One of the most surreal moments from 2024 – the moment, perhaps, that I realised “politics as normal” no longer existed – was watching Elon Musk get into a spat on Twitter-now-X over free speech laws in the UK with the account that pretends to be the Downing Street Cat. Finally the cross-border memeification of political discourse was complete.
The owner of Tesla appears to be obsessed with UK politics. And that obsession makes headlines here: both because of his place in Donald Trump’s cabinet, and as someone teasing Reform with the prospect of a game-changing political donation. But his grasp of British political culture is flimsy. And why shouldn’t it be? The South African anarchic tech-futurist isn’t a British citizen. He has never lived here. Britain has a fundamentally different approach to regulating hate speech and incitement of violence to the First Amendment-loving US that Musk has made his home. Different countries, different cultures, different laws.
He is currently focused on one of the most horrific episodes in recent British history: the grooming gangs scandal in which an estimated 1,400 young girls were sexually exploited over almost two decades by hundreds of men, predominantly of British-Pakistani origin. The episode re-emerged over the festive period: on New Year’s Day GB News reported that the Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips had written to Oldham Council in Greater Manchester, which had been calling for a Home Office-led inquiry into historic child exploitation in the area, to explain that the government would not intervene. Instead, she urged the council to commission its own local inquiry. The grooming gangs scandal had already been a hot topic on X/Twitter the preceding week, possibly triggered by a debate on whether the UK had succeeded in integrating Muslim communities, with the horrendous details revealed in the various rape cases over the years resurfacing and going viral.
Whatever the spark, Musk started 2025 by pouring petrol on the flames. He accused the Labour government of opposing an inquiry “because it will show that those in power were complicit in the cover-up”, replied to a tweet by Liz Truss to say Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison”, and blamed Keir Starmer for failing to prosecute the perpetrators when he was director of public prosecutions. Here lies evidence of the chasm between Musk’s interest and his knowledge: those familiar with Starmer’s career will know he did begin the prosecutions of the Rochdale grooming gangs in 2013 and also changed the way the Crown Prosecution Service approaches child sexual abuse cases.
But Musk had already decided last summer that the new British government was his nemesis due to its response to the riots sparked by fatal stabbings in Southport. He said then that “civil war was inevitable” in Britain and called the Prime Minister “TwoTierKeir”, a reference to the conspiracy theory that the far right is policed differently. Musk’s hostility towards Labour is baked in. The important question is how the British establishment reacts.
The rejection of a grooming gangs inquiry is awkward for the government, which has launched countless consultations and reviews on other policy areas over the past six months and has made halving violence against women and girls one of its core pledges. Critics are justified in asking why the government is failing to launch a national inquiry into systemic child exploitation that was ignored by layers of public officials. Kemi Badenoch has done so in the wake of Musk’s intervention, arguing that “no one in authority has joined the dots”. (She failed to mention the lack of dot-joining during her party’s 14 years in power, but Nigel Farage was helpful enough to point this out for her.)
The subject naturally appeals to both the Tories and Reform. It’s a visceral example of state failure, mixed with officials’ reluctance to get involved in matters concerning ethnic tension and minority immigrant communities, fearing accusations of Islamophobia, even if it meant abandoning thousands of girls to horrific abuse. But both parties should also be wary of filing in behind Musk’s talking points. As well as lambasting Starmer and Phillips, Musk yesterday campaigned on behalf of the far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson. “Why is Tommy Robinson in a solitary confinement prison for telling the truth?” Musk wrote. “He should be freed and those who covered up this travesty should take his place in that cell.” Robinson is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
Robinson has a history of convictions, including for assault and mortgage fraud, and was successfully sued for defamation in 2021. One of his previous jail terms relates to interfering with one of the grooming gang trials. And in Musk’s mind, it seems Robinson is a free speech champion wrongfully jailed for speaking the truth about Muslim child traffickers. Nigel Farage has more sense. He understands how toxic Robinson and the English Defence League Robinson used to lead are in the UK. In 2018 Farage quit Ukip over its “fixation” with Robinson’s cause, and was careful to distance himself from him over the summer when Robinson was making videos about the riots. Fellow Reform MP Richard Tice said in November that the party wants “nothing to do” with Robinson.
Not everyone involved with Reform will agree. One of the challenges Farage has this year is maintaining the enthusiasm for his insurgent party while slapping down fans who will damage its chances of credibility with their social media behaviour. How many of the 130,000 or so new party members will have tweeted approvingly about Musk’s call for Robinson to be liberated? And how will that be dealt with when Reform comes to select its candidates for the local elections, when it needs to maintain its appeal among voters who might feel uneasy about the scale and pace of immigration but still detest those of Robinson’s milieu?
As for the Conservatives, as Badenoch has just learned, co-opting Musk’s talking points runs the risk of being called out for hypocrisy by Reform. And perhaps more importantly, the Tories have historically been successful at branding themselves the party of law and order. If the Conservatives lean too hard into Musk’s disruptive inclinations, they might find themselves at odds with a public that overwhelmingly condemned the rioters over the summer, whatever they felt about immigration.
It goes without saying that Musk and the brand of populism he is attempting to import from the US spells trouble for Labour, as does his peculiar animosity towards Starmer. But those on the right who see an opportunity in the Americanisation of the debate should be wary. Britain is not America. And Musk could prove more of a liability to them than a benefactor.
[See also: Mark Zuckerberg’s fake internet empire]
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