IPSO rules that the Mail on Sunday must apologise for publishing an article by Suella Braverman that claimed that almost all child grooming gangs in the UK are of British-Pakistani origin due to ‘cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values’.
Our esteemed Home Secretary’s claim is of course a lie.
The regulator said Braverman’s decision to link “the identified ethnic group and a particular form of offending was significantly misleading” because the Home Office’s own research had concluded offenders were mainly from white backgrounds.
I feel a tiny, tiny bit of sympathy for the paper in that apparently they did double-check the claim with the offices of the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister. And it’d be sort of fair in a less ludicrous world to assume that any normal boss of a department wouldn’t publicly and provably lie about about the research that their own department did. But by now we surely all know that we clearly don’t live in that kind of world.