contd.,

"Crime tsar quits the Labour Party – but won't give up his job... after claiming he never saw damning reports into abuse
..
Former Rotherham MP Dennis Macshane said he did not look further into the town's child abuse sex scandal because he is a 'true Guardian reader and liberal leftie' and 'did not want to rock the multi-cultural boat'..

Political correctness stopped left-wing politicians and council officials from doing more to expose the abuse scandal, Rotherham’s former MP said yesterday.

Denis MacShane accepted he should have done more but said his own ‘liberal leftie’ background made him reluctant to speak out over abuse allegations against Muslim men.

The shamed former Labour politician, who was jailed over the expenses scandal and is no longer a member of the party, said: ‘I should have burrowed into this. Perhaps, yes, as a true Guardian reader and a liberal leftie I suppose, I didn’t want to raise that too hard.’

Mr MacShane blamed a ‘culture of not wanting to rock the multi-cultural unity boat’ for the failure by numerous agencies and individuals to expose the child exploitation.

He has previously admitted that he, like other politicians, had feared losing Muslim votes if he aired ‘the dirty secrets about bad practices in the Kashmiri Muslim community’."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2736204/A-raft-abuse-files-crime-tsar-says-didnt-Shaun-Wright-urged-quit-Labour-continues-shift-blame-scandal.html

The following link may also add something to
the discussion. Nothing is ever either black
or white in complex issues - one needs to not
only look at both sides of the causes of the
problems - but around the edges as well. There
are many professionals - police, social workers,
and others who failed the victims - and the reasons
for letting criminals get away with this sort of
behaviour need to be explained. It's simply all too
easy to brush things aside on "isms."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-28953549

Foxy,

If you believe that there are no freedom of speech concerns with 18C, you might look at the Catch the Fire Ministries case in Victoria, where there is a state religious vilification law with much the same language as 18C.

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2006/12/14/catch-the-fire-ministries-v-islamic-council-of-victoria-inc-free-speech-wins-just/

http://www.law.uq.edu.au/documents/qlsr/recent-issues/vol3/issue1/Klose_2010_vol3_i1.pdf

18D gives some defences to 18C, but it is so vaguely worded that a judge can interpret it as he/she likes. There is no unequivocal statement that truth is a defence, for example.