Labour MP did not say victims of grooming gangs should ‘shut their mouths’

Following the publication of Baroness Louise Casey’s national audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse (widely referred to as ‘grooming gangs’), a quote wrongly attributed to Labour MP Naz Shah has been re-circulating on social media.

The posts feature a picture of Ms Shah with the text: “Muslim Labour MP Naz Shah - ‘Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.’”

We fact checked similar posts referencing this quote back in 2023. As we said then, this is not a direct quote from Ms Shah. The quote instead appears to have been taken from a post she retweeted and liked in 2017, which came from an account on Twitter (now X) reportedly parodying the political commentator Owen Jones. Ms Shah later unshared and unliked the post.

The post reportedly said: “Exactly Areeq, those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of #diversity.”

At the time, a spokesperson for Ms Shah told The Sun that sharing the post “was a genuine accident” and was “rectified within minutes”.

In June 2025, Ms Shah told Full Fact: “I accidentally shared a post for a few minutes—it was a genuine accident. But for the last eight years, tens of thousands of social media posts containing the most vociferous, vile, and Islamophobic content have been deliberately shared online to spread disinformation.

“This disinformation is dangerous because ordinary people, who don’t know the context or are not prepared to read the background, not only believe the tweet but also the vile views shared with it.”

We’ve written about a number of quotes falsely attributed to politicians as part of our work fact checking online misinformation, including ones like this example which can persist for several years. False or misleading claims about politicians have the potential to affect people’s opinions of individuals, parties or how they choose to vote.

In this case, Ms Shah told Full Fact that she and her family had received threats as a result of these claims, and noted that the campaign group Leave.EU paid her damages for libel after it described her as a “grooming gangs apologist”.