ANDY BURNHAM'S REVIEW DECLARED THERE WAS NO COVER-UP OF CHILDREN BEING GANG RAPED IN OLDHAM. THE POLICE FORCE HE WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR NEVER GAVE HIS REVIEWERS FULL ACCESS TO ITS RECORDS. HE CALLED THEIR WORK THOROUGH. Within 32 days Labour had used it to shut down the scandal. Burnham stood by it for two and a half years. BURNHAM'S REVIEW CLEARED OLDHAM WITHOUT THE EVIDENCE IT NEEDED In November 2019 the Labour leader of Oldham Council asked Andy Burnham, then Mayor of Greater Manchester and the region’s Police and Crime Commissioner, for a review into the rape gang scandal in the town. Burnham commissioned it. It took 31 months and was published on 20 June 2022. Burnham’s own review held the evidence of a cover-up and explained it away. It found that the police told the BBC there were just two pieces of intelligence on the shisha bars, when their own officers had filed several. That was a lie told to a journalist to kill a story about children being raped, and the review called it proportionate. It found the council had put the girls most at risk under one roof, where the men could find them. When a care worker reported men circling the home waiting for those girls, the review sided with the council and dismissed the worker without ever interviewing them. Greater Manchester Police, the force Burnham was responsible for, never gave his reviewers full access to its underlying records, and Oldham Council redacted key information. The cases of the ten children it examined were locked away in confidential appendices. Then Burnham's so called expert team declared there was no evidence of a senior-level cover-up. LABOUR USED BURNHAM'S REVIEW TO SHUT DOWN THE SCANDAL IN 32 DAYS Labour politicians seized on its conclusions the day it was published. Jim McMahon, MP for Oldham West and Royton, Debbie Abrahams, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, and Angela Rayner, the party's deputy leader, dismissed the allegations as conspiracy theories and declared that a line had been drawn under the scandal. On 30 June, ten days after publication, McMahon attacked me by name in Parliament. On 13 July, the opposition brought a motion to Oldham Council demanding an independent public inquiry, with its terms set independently of Greater Manchester and Oldham Council. Its title called for an inquiry "including the actions and knowledge of Council Members and Officers." The motion said the council could not move forward until the unanswered questions were addressed. Oldham's Labour council leader Amanda Chadderton moved an amendment that cut all of it. The demand for an independent inquiry went, and so did any scrutiny of council members and officers. In their place she wrote "We must move forward." The council adopted her amended motion by 32 votes to 20. The review had been public for 23 days, and Oldham Labour had already used it to strike out any investigation of themselves. The council offered Operation Sherwood, survivor support and oversight groups instead. On 22 July, Burnham wrote an open letter to the people of Oldham. He told them he was very grateful to his reviewers for the thorough way in which they had undertaken their work. His reviewers had written in their own report that they could not examine the police source records, and that this limited their conclusions and the assurance they could give him. Burnham's letter said nothing about it. He made no admission that they had no power to compel witnesses, and he gave no explanation of why the children's cases were locked in confidential appendices. He presented Operation Sherwood as the way forward. BURNHAM STOOD BY IT UNTIL HE HAD NO CHOICE For another two and a half years, Burnham maintained his position. Only in January 2025, under extraordinary public pressure, did he acknowledge the need for an inquiry with powers to compel evidence. Even then, he proposed a limited national inquiry drawing on the same assurance reviews. The national statutory inquiry was finally conceded in June 2025, almost three years after his Oldham report. Had Burnham and the Labour politicians who used that report to close down the scandal succeeded, the National Inquiry would not exist. My position is clear. Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is neck deep in the cover up of the Pakistani Rape Gangs. THE PRIME MINISTER MUST BE DRAGGED BEFORE THE NATIONAL INQUIRY Andy Burnham leads the government responsible for the National Inquiry. His review was used to hold it off for almost three years. The National Inquiry must call him to give evidence under oath. He must explain why he called a review thorough when his own police force had kept its records from it, why he said nothing while Oldham Labour used it to vote down an inquiry into its own members and officers, and why he defended it for two and a half years while his Labour colleagues used it to attack the people exposing what was done to these children. The girls raped in Oldham's shisha bars and children's homes were told in 2022 that nobody had covered anything up. The man who told them went on to become Prime Minister. He must answer to them under oath. So must every other Labour Party politician involved in Oldham. Raja Miah MBE _________ You know what we are up against. The mainstream media will not touch my work. Institutions I investigate do not volunteer their records. Politicians do not suddenly decide to hold themselves to account. And yet, despite all of that, we forced the national inquiry. We did that because enough ordinary people refused to go away. But getting the inquiry was never the end of this campaign. In many ways it was only the beginning. Now we have to watch where it goes, what it investigates, which places it avoids, which witnesses it calls, which records it obtains and whether the same institutions that failed these children are allowed to control the story again. Nobody else is going to do that work for us. And I cannot do it indefinitely working on my own. That is why I keep talking about 50,000 committed subscribers. It is not a vanity number. I did not pluck it out of the air. With fifty thousand people with me means when we uncover something important, it does not depend on a newspaper editor, a television producer or an algorithm deciding whether you are allowed to see it. It gives us reach they cannot easily shut down. But there is another reason. I need to build a proper backroom operation around this work. At the moment I am investigating, researching, writing, publishing, producing the videos, running the newsletter, dealing with the technology and then starting again. It is unsustainable. I need people behind me who can take care of the technical and production work so that I can spend my time doing the thing I do best. That is why we have been pushing so hard for new paid subscribers. 🔴 SIGN UP HERE 👉 redwallandtherabble.co.uk If you read my work and want it to continue, I need your help. Sign up for free. There are no paywalls to access any of my work. If you can afford the £3 a month or £30 for the year, please become a paid subscriber. We forced the inquiry. Now we need the numbers to make sure they cannot control what happens next. Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of the road where I can continue working this way. The paid subscriptions have stalled. Worse, tens of thousands of people are now reading these articles without even joining the free mailing list. The audience is growing, but the number of people actually standing behind the work is not growing with it. This is becoming impossible to sustain. Raja Miah MBE