GB News national reporter Charlie Peters has delivered a moving tribute to Andrew Norfolk, the former Times journalist who exposed the Rotherham grooming gang scandal and died on May 8 aged 60.Peters described Norfolk as a "national hero" who "conducted fearless reporting when many others shied away" from the issue.READ THE FULL STORY HERE
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Times, he was chief investigative reporter for the Times and it was Andrew who first exposed the scandal of the grooming gangs of Pakistani origin at a time when it was very, very, he endured a lot of flack and it was very brave of him and the Times to break these stories.
00:16Let's speak now to GBA News reporter Charlie Peters. Charlie, good morning. Some people watching this will never have heard of Andrew Norfolk, but why was his work so significant?
00:24Well, Andrew Norfolk was a national hero. He spoke out on this issue and conducted fearless reporting when many others shied away or showed, as one headline he wrote put it, a cowardly reluctance to engage with this crisis.
00:43Now, when the Labour MP Anne Cryer in Keithley in West Yorkshire raised concerns in 2003, Andrew Norfolk, like many others, thought that this was a far right fantasy.
00:56He wrote one story about it at the time and moved on. But his journalistic instinct and his pursuit for justice meant that he came back to the story when he noticed an ongoing pattern.
01:09When the rest of the mainstream media and many people looked the other way, Andrew Norfolk dug in and conducted some really fearless reporting, months of painstaking court record research.
01:22He heard a news bulletin in August of 2010 while driving up to Edinburgh for a long weekend.
01:28He describes the moment that he heard about a gang being convicted in Manchester and that sort of kick-started a realisation and an urge to look into this more widely.
01:38Now, over several years, his reporting came up against a conspiracy of silence in Rotherham.
01:45And that was the first front page that the Times ran with in January of 2011, because despite all of the evidence he had gathered, the whistleblowers, the survivors, the harrowing testimony and the horrors in that South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, people there would not speak to him.
02:01Police officers, council leaders, even charities had this conspiracy of silence.
02:08But when Alexis Jay commissioned that report after the government stepped in, they did so after Rotherham council had to react to years of unrelenting coverage from Andrew Norfolk and the Times newspaper, reporting that they had once briefed out was the lies of the Murdoch press.
02:27Andrew Norfolk's reporting was not lies. It was brave. It was heartfelt and it changed lives because that Alexis Jay report in 2014 found some 1,400 victims from 1997 to 2013.
02:41So it was groundbreaking. It established a pattern which other reporters have followed elsewhere and have found to be more broadly a national crisis, not isolated to a few northern towns and cities.
02:56Today, GB News is reporting out in the west of the country. It's where I am today.
03:01I'm on my way to meet a survivor as part of our ongoing coverage of this crisis.
03:07And last night when I heard of this news about Andrew's passing, so many survivors got in touch to share their their memories of him, of course, but also their thanks and also their fears.
03:21Because we need Andrew Norfolk. He knew so much. He shared so much. He exposed so much.
03:28And speaking to a mutual source who caught up with him in March, they told me that when they were sharing more information, Andrew told them, keep going.
03:37There is more to be done. And I'll just say one more final thing, Bevan Andrew.
03:42So that conspiracy of silence that Andrew Norfolk faced is still ongoing.
03:47Last month, we revealed that a police officer was faced with arrest when he shared details of trafficking in Bradford.
03:55Now, we did not hear back from Bradford Council when we went to them with our concerns.
04:00I think that the crisis in West Yorkshire will dwarf that of Rotherham.
04:04But still, that silence continues.
04:06All right.
04:07All right.