The report that sparked Musk’s interest earlier this week claimed that Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips had rejected a town council request for a government-led inquiry into the sexual exploitation of children in Oldham, a town near Manchester in northern England which was one of the areas where allegations of abuse by grooming gangs were made.
While Musk and his allies claim this is part of a larger government cover-up, Phillips wrote in a letter that it was “for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into the sexual exploitation of children in the place, rather than the government to intervene.” The previous Conservative-led government similarly rejected Oldham’s calls for a government-led inquiry in 2022.
Musk called for Phillips to be jailed and called him “a rape genocide apologist.” Musk and Phillips did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Musk is also using the report to call, once again, for Starmer’s removal as prime minister.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk wrote to X on Friday morning, in a post that is now pinned to the top of his timeline. “Starmer must go and must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in Britain’s history.”
Starmer, in his role as director of public prosecutions more than a decade ago, actually started the prosecution of a grooming gang in Rochdale and introduced new rules aimed at enabling sexual abuse cases.
Starmer and the British government’s press office did not respond for comment, but the health secretary Wes Streeting told the BBC that Musk’s comments were “misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Musk also drew a number of US right-wing figures into the conversation, including accounts such as Chaya Raichik, who runs the virulently anti-LGBTQ Libs TikTok account, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, the commentator on right Ian Miles Cheong, and disgraced former US national security adviser Michael Flynn.
US Senator Mike Lee also weighed in, writing on X: “Will the UK be released?”
“Yes,” Musk replied.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and Trump supporter, repeated Musk’s narrative almost verbatim in a post on X. He then asked if the president-elect “considers appropriate sanctions against the United Kingdom until these concerns are addressed.”
In a post on Friday morning, Musk launched an appeal to King Charles to dissolve the UK parliament and order a general election. While the monarch in the United Kingdom dissolves parliament before the general election, it is done only at the request of the prime minister, and the power of the monarch is, in effect, nothing more than a rubber stamp.
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2025-01-03 16:53:00
