THE UK GOVERNMENT has found itself the latest target of online attacks from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of complicity in “the rape of Britain” and called for him to be jailed.
Musk has spent the last week or so levelling attacks against a number of British political figures, which have included withdrawing his public support from Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X last Friday.
“Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
Starmer hit back at Musk’s comments yesterday, saying:
“Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves.”
Since those comments, Musk, now a member of incoming US president Donald Trump’s inner circle, has doubled down and continued his online tirade.
America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 6, 2025
Cases in which groups of men, mostly of South Asian backgrounds, were convicted of the sexual abuse of vulnerable girls in a number of UK cities between 2010 and 2014 have been brought back to the fore of UK politics in recent weeks.
There have been various investigations and reports into cases of child grooming in the UK in recent years, some of which have detailed such cases.
In 2010, five men were given lengthy jail terms after they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls in Rotherham for sex.
In 2012, reports in The Times newspaper claimed that details from 200 restricted-access documents showed police and child protection agencies in Rotherham had extensive knowledge of these activities for a decade, yet a string of offences went unprosecuted.
The same year, nine men were convicted over a grooming scandal in Rochdale.
Then in 2014, Professor Alexis Jay published a damning report on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
The report described how more than 1,400 children were sexually exploited by gangs of mainly Asian men in the town over that period.
There have been other similar cases since then. Following a series of trials at Leeds Crown Court in 2018, it was reported that a gang of men who embarked on a “campaign of rape and other sexual abuse” against vulnerable teenage girls in Huddersfield were jailed.
The pattern of large-scale exploitation of mainly white girls by groups of men of mainly Pakistani heritage uncovered by West Yorkshire Police in Huddersfield mirrored what has happened in a number of other towns including Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford.
Some police departments in affected areas have since apologised for failing the victims.
The issue as a whole has been used by anti-immigrant agitators and politicians in the UK, who often allege the country has a “two-tier” policing system that discriminates against white people and is more lenient towards those with foreign backgrounds.
Last Thursday, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called for a full national public inquiry into what she described as the country’s “rape gangs scandal”.
Badenoch’s call came after Home Office minister Jess Phillips rejected a local council’s request for a government-led inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation.
“I believe it is for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the Government to intervene,” Phillips said.
Her decision, which she took in October, was reported by GB News last Wednesday. It was quickly seized on by Elon Musk and several senior Tories.
The Conservatives turned down a similar request for a national inquiry from the same local council while they were in power in 2022.
There have been a number of reports and investigations into child sex abuse in the UK, including an independent inquiry that concluded two years ago and incorporated the findings of a number of different probes.
Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse, called for the “full implementation” of her report’s 20 recommendations, none of which have been adopted.
Distancing herself from calls in Westminster for a new independent review, she said instead that the introduction of measures which she recommended two years ago was “critical”.
A number of reports into individual cases at local levels found the perpetrators were mostly British-Pakistani men and they also mentioned concerns among police and social services teams that if they pursued groups of non-white offenders they might be accused of racism.
The UK Home Office commissioned a study of available data in 2020.
That report said: “The academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending.”
It also said that “research has found that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white”, but some studies “suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations”.
The report also said it was hard to draw conclusions about offender identities because there was limited research and poor quality data.
However “it is likely that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending”.
In weighing in, Musk has followed the lead of far-right agitators like Tommy Robinson and taken aim at Prime Minister Starmer, who was head of the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) when the cases were before the courts.
Musk has also called for the UK’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips – who denied a request for a national inquiry into child sexual abuse – to be jailed, labelling her a “rape genocide apologist”.
“Who is the boss of Jess Phillips right now? Keir Starmer,” Musk wrote on Thursday.
“The real reason she’s refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Stamer (head of the CPS at the time).”
Starmer said yesterday that “a line has been crossed” and that threats made against Phillips were the result of the “poison of the far-right”.
Starmer added that the online debate about child sexual exploitation was based on lies, with politicians “jumping on the bandwagon”.
The prime minister also defended his record as a prosecutor.
“I reopened cases that had been closed and supposedly finished, I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang – in the particular case it was in Rochdale, but it was the first of its kind, there were many that then followed that format,” he said.
“We changed, or I changed, the whole prosecution approach, because I wanted to challenge and did challenge the myths and stereotypes that were stopping those victims being heard.”
He added: “When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record.
“Now that record is not secret. As a public servant, it’s there for all of you, for everybody to see.”
The Tories meanwhile have sought to distance themselves from Musk’s call to jail Phillips and said the billionaire had been “sharing things that are factually inaccurate”.
After Starmer’s comments yesterday, Musk continued his social media barrage, saying:
“Starmer was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes. That’s what the inquiry would show.”
Yesterday, Musk publicly withdrew support for the leader of the far-right Reform UK party Nigel Farage, in favour of the jailed anti-immigrant extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson.
Farage has previously called Musk “a hero” and said he would welcome financial support from him, which was rumoured to be around $100m. The two met at Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, following the Republican’s election victory last year.
“I am very pleased he’s backing our party, even if reports of his potential financial donations are somewhat overexaggerated,” Farage said on Friday. “Whether we like everything he says or not, he’s a hero.”
Musk falsely claimed that Tommy Robinson had been jailed for “telling the truth” about paedophile gangs in the UK.
He said Robinson “should be freed and those who covered up this travesty should take his place in that cell”.
Farage said that Musk saw Robinson “as one of these people that fought against the grooming gangs”.
“But of course the truth is Tommy Robinson’s in prison not for that, but for contempt of court,” Farage said.
Robinson is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for repeated contempt of court. His breaches of court orders nearly led to the collapse of a case involving a grooming gang.
Farage has long sought to distance himself from Robinson, pointing to his criminal record and saying he has no place in the party, despite there being significant overlap between their supporter bases.
“The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes,” Musk wrote on X yesterday after Farage’s comments.
“Well, this is a surprise! Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree,” Farage wrote on X in response to Musk.
“My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles,” he added.
Farage followed up later in the day with a video on X in which he called for a national inquiry. Musk reposted the video with the word “Yes”.
Speaking yesterday, Keir Starmer said: “Those who are cheerleading Tommy Robinson are not interested in justice. They’re supporting a man who went to prison for nearly collapsing a grooming case, a gang grooming case.”
Intervening in politics outside the United States and his native South Africa is not a new habit for Musk, but his poorly informed broadsides against foreign political figures have increased since he bought the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Musk is a serial spreader of misinformation and often boosts posts by other accounts frequently guilty of doing the same.
He has waded into UK politics before, saying things like, “Britain is going full Stalin” and “The people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state”.
“Civil war is inevitable,” Musk wrote on X in the aftermath of the racist mob attacks on mosques and asylum seeker accommodation centres in the UK that followed a knife attack on young children in the English town of Southport last summer.
Since he became a key figure in the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump, Musk seems to have become even more emboldened to meddle in the politics of other countries.
The issues and narratives that seem to concern the billionaire Tesla and Space-X owner fall along now predictable lines: immigration, cultural diversity and anything he sees as the product of what he calls “the woke mind virus”.
In almost every case, Musk takes up the cause of the far right elements in his target country’s political sphere.
He has openly backed Germany’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim AfD party and last month called outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz an “incompetent fool” before labelling the German president an “anti-democratic tyrant”.
The AfD has been labelled a suspected extremist organisation by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency and while the party is often at pains to say otherwise, it has links with right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi groups. Recent polling suggest support for the AfD is growing ahead of elections expected in February.
After a man who said he supported the AfD rammed a car into a crowd at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, on 20 December, Musk said: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”
Yesterday, French President Emannuel Macron said: ”Ten years ago, who could have imagined it if we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany.”
Ireland has not been immune to Musk’s attention either.
During the height of the debate about the government’s Hate Speech Bill, Musk said that Ireland’s then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar “hates the Irish people”.
Musk also promised that X would financially support any legal challenges brought against the bill.
In terms of Irish electoral politics, Musk threw his support behind disgraced MMA fighter Conor McGregor after he indicated he would run for the presidency.
With reporting from Press Association and AFP
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