Donald Trump’s single biggest donor is now spreading his influence overseas. Elon Musk has spent the past week spreading misinformation about a decades old grooming case and demanding imprisonment for the UK Prime Minister.
Musk has shown an increasing interest in UK politics since the July landslide election which saw the Conservative Party ousted in favor of the center-left Labor Party. More recently, his posts have grown increasingly vitriolic over a news story amplified by the right wing press.
According to the New York Times, Oldham—a town in the Manchester area—requested a national public inquiry into child sex abuse that occurred throughout the 2000s decade. In October, Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips declined the request in favor of commissioning a local inquiry, as other local governments had done.
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Last week, right wing outlet GB News ran with the story, framing Phillips’ rejection as complete inaction. Musk followed up by calling Phillips “rape genocide apologist” and an “evil witch” who “deserves to be in prison.” Musk then went after the Prime Minister, tweeting “prison for Starmer,” and polling his followers as to whether America “should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”
Why is Musk all of a sudden so concerned with a foreign country’s handling of one town’s child sex abuse investigation? The case overall stems from the “grooming gangs” scandal. In 2011, investigative journalists uncovered a widespread organization of criminal gangs grooming children going back to 1997. One particular inquiry into the town of Rotherham found that over 1,400 children had been sexually exploited.
Because the men involved were predominantly of Pakistani descent, conservatives have since seized on the case to claim that racial acceptance has gone too far. A common talking point is that the initial reports were not looked into because investigators were afraid to be called racist. Rotherham’s local government found instead that misogynistic victim-blaming played a much larger role (the police going so far as to dismiss some victims as “tarts”).
As communities are still reckoning with the extent of the damage to this day, the scandal continues to be a major political inflection point. The escalating racist rhetoric has since had deadly consequences. The white supremacist terrorist who carried out a mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, killing 51 people, had the words “For Rotherham” written on his weaponry.
As chief prosecutor during the time of the grooming gang scandal, Starmer prosecuted a record number of child sex abuse cases. “Child sexual exploitation is utterly sick, utterly sick, and for many, many years, too many victims have been completely let down,” Starmer said at a press conference on Monday. “Let down by perverse ideas about community relations or by the idea that institutions must be protected above all else, and they’ve not been listened to, and they’ve not been heard.”
Starmer went on to call out Musk specifically. “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible,” he said, “they are not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves.”
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