No, it's nothing to do with Islam.

Here we have a pretty typical "it's all about the muslims" rant doing the rounds on Twitter. The suggestion being that all these men being Muslim means that the "Muslim community" is complicit and shares in some of the guilt for not speaking out. A pretty broad brush with which to sweep. I notice that all these men have eyebrows. Therefore should we cast the same blame and suspicion on all of the eyebrowed community if that logic holds. Or is it the brown skin? Why not use that measure? It's about as specific.

By this logic, by way of being C.of E. an individual is somehow complicit in the crimes of Catholic priests. We're talking about the faith of over a billion people here. So apart from the coincidental, we have to a be a bit more specific here. What else do these men have in common? They are predominantly of Pakistani origin and living the North of England, which means the majority will trace their heritage back to remote, rural tribal areas. What we are seeing is a very specific consequence of immigration from a highly localised culture (which predates the arrival of Islam), which is massively incompatible with our own, dropped into post-industrial northern mill and mining towns. The clues are all there.

As far as the police not investigating, I was recently congratulated by a judge having successfully managed to get Avon and Somerset Police to do even a cursory investigation on an unrelated matter. It is next to impossible to get the police to act on so much as a house burglary let alone a rape. Their reluctance to act on rape in any circumstance is legendary. The reputation of the police for being little more than state revenue collectors is a perception well deserved.

There is a political correctness aspect to this but to blame this scandal on that specifically is to miss the point, while scapegoating Muslims when it is nothing to do with Islam. It ignores the much more serious and obvious issue: Our public services, the police and social services especially, simply do not work - and will not be fixed without a radical rethink of governance. They are bloated and bureaucratic beyond salvation. A bit of tinkering to diversity policy isn't going to change anything.

It's precisely this kind of ugly quasi-racist ranting that brought political correctness and diversity training into being in the first place. This woman sounds little different to my Muslim colleague who can go off into explosive rants about Jews. It's offensive to me and such ranting in the workplace would have him sacked from a public sector role on the spot - and rightly so. You wouldn't take his views seriously on matters of sociology and governance, so why are we seemingly blinkered enough to take this crap as gospel?