An interview with Mark Steyn

It’s last orders in the Last Chance Saloon

I start the week interviewing one of my favourite commentators of all. When Mark Steyn was at GB News, he was the only one worth watching and he was the only presenter I would get into a car for and head into Westminster to do an interview with. You can read all Mark’s unique, dark and funny articles on his website here.

I am a huge fan of Mark’s Clubland Q and A which I listened to while in the early stages of labour with my fourth child!

Laura Perrins: The last few weeks we have seen the issue of Pakistani Muslim ‘grooming’ gangs go ‘mainstream’ thanks to Elon Musk. This is an issue you have been speaking about for years, at least a decade. You have also been speaking to the victims of such rape gangs long before anyone else has, including having them as guest on your show when you were at GB News. How does it feel now, to see the debate go mainstream?

Even now, there are lots of euphemisms being used to discuss the issue – such as ‘grooming’ gangs. But you groom a dog. What these Pakistani Muslim men were doing to white English working class girls was brutal: targeting the vulnerable ones, then raping them in groups, in some cases seriously assaulting them by branding them, in one horrific case anally gang raping a young girl, and then trafficking and prostituting them around the country to other gangs of Pakistani Muslim men. We haven’t come even close to being angry enough over this?

Mark: No. I think all these terms are consciously designed to anaesthetise any potential for mass outbreak of righteous anger, which is what’s needed. Even rape is a bit of an evasion, because it moves it into Harvey Weinstein/Jimmy Savile territory. The evil English constabulary told these girls’ parents that rape by Pakistani Muslims was just a “phase”, a “rite of passage” for their daughters. Which is disgusting. But, if you remove anything that, say, Neil Gaiman might dignify as “consensual” sex, what’s left is torture - lots of torture, like being dangled off of fifth-storey balconies.

I remember – a decade ago now - a girl who lifted up her sweater and showed me the cigarette burns on her torso. I didn’t particularly want to see them, but they were serious third-degree burns. When you think of how long her “boyfriends” (as South Yorkshire Police would say) had to press those cigarettes to her flesh to do the damage they did, you realise that there is nothing these Muslim gangs could do to these girls that would persuade the Brit wanker coppers to lift a finger for the victims. So torture is now just a “rite of passage” in English towns?

Seeing as how I’ve mentioned Neil Gaiman, I can maybe just about understand a general public more interested in the Kardashians or Jimmy Savile. But, with the best will in the world, Mr Gaiman isn’t a “celebrity”. Some of the things his nanny has accused him of – making her throw up, and then demanding she eat her vomit – move us a little closer to Rotherham territory. But that in itself doesn’t account for why New York magazine’s account of her travails is more in-depth than that given by the UK press to any of the groomers’ victims. If you’re made to eat your vomit by a sicko English writer, hey, great: hold the front page. If you’re doused in petrol by Muslims dancing around you with lit matches, ah, well, that’s a little more sensitive… The diversity omerta descends, and cannot be lifted.

Laura: The one thing we might disagree on is the need for a public inquiry. In your latest piece and in your ever brilliant Q and A, you say a public inquiry will be pointless and politicians will – like so many inquiries before headed by a baroness – “chair them under the carpet.” I think there is a reason why Starmer has held out for so long on a proper public inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005. Although they can be manipulated by politicians and left wing lawyers, they are ultimately difficult to control, and generate headlines governments don’t like. A public inquiry would put multiculturalism on trial – and he doesn’t want to risk that. Do you still believe it would be pointless?