UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Mr Musk’s position was “misjudged and definitely misinformed”.
A senior British politician has rejected Elon Musk’s criticism of the government’s response to the historic child grooming scandal.
A US tech billionaire on Thursday accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to bring a “rape gang” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions more than a decade ago.
In a series of posts on his social media platform X, Mr Musk suggested that Defense Minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be jailed” for refusing calls for a national public inquiry into the Oldham scandal.
On Friday, UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Mr Musk’s position was “misjudged and definitely misinformed”. He called on Musk, a close ally of US President-elect Donald Trump, to work with the government to address the issue of child sexual exploitation.
“So if he wants to work with us and roll up his sleeves, we welcome that,” he added.
The widespread abuse of young girls, which occurred more than a decade ago in several British towns and cities including Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, has long sparked controversy.
A 2022 report into safeguarding measures taken in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 found local agencies failed to protect children, but found that the far-right was guilty of “culpable crimes that primarily attracted the attention of Pakistanis”. It said there was no cover-up despite “legitimate concerns that the ruling would be used against them.” Criminals all over the country. ”
Mr Street told ITV News the government takes child sexual exploitation “incredibly seriously” and is supportive of the Oldham investigation, but said it must be led locally.
Musk appears to have shown a keen interest in British politics since the centre-left Labor Party won a landslide victory in the July 2024 general election, ending 14 years of Conservative rule.
He retweeted criticism of Starmer and the hashtag TwoTierKeir. It is shorthand for the unsubstantiated claim that the UK has introduced “two tiers of policing” and that far-right protesters are treated more harshly than pro-Palestinian or Black Lives Matter demonstrators. .
Musk also compared Britain’s attempts to combat online misinformation to the Soviet Union, tweeting that “a civil war is inevitable” during anti-immigrant violence across Britain in the summer.
On Friday, he also supported the call for a UK general election, just six months after the last one. “The British people don’t want this government at all. New elections,” he wrote on the X platform.
Musk also recently announced his support for far-right British Defense League founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson, who is serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
