A senior British government minister on Friday criticised Elon Musk’s latest intervention in the country’s politics as “misjudged and certainly misinformed”.
The tech billionaire accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer a day earlier of failing to bring “rape gangs” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions.
In a string of posts on his X platform, Musk also suggested that Jess Phillips, minister for the prevention of violence against women and girls, “deserves to be in prison” for refusing a request for a national public inquiry into a child sexual exploitation scandal in the northern English city of Oldham.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting told ITV News television that Musk’s comments were wide of the mark and that the government took child sexual exploitation “incredibly seriously”.
“Some of the criticisms that Elon Musk has made, I think are misjudged and certainly misinformed, but we’re willing to work with Elon Musk, who I think has got a big role to play with his social media platform to help us and other countries to tackle this serious issue,” he said.
“So if he wants to work with us and roll his sleeves up, we’d welcome that,” he added.
The widespread abuse of girls in a number of English towns and cities including Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, which emerged more than a decade ago, has long stirred controversy.
A series of court cases eventually led to the convictions of dozens of men, mostly of South Asian Muslim origin. The victims were vulnerable, mostly white, girls.
A series of official inquiries into how police and social workers failed to halt the abuse found that officials in some cases turned a blind eye to avoid appearing racist.
The scandals have been seized upon by far-right figures, in particular Tommy Robinson, a prominent extremist agitator.
Accused of helping fuel anti-immigration riots last summer, Robinson was imprisoned in October after he admitted committing contempt of court over a long-running libel case involving a Syrian refugee.
In one of his X posts on Thursday, Musk claimed that Robinson was in prison “for telling the truth” and that “he should be freed”.
– Swipe at Starmer –
Most of Musk’s messages focused on Robinson’s long-time highlighting of historical scandals involving alleged paedophile grooming gangs in some English cities.
Sharing various other accounts’ claims around the child sex crimes spanning decades, Musk noted that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decides whether to charge suspects.
“Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer, 2008-2013,” he posted.
Starmer was the head of the CPS in that period, but none of the probes into the scandals singled him out for blame or found that he tried to block prosecutions due to concerns over alleged Islamophobia.
Later, in response to another post calling for King Charles III to dissolve parliament, Musk replied: “Yes!”
He later took another swipe at Starmer, suggesting that his government had turned down the requested inquiry “because he is guilty of complicity”.
Weighing in on the row, later on Friday Nigel Farage, a lawmaker and leader of the anti-immigration Reform UK party, disagreed with Musk about Robinson.
“He sees 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,” he told right-wing channel GB News.
Robinson himself had encouraged a narrative that he was a “political prisoner… but it isn’t quite true”, he said.
Farage added that Musk, with whom he has had talks about the US billionaire donating to his hard-right party, was “very supportive of me, he’s very supportive of the party”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)