Programming note: I'll be back this evening, Friday, with the latest episode of our eighth-birthday Tale for Our Time, Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome. And tomorrow, Saturday, please join me for the latest episode of our Serenade Radio weekend music show, On the Town. The latter starts at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here..
~As part of Steyn Club eighth-anniversary observances, welcome to the first brand new video edition of The Mark Steyn Show since my health collapsed at the end of the Steyn Adriatic cruise two years ago. I look 137 years older than I did the last time I welcomed you to a new show on camera. But that aside I hope this is content you'll want to watch, because it's important.
Today's episode was filmed live on the Mark Steyn Iberian Cruise with three of our special guests: Sammy Woodhouse and Samantha Smith are not only two of my favourite contributors to the show, but also indomitable survivors of the scourge that afflicts English towns up and down the land - the paedophile rapists protected and enabled by almost every organ of the British state from the Prime Minister's office down. Sammy and Samantha are joined by one of the few London media figures to take any sustained interest in the subject, The Daily Telegraph's Allison Pearson.
For a brief moment earlier this year, it looked as if the scandal of industrial-scale Pakistani Muslim rape gangs preying on English girls might finally be about to be cracked wide open. Elon Musk himself drew attention to various passages from an English court decision that started making the rounds on the Internet:
53) You, Mohammed Karrar, prepared her for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men... You both raped her when she was under 13.
Some of us have known all this for over a decade - even Keir Starmer. I heard about the use of "branding" from girls I talked to nine years ago. But the establishment knows it merely has to hunker down till the storm has passed. Lucy Powell was on the BBC's venerable Any Questions? just last week and, when a fellow panellist brought up the subject of "grooming gangs", she sneered at him that it was a racist "dog-whistle". Who is Ms Powell? Well, she's Lord President of His Majesty's Privy Council - and, despite calls for her resignation, Sir Keir made a point of seating her alongside him for Prime Minister's Questions a couple of days later.
That's the British state's attitude to the gang rape of English girls in one soundbite.
We feel differently about the subject. I've known the fearless Sammy Woodhouse for a decade, ever since I went to Rotherham and she came over for lunch at my hotel - where, as I subsequently learned, she had been raped years earlier. Samantha's ordeal began even younger - at the age of five. Click above to hear what Sammy, Samatha and Allison have to say.
~Among the benefits of Mark Steyn Club membership is that you can enjoy The Mark Steyn Show in any medium you desire: video, audio or text. So, if you find Steyn more convivial in non-visual form, please log-in to our Audio and Transcript versions. To listen to the above show, simply click here.
This edition of The Mark Steyn Show is a special production of The Mark Steyn Club. One advantage of membership is access to our comments section. So, if you take issue with anything Sammy or Samantha or Allison said on the show, then feel free to comment away below.