Over the past week, British public life has been dominated by Elon Musk’s shocking tweets calling for the overthrow of the elected government and weaponizing the national scandal over the rape of a young girl in a poor British town. Repetitive and basically despicable), it is causing a stir. It’s hard to keep your head up, but not everyone does it. The onslaught began on January 1st. Musk responded to a report on right-wing cable news station GB News that the country’s Labor government had rejected a recent national inquiry into sexual abuse. A suburb of Manchester, northern England. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the real story is more complicated than that. Oldham’s local politicians have long been at odds over how best to deal with the catastrophic failure of police and local authorities in handling the rape and abuse of between 2,000 and 200 young girls in the town. It has been divided. (As an example, in 2012, a social worker named Shabir Ahmed, who worked for Oldham City Council for 18 years, was convicted of 30 counts of child rape and sentenced to 22 years in prison.) This scandal hits painfully close to home. It is something. Similar incidents have taken place in a number of towns and cities across England, including Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford and Oxford, but in many cases the perpetrators are mostly South Asian men with Muslim backgrounds. It is characterized by the politically condemnable fact that Most of the victims were young white girls.
Last October, months after Labor defeated the Conservatives in the general election, Oldham councilors wrote to the party’s security minister, Jess Phillips, a prominent campaigner against violence against women and girls. He called for a national investigation into what happened. In the city. Like one of his Conservative predecessors who rejected a similar request in 2022, Mr Phillips instead recommended a locally led process. (A recent investigation in Telford, a town 80 miles south of Oldham, found more than 1,000 cases of child sexual exploitation dating back to the 70s along these lines. This is a model of that type. Commenting on the “strength of feeling” in Oldham, Mr Phillips said: “It is only Oldham City Council that decides to commission a local investigation into child sexual exploitation, rather than government intervention. ” he wrote.
It’s a tricky call. Maybe Phillips got it wrong. Perhaps she got it right. These are not easy questions, nor are they solvable. The interplay of local politics, racial and religious tensions, regressive attitudes toward women, and often gross prejudice against the victims themselves has made prosecuting and stopping these cases brutally difficult over the years. “This horrific, life-altering crime has not gone away in Telford or anywhere else,” Tom Crowther, the former magistrate who led the town’s widely praised investigation, wrote in 2022.
But Musk didn’t buy Twitter (now X) for that nuance. “Jess Phillips (sic) is an apologist for rape and genocide,” he posted to his 211 million followers at 6:40 a.m. ET on January 3. Twenty minutes later, he asked Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was England and Wales’ chief prosecutor from 2008 to 2013 and oversaw some of the first successful prosecutions of British Asian “grooming gangs” during his tenure. asked a question. “Starmer was complicit in the rape of Britain,” Musk tweeted, with 59 million views at the time of writing.
Since then, Mr. Musk has tweeted dozens of times on the subject, most of them amplifying anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tropes that British right-wing activists have long associated with abuse scandals. Like them, Musk, rather than acknowledging the truth, suggests that a powerful woke cover-up may be at work, which is even sadder and more intolerable. These crimes are committed in plain sight, the girls are often poor and desperately vulnerable, and are often young teenagers, even pre-teens, and children. They were considered sex workers or sluts, and almost no one paid any attention to them. “So why would a Kia Sturmtrooper order his party to block such an investigation?” Musk tweeted. “Because he’s hiding something horrible. That’s why.” Shortly before 8 a.m. on Jan. 8, Musk updated his pinned tweet to write: Those who have been raped deserve some kind of justice in this world. ”
It’s really hard to find words to describe the disrespect, ignorance, and potential violence involved in each of Mr. Musk’s interventions. The sudden obsession of the world’s richest man with the sexual exploitation of children in a deindustrialized British town, much of which happened more than a decade ago, has made him follow the news and live here. It made me think that British people like me actually care about child sexual exploitation. Things like that are just to make sure we haven’t lost our minds. So we recalled the vast amount of reporting that has documented these horrific stories over the past 15 years, in all forms – official, journalistic, conspiracy, TV drama. We are reminded that it is very difficult to collect reliable data on sexual abuse, especially sexual abuse of children. (In November last year, the Labor government released UK statistics for the first time that included the ethnicity of perpetrators, revealing that 7 per cent of offenders in 2023 will be ‘Asian’, roughly in line with their proportion of the population) ) we remember. Starmer did a decent job as a prosecutor. We remember that in 2014, Scottish academic and former social worker Alexis Jay led a shocking investigation that documented the abuse of around 1,400 girls in the town of Rotherham alone. Jay then led a seven-year national independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, conducting a series of 15 investigations. The investigation included interviews with more than 7,000 victims from across the UK. We were reminded of the lack of political will. In 2022, Jay’s monumental work resulted in 20 recommendations, none of which were enacted by the previous Conservative government.
But the difficult task of protecting vulnerable children, prosecuting rapists and enacting legal reforms is not what Musk is looking for. “Truth is a concept that Elon Musk clearly has little interest in,” Andrew Norfolk, a recently retired investigative reporter for the London Times who spent many years covering grooming gang cases, said this week. told the old paper. What Musk craves is anarchy and proof of his power. Since endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential bid in July, he has stepped up his digital forays on behalf of right-wing parties and causes in democracies from Argentina to Germany. Last summer’s riots in Britain, in which three girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class near Liverpool, led to online misinformation identifying the suspected killer as a Muslim immigrant. Flammed (he wasn’t). –Musk tweeted, “Civil war is inevitable.”
At this point, what’s more useful than Musk’s statements and tweets is how the public and politicians react to his presence. Over the past week, Starmer has returned to quiet, serious prosecutor mode. At Monday’s press conference, which was supposed to be about reforming the National Health Service, the prime minister refused to mention Mr Musk by name. “Those who are spreading lies and misinformation as widely as possible have no interest in the victims,” he told reporters. “They’re interested in themselves.” Phillips is no stranger to online abuse, but has had to step up her security measures since becoming the target of Musk’s tweets. “You know, Elon Musk goes to Elon Musk. I have bigger and more important things to think about,” she told Sky News. Ed Davey, the perfectly innocuous leader of the Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party in the House of Commons, criticized Musk on “Wriggling cretin,” he scoffed. ”
The most alarming response has come from the Conservative Party. The party has been dazzled by Mr. Musk for some time. In November 2023, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak held a flattering “talk” event with Musk in London, praising him as a “great innovator and engineer.” Mr Sunak resigned after last summer’s general election defeat and was replaced by Kemi Badenoch, 45, the former digital director of Boris Johnson’s former magazine, The Spectator. Mr Badenoch has refused to reveal his party’s new policies until 2027, favoring a wandering and confrontational style until then. A day after Mr Musk launched his latest barrage, Mr Badenoch and the Conservative Party decided there really should be a national public inquiry into Britain’s Asian grooming gangs. This is something Musk and his party could have done at any point in the past 14 years. Robert Jenrick, the Conservative Party’s shadow solicitor general who was runner-up to Mr Badenoch in the autumn leadership election, has brought the party’s anti-immigration rhetoric down to the level of President Trump. “The importation of hundreds of thousands of people from other cultures with medieval attitudes towards women has brought us here,” he wrote to X. Perhaps hoping for a retweet, Andrew Griffiths, the party’s shadow business secretary, chimed in: Purchasing X may have saved humanity. ”
In the House of Commons at midday on Wednesday, Mr Badenoch used all six questions during Prime Minister’s Questions to pressure Mr Starmer to agree to a new national inquiry into the “rape gang scandal”. Mr Starmer pushed back, pointing out that an extensive investigation into Mr Jay’s sexual abuse in the UK took seven years, but its findings had not been implemented. “What we need now is to act on what we already know,” the prime minister said. “I already know from personal knowledge, from my time as chief prosecutor, that distorted ideas, myths and stereotypes about the victims are at the heart of this case. We have known this for 10 years. I was there.”
Mr. Badenoch continued. “Doesn’t he think that resisting this means people are going to start worrying about a cover-up?” During his almost eight years as an MP, Mr Starmer said Mr Badenoch, a former children’s minister, said: pointedly stated that this was the first time he had raised this issue. But I think the context is also in the legacy media, and also in the legacy politicians. Badenoch began reading out dark couplets of towns affected by these crimes, including Telford, Rochdale, Bristol, Derby, Aylesbury, Oldham, Bradford, Peterborough, Coventry, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Ramsgate, and the House of Commons. ‘Shame on the Chamber!’ Labor MPs representing these areas were furious at the Tory leader’s opportunism. I watched it from the press gallery above, and to be honest, I was shocked. This was British politics completely distorted and angry – hyper-focused, to use a Muskian phrase – by the thumbs and feckless brains of far-flung millionaires. .
Nigel Farage watched the whole thing with a raised eyebrow. Since last year’s election, Mr Farage has been one of five backbenchers for the Reform Party, the latest in a populist, anti-immigration political movement he has led for the past two decades. Mr Farage has been on a rollercoaster journey with Mr Musk. The two sides met at Mar-a-Lago last month, and there were reports that Musk was willing to donate $100 million to the reform effort. But on January 5, in the midst of a new X-bombing campaign against the UK, Mr Musk tweeted that Mr Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead reform, an apparent reference to Farage. This suggests that he has refused to have anything to do with the Tommy Robinson case. Mr Farage, the imprisoned far-right founder of the Islamophobic extremist group English Defense League, was allowed to return to X by Mr Musk. Mr Farage doesn’t seem too concerned. At Prime Minister’s Questions, he laughed gleefully when Starmer was teased for being shaken by Musk. Farage shrugged his shoulders from the backbench and made an “easy come easy go” gesture. He and his Outriders have been campaigning on the racial aspects of the grooming gang scandal for years. Mr. Musk’s hyper-focus and reckless agitation will likely quickly find another target and move on. But the anger and energy in British politics is flowing in the direction Farage always wanted. ♦
