Friday May 01, 2026

Maajid Nawaz on Grooming Gangs, Covid Backlash and Losing LBC

Maajid Nawaz was radicalised as a teenager and built his life around an extremist ideology that led to his arrest in Egypt, prison, and torture, before walking away from it and rethinking everything he once believed.

Years later, after becoming a well-known voice in counter extremism, he lost his role as a presenter on LBC during Covid, publicly labelled and ridiculed for his views.

This conversation lands at a time when the Home Office has apologised for what’s being described as one of the darkest periods in British history around the grooming gang scandal, and that’s where things open up.

We get into what actually happened, the cover ups, the corruption, the scale of what was allowed to go on, and why so many people were ignored or shut down for speaking about it, along with his take on who benefits when something like that is kept quiet for so long.

From there it builds into the bigger picture, power, influence, how decisions are made behind the scenes, from public narratives to government contracts, and what starts to come into view once you begin connecting the dots.

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Key moments include:

✔ 00:00 Being drawn into extremism at a young age and how that path took hold.

✔ 09:00 Arrest in Egypt, time in prison, and the reality of torture and its impact.

✔ 22:00 Grooming gang scandal, the Home Office apology, and what was happening while it was being covered up.

✔ 36:00 Why people who spoke out were shut down and what that says about the system.

✔ 48:00 Covid, losing his role at LBC, being labelled publicly, and the personal fallout of that.

✔ 1:05:00 Power and influence, how decisions are shaped behind the scenes, and what drives them.

✔ 1:18:00 Government contracts, incentives, and what sits underneath public facing decisions.

✔ 1:30:00 Where this leaves people now and why more are starting to question what’s really going.

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