By Lipton Matthews – Mises Wire
I recently attended an event at the Prosperity Institute in the United Kingdom, and, as a foreigner listening to the discussion unfold, I found it both unsettling and clarifying. The panel addressed the grooming gang scandal, a subject that remains profoundly uncomfortable for Britain’s political and cultural establishment. What distinguished this event was its refusal to soften the reality of what occurred or to retreat into evasive language. The discussion did not merely revisit past failures; it exposed a deeper pattern in how British institutions exercise power.
At the center of the panel was Fiona Goddard—a victim of grooming who spoke with calm precision. She described how the police betrayed her trust after she came forward with her story, only to discover that information she had shared in confidence had been passed back to members of the grooming gang. That institutional betrayal placed her at renewed risk and compounded the original abuse. She also recounted something even more disturbing. The men who groomed her told her explicitly that they targeted her because she was white and that their aim was to destroy white girls. The starkness of her testimony stripped away any remaining illusions about the ideological framing that has often surrounded these crimes.