On Jan. 1, Elon Musk decided to amuse himself by launching a salvo of badly informed tweets seemingly aimed at bringing down the government of the United Kingdom. His interest was triggered when someone told him that Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister in Keir Starmer’s government, had blocked a national inquiry into the organized abuse of children in the Manchester suburb of Oldham by a criminal gang of Pakistani immigrants. Upon receiving the news, Musk let rip.
“So many people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this,” he declared. Two days later, on Jan. 3, he put the prime minister in his crosshairs, posting, “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
Musk apparently knows little about U.K. politics. If he did, he would have understood that Phillips’ decision was not an attempted cover-up of the country’s long-running “grooming gangs” scandal, but a minor political decision about local strategy. He also might have known that, far from leading a cover-up, Starmer was a leading figure in prosecuting grooming gangs across Britain during his previous job as director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.
But Musk barreled ahead. Having declared the King should dismiss the Labour government of “rape genocide apologists” on his say-so, the world’s richest man connected the issue to the unrelated imprisonment of a former football hooligan named Tommy Robinson. Demonstrating his ignorance, Musk wrote that Robinson was “in solitary confinement prison for telling the truth.” In reality, Robinson is in solitary confinement at his own request, as he fears assassination in prison, and his latest prison stay is the result of his repeating lies in defiance of a court order. For many years before his current legal problems, Robinson was indeed a loud voice bringing the grooming gang issue to public notice, but that is not why he is in prison.
Musk apparently knows little about U.K. politics.
One early casualty of this spasm of anti-British sentiment is Musk’s cozy relationship with Nigel Farage, the onetime Brexit leader and now head of a new party called Reform UK, which won five seats in Parliament last July during a Labour landslide. After Farage (to his credit) explained that he was not supporting Robinson or calling for his release, Musk’s promise to finance the new party to the tune of $100 million — which would have been the largest political donation in U.K. history — seems to have gone up in smoke. The American billionaire doesn’t just want the Labour government to fall, he now wants Farage’s head as well. On Jan. 5, he tweeted, “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” (Despite everything, the episode has arguably proved politically convenient for Farage, who is grateful to talk about something besides Brexit, for many years his sole focus, which the public has realized was a ghastly mistake.)
Musk’s meddling in U.K. politics has demonstrated that, without knowing anything about a situation, he can spread chaos with a few research-free tweets. After 15 years, a sensitive national story about child rape has been revived, sensationalized and internationalized, sending followers of Musk who couldn’t find the U.K. on a map into full outrage mode.
Contrary to Musk’s claims, the U.K. media and government have not been ignoring the story or covering it up. A scandal in Rotherham was the first story to reach a national audience, broken by The Times of London in 2011, and was followed up by investigative reporting by the BBC that revealed child prostitution gangs operating in some 50 Pakistani communities across England and Wales. Beginning in 2013, the Conservative government and independent agencies launched inquiries and reports, including a large, well-funded public probe, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which ran for eight years and reported in 2022.
Falling at the intersection of immigration, political correctness and the growing resistance to Islam among the dispossessed working class, the grooming gangs scandal was already complex and combustible; now it is the only issue being discussed. Incredibly, Musk has set the agenda with a series of preposterous non sequiturs: replacing the prime minister with some Musk sock puppet, dethroning Farage, freeing Robinson. After all this time, the best that can be expected is for the wheels of justice to grind slowly on, shutting down the gangs and prosecuting those responsible, all while navigating the delicate act of communicating necessary government actions to Pakistani and Muslim communities who see the whole issue as a conspiracy by the dominant culture. Musk’s attempt to smash his way into the issue without knowing anything about it has been the opposite of helpful. As Health Minister Wes Streeting recently told the Guardian, “We’ve given way too much air time to one tech titan who lives in a different country and, frankly, doesn’t know what he is talking about when it comes to what happens here in Britain.”
Musk’s tweets have been amplified by a new type of news operation in the U.K. In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to establish news channels to promote various political positions. Musk’s sudden intervention has been very good news for one in particular, the right-wing and nationalist GB News TV channel. Owned by a hedge fund manager and a Dubai-based investment company, GB News was launched in 2021 to capture the anti-immigrant, nativist section of society. The first words it broadcasted were, “We’re proud to be British.”
Musk’s tweets have been amplified by a new type of news operation in the U.K.
Ridiculed for the low quality of its content, it has struggled to find viewers, and a lot of high-profile broadcasters lured to the station have left, partly because of its amateurish operation, and partly because of repeated accusations of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and misogyny, both from critics and official regulators. But since Musk’s sensationalist revival of the grooming gangs story, the network appears to have struck gold. A young journalist who works for them, Charlie Peters, has been working hard on the grooming gangs story, and was the only broadcast journalist present in court last September when seven members of a gang operating in Rotherham were finally sent to prison. Overnight, Musk’s tweetstorm transformed GB News into a major player in British media.
The result is a major change in political life. On Jan. 10, Streeting told the Guardian that he fears that the attention paid to the Pakistani and Muslim identities of the grooming gangs might lead to vigilante violence or mosque attacks. Whether that plays out remains to be seen, but the genie is out of the bottle; the establishment reluctance to address the cultural dimension has been defeated, and the mainstream political parties are trying to formulate responses to the threat of a new nativist, anti-immigrant politics in the U.K. and across Europe. The Conservatives’ new leader, Kemi Badenoch, herself an immigrant from Nigeria, is trying to finesse the situation by claiming that the child rape phenomenon is not due to British Pakistani culture, but only a small part of it, made up of “peasants” from the most backward, badly educated parts of Pakistani society. Meanwhile, the Labour party is aiming to establish an official policy on Islamophobia that declares “Asian grooming gangs” an Islamophobic term, but is mostly hoping this will somehow go away. If Parliament and the major parties fail to appease the public with some credible policies, there are plenty of people waiting in the wings who will be happy to take over and offer more extreme versions, such as mass deportations. It may have been with this in mind that on Jan. 17, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced five new inquiries.
The demonstration of Musk’s power is one thing nobody can avoid noticing. He has shown that he does not need to give candidates millions of dollars to have a major political impact. His recent intervention is a demonstration test. He has also shown an interest in giving oxygen to the far-right Alternative for Germany in the run-up to next month’s elections; many expect him to then turn his affections to the Rassemblement National in France. In Europe, as in the U.S., immigration is consistently at or near the top of public concerns, and Musk understands that oversimplified tweets from far away can fan the flames of resentment. The upheaval in Britain is a taste of things to come.