Here’s a speech with a horrifying message that was posted on line in October 2015, and I’ve only just discovered it.  It is even more relevant now than it was then.

Andrew Norfolk, now chief investigative reporter for The Times, tells us a story that we do not want to hear but we absolutely must.

Almost a bald opening. The only preamble is “Thank you”.

The story that unfolds is chilling, made even more so by Norfolk’s cold delivery. He indulges in no histrionics, speaks almost in a monotone, and speaks slowly and deliberately. It just shows that when the narrative thread is strong enough (and great credit must be laid at Norfolk’s feet for a superbly built structure here) you don’t need to add anything.

I think that some of the delivery style is forced upon him by virtue of his battling a stammer. I am sure I spot symptoms, and if I am right then even more credit is due him for how well he manages. My regard for this man builds by the second.

The story he tells has become sadly familiar.  He speaks of how he reported, again and again, stories of mass grooming and wholesale rape of underage girls in Rotherham. It was greeted in the main by deaf ears or recrimination. More such examples of it continue to be revealed – the latest, concerning Telford, in the past week – and we get progressively more persuaded that we are looking at the tip of a huge iceberg.

The blindness of the eye turned to it by the Establishment is a national outrage. The BBC and Parliament had to be repeatedly goaded by LBC, Spiked Online, and others to begin muttering reluctantly about the Telford scandal. Perhaps it felt that a mere 1,000 underage girls being mass-raped was not sufficiently newsworthy.

Concurrent to that are disgraceful cases of persecution by officialdom of anyone who dares to speak of it publicly.  Again last week, an American girl – Brittany Pettibone – was detained for forty-eight hours by immigration officials before being deported. Her crime was her intention to interview someone called Tommy Robinson on this very subject. You may recognise Mr Robinson’s name as a dangerous far right extremist jailbird, which is certainly how he has been painted by the media, but that is not how the students of Oxford University viewed him after an hour long speech at the Oxford Union. I covered it here.

When the sort of conduct that Norfolk describes is allowed to flourish with impunity it could be described as negligence: to persecute anyone who dares to exercise free speech on the subject has no possible excuse. It debases our entire country.

This is not a partisan issue. All parties are party to it. I mean the wanton ignoring of the crime. It permeates the administration of our entire country. The way it continues to be studiously ignored is in its way as bad as the crime itself, and remember that the crime involves thousands of sexually abused little British girls.

Who is there with the integrity, energy, and spine to root this out? I chose that metaphor verb with deliberate care, because the roots of this go very deep. It is like Japanese Knotweed. It has spread unchecked, and is now ubiquitous. It needs to be purged it at its roots. The official collaborators are everywhere, in politics, the civil service, the judiciary, academia, the media. Don’t bother to tell me that other countries are as bad – I know that and it’s no excuse. We have to destroy it here because in the mean time it is destroying us.

And perhaps there is one further question that we might regard as relevant. Who was ultimately responsible during nearly all of of the period in question? The buck stops at the top of the chain of command, The Home Office. Norfolk’s account begins in 2010. Who was Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department from 2010 till just two years ago? And should that person ever again be trusted with any sort of government office?  Step forward Mrs Theresa May.