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The grooming gang scandals didn’t actually translate into a hard stop on Muslim immigration, but they were folded into wider geopolitical and domestic narratives — including stronger alignment with Israel.
Successive governments (Labour, Conservative, and now even under the stop the boats rhetoric) have not meaningfully reduced Muslim immigration.
Grooming scandals, despite their headlines, were localized issues and never shaped immigration law in a sustained way.
In that context, support for Israel was often presented as part of a broader anti-Islamist stance:
“We (the UK) and Israel face the same threat from radical Islam.”
Grooming gang scandals fed into that narrative by painting Muslims as a domestic danger, reinforcing alignment with Israel’s framing of itself as besieged by hostile Muslim neighbors.
This didn’t change migration numbers — but it did shift the overton window: being pro-Israel became an easy way for UK politicians to signal toughness on Islamic extremism, without taking the politically costly step of cutting immigration.