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Notes -
I don’t see why 1997 would be the turning point. Mass immigration from Pakistan was relatively unrelated to the Blairwave (which actually began in the last year or two of Major’s premiership), the Mirpuri community was already large, well-settled and very fecund (much moreso than now) at that time and many of the perpetrators were second generation (this is sometimes hard to tell because the press today uses their current ages when discussing historic cases, but many if not most were 18-30 year old, born in Britain at the time of their offenses).
I don’t think so. I suppose the prevailing narrative is that the British police may have been ‘institutionally racist’ until at least Stephen Lawrence (which if anything would make 1993 the turning point). I have my doubts about that, but in any case widespread overall racial prejudice among some white cops doesn’t mean that they would have been deliberately tough on Pakistani grooming gangs, whose victims were predominantly the (native) underclass for which most police officers would have had some degree of contempt given that they are the population they most frequently interact with (or would have interacted with, at least at that time).
Some of the articles he links to also feature local police in court saying or implying the issue was already widespread and a well known feature of local life.
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