Before Musk, there was Miah

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Watching the story of the grooming gangs creek back into life last week – and the interventions from Elon Musk – was like watching the film adaptation of a book I’d already read. I know the story. The same cast of characters and the same familiar plot.
Before there was Elon Musk, there was Raja Miah. Before Jess Phillips, there was Sean Fielding.
My friend Joshi Herrmann, the founder of new news outlet The Mill, has been working on this story for years. What follows is my rough interpretation of his fine work, and some reflections on the story he has unpicked over the last few years. It’s the story of a provocative character with a large online following and the poisoning of political discourse. It’s a story that starts in Oldham, and ends with an intervention from the richest man in the world.
This week, Joshi kindly allowed me to rejoin him on the podcast we used to host together, because the story we have covered before got a whole new lease of life. You can listen to that by clicking here. You should also read Joshi’s brilliant work on this story – this is all him. And I would heartily recommend subscribing to The Mill – or one of their outlets near you. They are a new brand of quality, subscription news outlets. And you’ll understand why I think you should support them… because in part, this is a story about why The Mill is so important.

Raja Miah was a pillar of the community in Oldham. He was awarded an MBE for his work on community cohesion in the aftermath of the 2001 riots. He set up community projects and schools. But things came unstuck. The schools collapsed, and were heavily criticised by then leader of Oldham Council, Jim McMahon. It was an origin story – a moment that would set Miah on a path of revenge.
In the years that followed, Raja Miah began to make a very specific and highly charged claim: Oldham had been the scene of a mass grooming scandal – much like neighbouring Rochdale – and the council were covering it up, working in the interest of a group of shadowy cartels. Armed with a camera and a YouTube channel, Miah took aim at the council and Jim McMahon, by now the town’s MP.
It spread like wildfire, landing on message boards and community Facebook groups. It’s the sort of content that speaks to those at the sharp end of a world not quite working – jobs are insecure, costs are high, shops are boarded up and a doctor’s appointment is hard to come by. There is a feeling of disconnect with the people in charge, a sense that those in positions of power aren’t really working for them. And if they aren’t working for them, it makes sense they are working for somebody else.
Sean Fielding, Failsworth councillor, leader of Oldham Council, and a rising star of the Labour Party, was specifically targeted. In some cases, physically. Initially dismissing the accusations as a handful of online trolls, he was soon accosted in the street, and in shops, and on the doorstep. It’s not the sort of harassment that Mark Wilkinson would endorse, but he certainly benefited from Sean’s demise. A retired police officer, Mark and his wife Kath were the admins of a local Facebook group, Failsworth First. They shared Raja Miah’s posts to their followers. Mark was so taken by Raja Miah’s claims that he stood against Sean Fielding in a council election. And won.
This is another of the stories of our times. The fragmentation of local politics, the rise of independent candidates, many using a populist blue-print and the power of Facebook to upend the norms of local democracy. It got Trump to the White House, and it got Mark Wilkinson to Oldham Council.
Let’s deal with a fact. There are victims of child sexual abuse in Oldham. There are harrowing, blood-boiling cases, and the victims were let down by local authorities and the police. That is a source of shame. It takes a village to raise a child, and this village failed. We know that this happened because there was an inquiry. An inquiry that Sean Fielding asked for, that Andy Burnham commissioned, and that published in 2022. It found examples of abuse, but it didn’t find examples of cover ups or cartels. In fact, it praised Oldham Council for taking the issue seriously, and doing more than most to try to highlight the risks of grooming. The inquiry proved, as much as it ever could, Raja Miah’s theories wrong. But Miah and his followers weren’t interested. They claimed the report was a white wash, well before it was ever published.
Since then, Oldham’s politics has been chaos, with angry protests and salacious accusations. Labour’s majority has slowly chipped away. Under pressure, council leader Arooj Shah – one of three council leaders to have lost her seat in recent years, before winning again in 2023 – asked the government for a new inquiry into grooming in the town. It was that request that Jess Phillips – the Safeguarding Minister in the Home Office – rejected last year. And it was that rejection that Elon Musk – the world’s richest man – posted about on his social media site, throwing a grenade into British politics and setting fire to the news agenda for weeks. Musk retweeted Raja Miah, and his claims of a cover-up in Oldham sprung out of Failsworth’s Facebook community group and found a new global audience.
Of course, Elon Musk and Raja Miah are representative of something bigger – of a shift in power and a blurring of the lines between truth and fiction.
This is also story about the media, and how the hollowing out of local journalism has left a vacuum into which misinformation and bad faith actors have rushed. The office of the Oldham Times is… in Bolton. It’s the same picture in towns across the country, places that have become media deserts. Facebook groups are the new newspapers, people like Raja Miah are the new journalists.
That’s why The Mill is so important – as our communities are fracturing and shifting, news organisations like Mill Media are the ones helping fill the void with important context.
As for Oldham, having more inquires may well be the right thing to do – and the victims of child sexual abuse make compelling cases. They have been failed, and they want to know why. And there may be a legitimate argument for inquiries that are deeper and wider in scope, and have the legal powers to compel witnesses and evidence. But no amount of public inquiries will ever satisfy the bad faith actors and their hunger for chaos. They aren’t looking for answers, or justice for victims, they’re looking for revenge. And revenge is like fast food – it tastes good, but it never really fills you up, and always leaves you wanting more.
Listen to The Mill Podcast – Did Elon Musk mislead the world about grooming in Oldham?