A few weeks after Jack Straw’s “easy meat” comments, we are told by the Mail on Sunday that Asian gangs are indeed grooming young girls and that the men responsible for this are locked into unhappy arranged marriages to cousins.

And who tells us this?

None other than Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, pitched into Parliament for life in 1998.

Ahmed tells us the men are:

”… forced into marriages and they are not happy. They are married to girls from overseas who they don’t have anything in common with, and they have children and a family. But they are looking for fun in their sexual activities and seek out vulnerable girls.”

He goes on:

“This didn’t happen in my or my father’s generation. This is happening among young Asians. While I respect individual choice, I think the community needs to look at marriages in the UK rather than cousin marriages or economic marriages from abroad.”

This is strong stuff which will, no doubt, reverberate within the British Pakistani community.

Concerns have been raised before about cousin-to-cousin marriages.

The former Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas, pointed to the increased risk of genetic conditions, complaining there was no debate about the issue.

It was “the elephant in the room”.

When I was MP for Pendle I raised this issue privately a number of times with the local NHS Primary Care Trust.

I wanted to know what advice local GPs were giving patients who were married to first cousins and were thinking about having children or who were pregnant.

I had seen for myself the distressing genetic defects in children whose parents were first cousins.

I recall one family with a line of blind and deaf children, born one after the other.

I wanted statistics for the local area.

How many consanguineous marriages were there in Pendle?

How many children were born with genetic defects?

At the time, these were radioactive questions.

I was told these very local statistics were not available.

Of course, there are researchers who say the risks arising from cousin-to-cousin marriages are overstated.

Hopefully, studies in Bradford will throw light on the whole issue.

Lord Ahmed also talks about trans-continental marriages.

The thing that constantly struck me in my time as an MP for an area with a high and growing British Pakistani population (14%) was the willingness of young people, educated and brought up in Britain, to go off to Pakistan and return with a totally uneducated spouse, often without a word of English.

Of course, I carry my own cultural baggage. But, try as I may, I could not understand why a young person brought up in Britain would wish to lock themselves into a marriage with someone with whom they had absolutely nothing in common – except a blood tie.

Anyway… I cannot see these trans-continental marriages ending any time soon. The pull is too strong.

There is a transmission belt between Pakistan and her overseas diaspora.

Pakistan is a failing state with myriad problems.

Who wouldn’t give an arm and a leg to escape from such a place?

Coalition talk in Canada

The Canadian House of Commons returns today after the usual lengthy holiday break.

There is talk in the air of an early election. (The last one was only a couple of years ago.)

The opposition parties are snorting and pawing the ground.

And the Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is warning voters that if they don’t elect a majority Conservative Government they may be saddled with a coalition.

Hmmm.

This doesn’t seem to frighten the voters.

Half of them would embrace a left leaning Liberal/NDP coalition if it meant getting rid of the Conservatives.

All eyes are on the UK. The test tube of coalition politics in a first-past-the-post system.