How could large numbers of young Pakistani men in the city of Rotherham, Yorkshire, get away with sexually abusing some 1,400 young British girls? That's the big question in a sexual-abuse scandal rocking the land that gave us Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the foundations of the modern Western tradition.

Many observers say multiculturalism and political correctness are why large numbers of dark-skinned Muslim men could have had their way over the years with vulnerable working-class British girls.

They're right, of course. The police, it seemed, were afraid to confront a privileged minority for fear of being called racist. But some interesting new insights along these lines are provided in a New York Times Op-Ed -- “The England that is Forever Pakistan” -- by Sarfraz Manzoor, a British journalist of Pakistani descent who, interestingly, immigrated to England with his family as a boy.

Manzoor, despite his Pakistani origins, blames the sexual-abuse scandal on the cultural backwardness of the Pakistani community he grew up in – and on the self-interested Labor Party politicians who represented it. Regarding the Pakistani community, he writes:

The Pakistani community in Rotherham, and elsewhere in Britain, has not followed the usual immigrant narrative arc of intermarriage and integration. The custom of first-cousin marriages to spouses from back home in Pakistan meant that the patriarchal village mentality was continually refreshed.

Britain’s Pakistani community often seems frozen in time; it has progressed little and remains strikingly impoverished. The unemployment rate for the least educated young Muslims is close to 40 percent, and more than two-thirds of Pakistani households are below the poverty line.

My early years in Luton were lived inside a Pakistani bubble. Everyone my family knew was Pakistani, and most of my fellow students at school were Pakistani. I can't recall a white person ever visiting our home.

So how did Manzoor escape this cultural backwardness? Believe it or not, it was thanks to white Britons; or as he explains:

I owe much to the fact that my family moved from a Pakistani monoculture in Luton to a neighborhood that was largely white, where I learned to challenge many of the attitudes and expectations my parents had instilled. An enlightening breeze of modernity needs to blow through those pockets of England that remain forever Pakistan.”

Sexual abuse not only was tolerated by the Pakistani community, to be sure, but by leftist British politicians who turned a blind eye to it; or as Manzoor explains:

Rotherham is solidly Labour; the last Conservative M.P. lost his seat a month after Adolf Hitler was elected the chancellor of Germany. The Labour politicians who governed Rotherham in the last decade came into politics during the anti-racism movement of the ’70s and ’80s. Their political instinct — and self-interest — was not to confront or alienate their Pakistani voters. Far easier to ally themselves with socially conservative community leaders, who themselves held power by staying on the right side of the community.

As large numbers of culturally backward Pakistanis have immigrated over the years to London, some clear-eyed observers have coined a politically incorrect sobriquet for the storied city: “Londonistan.” To leftists, the term is no doubt racist or xenophobic.

Don't expect the sexual-abuse scandal – or reality-check in Manzoor's Op-Ed – to change their minds. After all, the victims were working-class white girls – not constituents who merit much respect in the identify politics that now pervades England.