independent reviews found that local authorities downplayed allegations and failed to crack down on these crimes in large part out of fear of being accused of racism or Islamophobia.

At the same time, dozens of sharia councils have emerged across the United Kingdom that run an informal legal system handling divorces, inheritances, and family disputes within Muslim communities. But they often leave women with virtually no rights and protections, especially if the marriage was not officially recognized by UK civil law in the first place.

British converts from Islam to Christianity, such as Nissar Hussain, describe years of targeted harassment, demonization, and even brutal physical assaults simply for choosing to change their faith, an act branded as “apostasy.”

Many are now asking: Have we witnessed the failures of the multiculturalism experiment in the United Kingdom? To what extent should immigrants be expected to integrate and assimilate into the cultural and civic norms, such as equal protection under the law and gender equality? How should police and other authorities enforce the laws impartially when cultural and religious sensitivities are involved?

These questions are all coming to a head in the United Kingdom—and the cultural clashes there serve as a cautionary tale for America, says Peter McIlvenna, co-founder of Hearts of Oak.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Peter McIlvenna, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Peter McIlvenna:

Thank you, Jan. Great to be with you.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so what is it that people don’t understand about Islamism, this extreme version of Islam in America? You’ve been going around; you’ve come from the UK. There have been some really troubling developments in the UK over a while that seem to have been ignored. What do Americans not understand?

Mr. McIlvenna:

I think it’s difficult for anyone who does not live in the situation to understand the changes in a society and the rapid change in terms of demographics, the change in many of our institutions because of Islam slowly beginning to change. I’ve lived in London. Melanie Phillips calls it Londonistan. I wouldn’t consider that, but I’ve lived there for 23, 24 years, and I have seen a huge change in London.

What I would say to Americans is that Islam brings a clash. It brings a clash of what you want as freedoms. It brings a clash of how you live your life. But it is really, in terms of freedoms, in terms of the freedoms to choose or change your religion, in terms of women and how they’re treated, in terms of those who leave a faith and how they are treated, in terms of how children are brought up.

I’ve got a friend, I think you talked to Nissar Hussain and his story of how he was beaten to the point of death because he converted. Many other friends have had to flee countries because they have converted. Others have been told to leave their area. And that is a failure of the UK, just a systemic failure, a police failure, a failure of the politicians to understand what type of Islam is being taught and what that means.

Mr. Jekielek:

What happened in the UK? For example, we hear about these grooming gangs; some people call them rape gangs. It’s a horrific, decades-long crisis where all sorts of young women were horribly abused and not given any justice whatsoever. How do things like this happen?

Mr. McIlvenna:

So I have followed the grooming gangs, as it’s now known, for 15 years. I’m actually heading up the first legal case for one of the survivors to get compensation from her perpetrator. It’s never been done before. We’re now five years into that. She’s been awarded half a million dollars. We want to get that money for her. But this had been going on since at least 1975, which was the first reported case. So we are 50 years into this.

My anger is against the authorities for turning a blind eye. My anger is against the police for arresting the fathers who complained that their daughters were getting raped. My anger is against the politicians that cover this up. The amount of inquiries that we have had into this and They’ve whitewashed everything, and not a single action point has come to happen. My anger is against a lot of these.

There are about 500 of these men who have been jailed for the rape of children. 90 percent of them are Islamic, and 90 percent or more are Pakistani. You look down the names of them; there seems to be something that ties them together, and it was because of the fear of Islamophobia or racism that the police turned a blind eye.

We had two police officers who said the reason why they did not act was because they didn’t want a race riot. They wanted to keep the peace, and that’s why they have not policed properly; they want an easy life. That is a dangerous situation for society to be in when the authorities want life to be easy and will arrest the victim because they don’t want to arrest the perpetrators, as it will stir things up.

So we had these girls arrested for prostitution, 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds. A girl cannot consent to sex. That is rape. We had these girls arrested for drug abuse and alcohol abuse because they were plied with alcohol, and that was how they were kept in this situation. Sarah Champion, a Labour MP, so on the Left, is an MP for Rotherham, one of the epicentres of these regions. She says up to one million girls have been affected. One million girls.

Mr. Jekielek:

And it’s, you know, pure. So you’re saying the motivation is not wanting to cause a stir. I mean, that’s kind of like a bit of a stereotype against British people, isn’t it?

Mr. McIlvenna:

The reason this has carried on, the reason it’s been allowed to continue for over 50 years, and it’s happening to this day. You talk to any of these survivors; they say they still see the taxis driving around, driving these girls around to be raped. And it is still happening. The police still turn a blind eye. We are having probably every fortnight, there’s another legal case of 10, 15, or 20 men being tried for these crimes. So it’s still happening, and it’s not historic.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s almost like the police have been groomed themselves or something.

Mr. McIlvenna:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s like, I find this so astonishing, right? I deal with issues, as you know, that are hard for people to believe. I know. But this is really hard to believe because this is like one of the most vulnerable. It’s really sad, you know.

Mr. McIlvenna:

It is, and I know your fantastic book on organ harvesting, Killed to Order, and that is gruesome, but you tell it well. This is another gruesome story of how something which has been sanctioned by the state and allowed by all the levers of power. And this is what happens when you have multiculturalism. I would say that you begin to accept another culture, another belief, and you automatically say it must be acceptable, it must be good, it mustn’t be negative to our society.

Who makes that decision? Or even if you accept another religious faith, just because something has religion tied to it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Concerning Scientology; I don’t agree with that and how people are treated. So just because something is defined as a religion does not make it good. But because it’s defined as a religion, it means the police and the courts have turned a blind eye.

Do you know we had a court case that was collapsed by the police? Up in Huddersfield in the north of England, there was a case of 29 individuals that were being tried for these crimes. And after two-and-a-half years, it went to court, and the police turned up with no evidence, zero. They collapsed it, purposely because they didn’t want this problem on their streets. But if you say something online, on Facebook, on X, that’s a hurtful word, you can be arrested for two-and-a-half years. On top of this, to add to the other confusion of what’s been happening, we have a lot of these men.

So the girl I’m working with, Liz, was raped twice as a 14-year-old, 15-year-old. Her perpetrator was jailed for six-and-a-half years, was released after three-and-a-half years for good behavior. Two cases of child rape, three-and-a-half years in jail. How is that acceptable? So we have shockingly lenient sentences from our courts. And the way you deal with this is to put a 25-year sentence, a life sentence for child rape. Then we will maybe begin to see changes. But if you let these people out for three and a half years for good behavior, that’s the problem. There’s no punishment for the crime.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think that part of the reason this hasn’t moved forward is similar because it’s just so astonishing for the regular person to fathom, right? Like, how could, I mean, these are children, these are our future, right? And we’re allowing these horrible things to happen to them. Why? Because we don’t want trouble?

Mr. McIlvenna:

It is just like what you’ve talked about. It’s too gruesome to talk about. You don’t want to talk about this over a cup of coffee with a friend. It’s not really polite conversation. So people ignore it. And it is, I’ve, a lot of these girls have written books, and I’ve been given the books. and I understand the issue, but I couldn’t imagine reading about their stories. Or the BBC has done a three-part series, I think six years ago, called Three Girls. And they looked at the three girls in one of these stories of what had happened to them. So this has become entertainment, kind of in a gruesome way, that they are a three-part series.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you’re saying the BBC did a very, like, a highly factual exposé on all this, and that didn’t lead to a massive inquiry, or it did, and it was ignored? Or, like, what happened to all these inquiries? I’m so confused by this.

Mr. McIlvenna:

So we have had many inquiries that have looked at, because the grooming gangs are called group-based child sexual exploitation, that’s the definition for them. Now they’re being called, by many of the commentators, Muslim Pakistani rape gangs, which then begins, because what does grooming gang mean? It means it doesn’t define your terms. So now we’re seeing a lot of journalists, GB News now begin to define what they’re talking about. Gad Saad now defines, Elon Musk now defines, Tommy Robinson defines. So you’ve got a conversation about what this is.

But we have had numerous inquiries that have focused on child sexual exploitation. So the grooming of children, the trafficking of children, the rape of children, but not the subset that this is talking about, which is in communities that have closed and have not reported this to the police. That’s one of the big issues.

So back to the inquiries, we have had 15 inquiries, 14 inquiries, local and national. Now the UK government has been forced to do an inquiry on grooming gangs. They’ve been forced, kicking and screaming, into doing this. They’ve just appointed a chair. This is going to last two years. It’s going to cost 30 million, 40 million. And they don’t need another inquiry.

The information is out there. Just read the transcripts of the court, and you will hear the stories from these girls. Begin to act. Begin to arrest the police officers who turn a blind eye. Arrest the local politicians who turn a blind eye. Arrest child services that turned a blind eye. Let’s go after those in power who turned a blind eye. But yet the government’s saying, no, we need a new inquiry, the Conservatives, and this is a plague on all their houses, Jan.

This is the uniparty working in the UK. The Conservatives, Labour, Left and Right. The Conservatives had a huge inquiry in this and they had 20 action points at the end. Not one has been actioned, not one. So why start a new inquiry and pay tens of millions whenever you can go back to the old ones? Let’s look at the recommendations. Let’s implement them immediately. That’s what you would do.

Mr. Jekielek:

So it’s one thing to have good conclusions in an inquiry. It’s completely a different thing to actually enact them. And so why is it again? Is it just because enacting them disturbs the peace? Why are they not being enacted?

Mr. McIlvenna:

They haven’t been enacted because of who the perpetrators are. The communities you’re dealing with, Islamic communities, are a shame and honor culture. So they will not go to the police. I think the tip-offs we had to the police were something like 5 or 6 percent from the Muslim communities because they don’t want to bring shame on their culture as a culture of honor. The last thing they would do is go to the police, and that is why part of the issue we have with this.

The UK government has allowed Sharia courts to operate. On a slightly different tack on this, there are 84 Sharia courts operating in the UK, legally operating, and the government allows communities to deal with issues in a range of areas. Now, they have not dealt with grooming gangs, but they deal with marriage, divorce, and disputes.

And of course, in the case of marriage or divorce, a woman has to be told, I divorce you three times, and she’s divorced. She has no rights to children. She has no rights to finances. In Islam, if a woman is raped, she has to have two to four witnesses to back up her claim.

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you mean witnesses?

Mr. McIlvenna:

Witnesses to the act because a woman’s testimony is worth half to a quarter of a man’s. So she needs to have extra proof to show what has happened.

Mr. Jekielek:

Basically, what you’re saying is that these courts are functioning with, dramatically, a very different value system than the Western rule-of-law system. I mean, that’s what you’re saying, right?

Mr. McIlvenna:

Which is what I said at the beginning about how women are treated. This is a huge issue that I have regarding how women are treated in Islam generally, according to the stories in the past. Now, in some countries, they have freedom; in other countries, they have not. It is about how women are treated and how women are allowed to go out, being allowed to engage with society, and being allowed not to be covered head to foot.

Because the big change we have seen in terms of the rise of Islam in the UK has been through demographics growing at ten times the rate, ten times faster than the national population. Many come from countries that see women very differently from how we see them. That’s why we’ve got ourselves in this situation.

So maybe we have to go back to educating people from Islamic countries on how to treat women or helping these women learn English. Because men can’t speak English. They’re trapped in those communities. If they could speak English, that would help them engage with wider society.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is something I interviewed Michael Anton about. You know, he’s had a number of roles in the government. I think he was in this administration and the State Department policy planning, I believe, some years ago. And he said something that was revelatory to me, you know, someone who grew up in Canada, a very multicultural society, structured that way and intentionally. And he said, yeah, well, if you, I mean, basically, I’ll summarize, but he said, yeah, so if you import people from a different country, if the people immigrate and they’re not asked to assimilate to the local culture, they import the culture they came from. And in many cases, that culture is rather destructive. That’s why they’re bad. And that’s why they came in the first place to theoretically get away from that, right? So what doesn’t make sense?

And I was like, I thought to myself, wow, that’s kind of obvious. But it certainly never occurred to me that this is the reason why you have assimilationist policies, because we believe this is a good system, and it actually is a fantastic system. And the problem is that we don’t expect that people actually follow it, but import systems that aren’t actually very good at all for these core rights, like exercising your First Amendment right, for example, your protection from government to exercise your conscience, your faith, your being where you want to be. Going back to these public displays of faith, in America, that’s protected and it should be, right?

Mr. McIlvenna:

This is a difficult conversation America needs to have. We are seeing in the UK that when we don’t have integration, we have isolationism. We have ghetto communities, generally in all cultures, but certainly in Islam, and often those communities revert around the mosque in Islam or in other cultures, and they may revert around maybe where the embassy is based or where there are certain food shops. There are reasons why, but you know what area you’re in. It’s not everyone who comes as a melting pot; it’s one area and another area.

But when you’ve got another culture or faith that is dominant and wants to dominate, you’ve got an issue, and I think what you’re seeing up in Michigan is going to spread, and what you’re seeing here in Texas, actually, where we are now, the issue in the UK is that we are not allowed to have this conversation. If you look at our hate speech laws or the Islamophobia definition that’s just coming in, which has not been proposed and accepted, we’re going to have an Islamic blasphemy law through the back door, and who knows what’s going to happen? Who knows whether I can come and talk to you again, because the expectation from the free speech union is that we’re going to have eight times the arrests that we currently have.

Mr. Jekielek:

Which are, I mean, off the charts right now.

Mr. McIlvenna:

I know.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just summarize for me what that looks like right now.

Mr. McIlvenna:

So the Online Safety Act came in, and that was to do with prosecuting conversations online. So now a social media company can be fined 10 percent of their global turnover if you say something that someone else might find offensive. There’s no absolute. It’s utterly subjective.

Mr. Jekielek:

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, is kind of what you’re telling me.

Mr. McIlvenna:

It doesn’t. If you’ve annoyed someone—

Mr. Jekielek:

I could just, anything that I don’t like, that’s against my agenda, could be offensive to me. In fact, it is. I’m kidding, but obviously, people could use this as a very powerful weapon.

Mr. McIlvenna:

It’s how you jail your enemies. You say, he said something nasty I didn’t like. Oh, well, we’d better lock him up and arrest him, sir. That’s what happened. So that’s where we are in the UK.

Mr. Jekielek:

So how many people are locked up right now for violating this law?

Mr. McIlvenna:

We are having around 30 to 35 arrests a day. The Times said that a year ago. Whenever we had—

Mr. Jekielek:

30 to 35 arrests a day?

Mr. McIlvenna:

A day.

Mr. Jekielek:

How many are charged and convicted?

Mr. McIlvenna:

Now, this is very difficult to find out. This is where the government doesn’t want to give out the information. We’ve got FOIAs, [Freedom of Information Act] just like you have here, but it’s quite difficult to get the police to give this information out. Often what happens is that these people will be arrested, they’ll be held for two days, and then told, don’t you dare do this again, and you’re released. And that’s enough to silence most people. No one wants to go to jail.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, but just the idea that people are being picked up for this at all. I mean, it’s almost, I mean, I think I’d be in big trouble, and I’m pretty nice. I mean, imagine what the Chinese Communist Party thinks about talking about forced organ harvesting for prisoners of conscience. You’re just evil. They say you’re evil for talking about it. Anyway, we’re going to have to finish up. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today. A final thought as we finish, please.

Mr. McIlvenna:

A final thought. This is all about identity. And I would encourage Americans to make sure that you hold on to your identity. Because in the UK, we’ve lost our identity. What does it mean to be English or British? No one knows. Is it fish and chips? Is it a cup of tea? We don’t know. And the British Empire ruled the world. And I think there is this clash in America at the moment. What does it mean to be American? And I think America needs to hold on to that. Understanding of life, freedom, liberty, that American dream, the freedom to practice what you want to believe. They need to hold on to that because when you give that away, you end up like Britain. That would be my last thought.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Peter McIlvenna, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. McIlvenna:

Thank you, Jan, so much.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.