He called for the release of a convicted criminal and far-right agitator. He unfairly accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to pursue child rapists when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. He supported a post calling on Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call an election to overthrow Britain’s seven-month-old Labor government, which is constitutionally impossible.
Elon Musk has once again set his sights on the UK, putting the country under scrutiny in a fickle world obsessed with online content. In a flurry of posts that began before the new year, Mr. Musk moved from enthusiastically backing Germany’s far-right party to targeting Britain in several politically sensitive areas.
The British government, which had largely ignored Mr. Musk’s trolling for months, quickly hit back on Friday, albeit in a characteristically polite manner.
“Elon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps he should focus on issues on the other side of the Atlantic,” Government Health Minister Andrew Gwynne said in an interview on LBC radio. Gwynne’s boss, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, told reporters: “I think some of the criticism of Elon Musk is misjudged and definitely misinformed.” Ta.
Britain is one of several European countries seeking to replicate the influence Mr. Musk wielded on behalf of President-elect Donald J. Trump in last fall’s U.S. presidential election. In addition to Germany, where his far-right neo-Nazi-linked party Alternative for Germany has disrupted the country’s politics ahead of next month’s general election, Musk also has close ties with Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia. is being built. Meloni.
In Britain, Musk’s hostility to the Labor government stems in part from the party’s aggressive response to online hate speech. Officials said false and inflammatory posts helped incite anti-immigrant riots that followed the gang stabbing of three girls in the town of Southport last July. They arrested more than 30 people, prompting Mr. Musk to denounce the government for what he called an attack on the freedom of speech he praised in his “X” platform.
Britain is “becoming a police state,” he says.
But since then, Mr Musk has made other complaints, from voicing support for the anti-immigration party Reform UK to stoking anger over the government’s handling of a decade-long child sex abuse scandal in a northern town. It also deals with stability issues. of Rotherham. An estimated 1,400 girls were exploited by ‘grooming gangs’, mainly made up of British men of Pakistani descent.
Perhaps most provocatively, Mr. Musk took up the cause of far-right anti-immigration agitator Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He has been in prison since October after being found guilty of defying a court order by repeatedly making false claims about a teenage Syrian refugee he had successfully sued for defamation.
Mr. Robinson has previously been jailed for assault, mortgage fraud and traveling to the United States on a false passport in an attempt to establish ties with right-wing groups.
“Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk posted as a pin at the top of his X account, which has 210 million followers, on January 2nd.
Mr Musk’s defense of Mr Robinson has left Britain’s other right-wing allies in an awkward position. Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s Reform Party and a close ally of Mr. Trump, said Robinson was the founder of the English Defense League, an Islamophobic nationalist group known for violent street protests in the late 2000s and 2010s. I have avoided him for many years.
Farage, who has been delighted by Musk’s support and courted him in hopes of winning donations to Reform Britain, has echoed Musk’s calls for a new investigation into the child sex abuse scandal. . But he has remained conspicuously silent about Mr. Robinson.
As in Germany, where Mr. Musk’s promotion of the far-right party AfD sparked a widespread backlash, his intervention has won him few fans in Britain. But analysts say his closeness and influence to Trump means his opinions, amplified by social media platforms, cannot be ignored by the government.
“His message doesn’t work in Britain or Germany, but governments are constrained by their relationships with President Trump,” said Sundar Katwala, director of British Future, a London-based research organization. “It would be difficult enough to relate to Mr. Trump. What Mr. Musk is doing is putting this non-governmental actor at the center of the court.”
Katwala said it makes sense for the government to respond to Musk’s more extreme or false statements simply because his unpopularity makes him an easy target for other critics. He claimed that there was. “They leave the goal open without saying anything,” he said.
Privately, British officials say they hope that after Trump takes office later this month, Musk will be too busy reforming the U.S. federal government to continue his daily barrage against Britain and Germany. states. But on the other hand, online influence is far-reaching enough to “influence politics,” Katwala said, citing the child sex abuse scandal as a case in point.
Musk’s post helped spark an uproar over the incident, which dates back to 2014 and was the subject of local and national investigations. Jess Phillips, one of Mr Starmer’s cabinet ministers, made the comments after pushing back on calls for a further national inquiry. This is a matter for local councils, and opposition Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch joined Mr Farage in criticizing the government. “No one in authority is connecting the dots,” she posted on X on January 2nd.
On Friday, Musk claimed that Phillips, the undersecretary for protection and violence against women and girls who has long campaigned for women’s rights, is an “advocate of rape and genocide.” Women’s rights advocates said the words jeopardized Phillips’ position. Safety. He also sought to focus the scandal on Mr Starmer, who led the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013, when the abuse first came to light.
Several men were jailed, but investigations revealed that the victims were reluctant to come forward and most of the suspects were British-Pakistani. There were also concerns that police and prosecutors were slow to respond to the allegations. .
“Starmer was complicit in the rape of Britain during his six years as Crown Prosecution Director,” Musk said in a post pinned to the top of his account early Friday. “Starmer must leave the country and be charged with complicity in the worst mass crime in British history.”
Indeed, in 2013, following the scandal, Mr Starmer announced new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with child sexual exploitation cases.
Mr Starmer won a commanding parliamentary majority in July and is in no immediate danger of losing his job. But Mr Musk’s drumbeat of disinformation and criticism, combined with the prospect that he will fund UK reforms, has upset people across UK politics. MPs called on the government to strengthen laws restricting donations by foreigners to British political parties.
Mr Musk’s support for his post calling on Prime Minister Charles to intervene and call an election exposed his ignorance of how the UK works. Under the constitutional monarchy, the king can dissolve parliament, but only at the request of the prime minister, who decides when to hold elections.
“He’s the Citizen Kane of the 21st century,” Katwala said of Musk. “He has pictures of England and pictures of Germany, and he is looking for information to support those pictures. The problem he has with exporting to England and Germany is that his knowledge of England and Germany is clearly That’s what’s missing.”
