Elon Musk asks if the United States should also take over Britain. In Britain, we are considering whether we should be worried, says Britannia correspondent Kirsi Crowley.
Kirsi Crowley Britannian correspondent
LONDON While Donald Trump threatens to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal, his partner Elon Musk asks whether the United States should replace British rule.
More than half of the two million respondents on X, the messaging service owned by the world’s richest man, answered in the affirmative.
Elon Musk has not been elected as a representative of the United States, but he is pushing Britain and the rest of Europe into the political mold he wants. In Britain, churning works.
Because of Musk, the latest headline is again the grooming gang scandal from a decade ago. Musk demands the prime minister Keir Starmer’s resignation because this will not open a new investigation into the abuse of minors that has shocked Britain.
More than a decade ago, The Times magazine revealed a crime ring in which gangs of men had been stalking young, vulnerable white girls for years. The men raped the girls and forced them into sex work. A large part of the gang members were of Pakistani background.
There were gangs in numerous cities. An official investigation revealed that in the largest cluster in Rotherham, with a population of 260,000 in central England, there were up to 1,400 victims between 1997 and 2013. The youngest were only 11 years old. Men enticed them with friendship, alcohol and drugs.
Musk has taken the scandal as his latest weapon against the British Government. He claims that the case has been covered up. According to Musk, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is “complicit in the rape of Britain”. Starmer was the public prosecutor when the cases came to light.
According to later investigations, several mistakes were made in the handling of the crimes. Local authorities delayed bringing charges. The police treated the victims condescendingly. It considered girls from poor backgrounds to be to blame for their own situation. The ethnicity of criminals and victims was kept silent.
However, over the years, several investigations have been conducted into the scandal and the culprits have been sentenced to prison. The victims have spoken in the media. Starmer himself was involved in the prosecution.
The conservative party sitting in the opposition has now lined up to support Musk. It requires yet another study. Leader of the Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch said during Prime Minister’s Question Time that previous investigations did not delve into the activities of rape gangs or whether it continues.
Prime Minister Starmer, on the other hand, asked why Badenoch did not demand such an inquiry once during the 14 years of the Conservative government. Starmer also accused the Conservatives of inaction in implementing the recommendations of previous inquiries and promised the current government would do them.
For Musk and the far right that supports him at the heart of the dispute is not so much the protection of girls, but the damming of immigration and the strengthening of ethnic dividing lines.
The messaging service X calls for Muslims to leave Britain.
Also a representative of the British Conservative Party Robert Jenrick managed to say that “alien cultures” with “medieval attitudes” must be rooted out of Britain.
In the narrative of the extreme right, the scandal is seen as proof that ethnic minorities are solely to blame for the sexual abuse of children.
Police statistics however, they say otherwise.
Also, for example, a former prosecutor Nazir Afzal has said that Pakistanis and Asians are overrepresented in street grooming gangs, but white men are the majority in online, domestic and institutional child sexual abuse.
Musk’s goal is to bring the extreme right into the mainstream In Britain, where the Labor Party won last summer’s parliamentary election strongly.
However, his aspirations are too much even for the leader of the far-right party Reform UK For Nigel Farage.
Musk hinted that he would give a hefty donation to the party that won parliament in the last election.
Suddenly, however, he said he wanted Farage out of the party leadership.
The reason, according to Farage, is that he refused Musk’s demand to admit a radical far-right member, who is already in prison for the fifth time, to the party Tommy Robinson.
Robinson instigated last summer’s violent anti-immigration riots in Britain on the messaging service X.
The Labor Party now leads Britain with a strong parliamentary majority. Elon Musk’s comments shouldn’t sway it.
However, Musk’s influence on US President-elect Donald Trump is still a matter of conjecture. It is not clear to outsiders whether Musk is speaking as an eccentric billionaire or as Donald Trump’s influential right-hand man.
So the British government has so far taken Musk’s comments with moderate restraint.