Elon Musk’s grooming gangs allegations expose a deeper truth about UK politics

Elon Musk’s dramatic recent intervention in British politics has raised a number of important issues relating to the pervasive influence of social media on politics in the West.

Last week Musk launched an unprecedented attack on UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Minister for Safeguarding Women and Girls (a typical woke exercise in virtue signalling) Jessica Phillips, over their involvement in the infamous “grooming gangs scandal”.

This scandal involved hundreds of men (for the most part of Pakistani origin) grooming a large number of young girls (for the most part white) for illicit sexual purposes – that took place in some 40 migrant-dominated British towns (most famously Rotherdam) between 1997 and 2013.

Subsequent inquiries disclosed that widespread grooming took place, and that the immediate response by police, local councils and the director of public prosecutions DPP was tardy and unenthusiastic, to say the least.

Complaints by parents of the young girls were initially ignored by police, and the mainstream British media failed to comprehensively report on what was happening at the time.

Conservative commentators and some Tory politicians have for the past decade sought to politicise the “grooming gangs” issue, claiming that these failures were caused by institutionalised woke reluctance to expose the criminal activities of members of an ethnic community, and rigorously prosecute wrongdoers. 

Starmer was the DPP between 2008 and 2013, and this is the basis for Musk’s attack on him. He accused Starmer of being “evil”, failing to prosecute offenders because of his ideological commitment to diversity politics and of being complicit “in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”.

Musk also intemperately called Jessica Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” – an absurd term – and a “witch”. Such crudities appear to be the norm for Musk.

The “grooming gangs scandal” became a political issue again in October last year, when Phillips rejected calls for a further national inquiry into the matter. Musk has now called for a wide-ranging inquiry into the scandal and Starmer’s personal involvement in it. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has also called for a government inquiry. 

Starmer has firmly rejected Musk’s allegations – he claims, in fact, to have prosecuted some offenders – and it is not yet apparent precisely what Starmer’s personal role, if any, in the scandal was. Starmer has predictably accused Musk of “peddling lies and misinformation” and refused to establish an inquiry.

There is no doubt that Musk’s intervention is politically motivated.

As an influential member of the incoming Trump administration, Musk is no doubt seeking to curry favour with the new president by attacking Starmer – whose unwavering support for NATO and the crumbling Zelensky regime are anathema to Trump. 

Trump’s recent comments make it clear that he is determined to withdraw US support for Zelensky and bring about a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Ukraine.

The fact that Musk’s comments were politically motivated, however, does not mean that they are completely without substance – notwithstanding his vulgar rhetoric.

Musk’s denunciation of the unpopular and beleaguered Starmer has understandably provoked a torrent of criticism from Labour MPs and woke media organisations in the UK and elsewhere. Some have even called naively for Musk’s X social media platform to be banned in the UK – as if that were possible.

These criticisms are patently self-interested and disgracefully hypocritical.

They also smack of desperation by a political elite that has, for the past 20 years, enthusiastically embraced and utilised social media platforms, while showering tax benefits and legal immunities upon the tech titans – like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – that own and run them as personal fiefdoms.

How can Starmer and the Labour party criticise Musk for “intervening” in British politics with a straight face?

UK politics – and politics in the West generally – has been irreversibly corrupted by global social media corporations for the past two decades.

National elections are now run on global social media platforms that successive governments, of whatever political stripe, have permitted to bombard voters with completely unfiltered information – including wild conspiracy theories, demonstrable falsehoods and vile abuse – that is designed to exacerbate and confirm recipients’ prejudices.

Large social media platforms now determine political outcomes in the West and have done so for some time. The Brexit referendum is a classic example.

More importantly, the tech giants have virtually destroyed the educated public – why read books when Tik Tok can provide you with all the information that you need – and made rational political debate impossible in the West.

Traditional media outlets – that were run by professional editors and staffed by experienced journalists – did not, as part of their basic business model, publish unfiltered information or derogatory material penned by unhinged conspiracy theorists. Nor did they target readers in the neo-totalitarian manner in which social media platforms now do.

For all of their manifold faults and ideological limitations, traditional media organisations in the West regularly published informed critical and dissident thought and encouraged rational political debate. 

These organisations, however, have little influence over politics in the West today – and they certainly no longer determine the outcome of elections. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision to abolish fact checking completely is simply the endgame of the corruption of Western intellectual life and politics that has been at the heart of the global social media agenda since its inception twenty years ago. 

Starmer, like most other contemporary Western politicians, has, of course, eagerly used social media and its inherent anti-intellectualism in order to gain office and destroy his political opponents.

Starmer’s campaign to drive Jeremy Corbyn and the traditional Labour left out of the party – based primarily upon false allegations of anti-semitism – is just one example. Starmer also gleefully used the “partygate” material leaked by Dominic Cummings to destroy Boris Johnson’s Prime Ministership.

When similar tactics are used against him, however, Starmer cries  “disinformation”– with a degree of hypocrisy that is simply breathtaking.

Having permitted the tech titans’ unfettered freedom to shape and debauch public opinion for decades – at a time when they, by and large, promoted elite ideologies – woke politicians like Starmer evince outrage when these individuals change their political allegiance, and embrace the increasingly more appealing political agendas of populist leaders like Trump. 

Starmer and the Labour party have never sought to impose effective restrictions on the global tech giants, and Starmer is so enamoured of them that just this week – in the midst of the Musk imbroglio – he announced Labour’s new policy of “making Britain a world leader in AI”.  

It is no wonder that Musk feels free to treat Starmer with contempt, and campaign to have him driven out of office.  

Starmer and his ilk have sown the wind for decades and are now beginning to reap the whirlwind. In fact, they resemble latter-day Dr Frankensteins who are powerless to control the monsters that they created.

What then of the substance of Musk’s allegations?

Previous inquiries have conclusively shown that widespread grooming took place – although its extent is not clear – and that the police and other authorities were exceedingly slow to take appropriate action. It is also apparent that woke media organisations failed to adequately report on the entire “grooming gang scandal” when it was happening.

This, of course, as conservative media outlets and politicians assert, can only be explained by a deep-seated ideological reluctance to pursue perpetrators who happened to have come from an ethnic background.

As with all “culture wars “ issues in the West, the search for truth was compromised from the outset by emotive moral posturing and irrational allegations and counter allegations of  “racism” and “wokeism”.

Neither side of the impassioned political debate was willing to put their ideological prejudices aside and determine exactly what occurred in Rotherdam and other towns – let alone ensure that appropriate action was taken against the perpetrators.

In the circumstances, why shouldn’t there be a further inquiry into what even Starmer agrees was a national scandal ?

As to Starmer’s personal involvement in the “grooming gangs scandal” the position is far less clear. But Starmer’s refusal to establish an inquiry into the matter surely smacks of gross hypocrisy.

How can the politician who enthusiastically supported inquiries into the arguably less serious alleged transgressions of Jeremy Corbyn, Dianne Abbott and Boris Johnson now refuse to establish an inquiry into Musk’s allegations? 

The answer to that question is, of course, that within Starmer’s ideological world-view, one set of rules apply to global elite apologists like himself and quite another applies to politicians who hold differing ideological views.

To have dramatically exposed this contemporary political truism may be the most important consequence of Elon Musk’s recent theatrical incursion into British politics.