Sarah Champion attacks 'floppy left' and says people too scared to speak out about racial aspect of sex gangs

Comments come after MP apologised for ‘poor choice of words’ in The Sun article that accused Pakistani men of ‘raping and exploiting white girls’

‘By not dealing with the facts head on, you allow people to manipulate what’s going on,’ says the MP for Rotherham (Getty Images)

A former shadow minister has hit out at the “floppy left” after she was forced to resign for speaking out about men of South Asian and Middle Eastern origins grooming young white girls for sex.

Sarah Champion quit Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet after writing in The Sun that the UK had “a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”.

Mr Corbyn later accused the paper of publishing “statements that incite Islamophobia and stigmatise entire communities”.

Ms Champion, the Rotherham MP, was writing after one woman and 17 men – from the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish communities, mainly British-born – were convicted over the drugging and raping of underage girls and vulnerable young women in Newcastle.

It was an echo of the 2012 Rochdale scandal in which nine men were jailed for running a child sexual exploitation ring. The judge in that case said the men treated the vulnerable girls “as though they were worthless and beyond respect”.

And it was in Rotherham that gangs of largely Asian men groomed, raped and trafficked some 1,400 children over a period of years, as a damning report detailed in 2014.

Ms Champion initially apologised for an “extremely poor choice of words”.

She told The Times: “If I’m on the floppy left, to be accused of racism is probably the worst thing you can call me. That fear will motivate me to step away from a lot of topics I’d maybe tackle head on if I didn’t have that phobia.”

“By not dealing with the facts head on, you allow people to manipulate what’s going on,” she added, referring to previous official failures to confront grooming.

She told the newspaper that “multicultural policies that I, through my working career, grew up with, and which Jeremy Corbyn grew up with, need a translation to come outside London”.

“London is not representative of the UK and it’s definitely not representative of the North of England in relation to race,” she said. “Rotherham and many post-industrial towns are still segregated.”

Following the conclusion of the Newcastle case, dubbed Operation Shelter by the police and comprising a series of trials, a former Crown Prosecution Service chief said Britain must confront the scourge of “profoundly racist” crime it exemplified.

Lord Macdonald, a Liberal Democrat peer, said there was “a major problem in particular communities” of men viewing young white girls as “trash” and available for sex.

He added: “And this seems to be a recurring theme. This is obviously disgusting and outrageous behaviour and it’s completely unacceptable.

“Not all sex crime belongs in a particular community, but there is a particular issue about some men in some communities who feel that these young girls are trash who are available for sex.”