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POLITICS

Shouting across the pond: Elon Musk reignites decade-old grooming gangs scandal in an attempt to influence British politics

As Elon Musk seeks to increase his influence in the European political sphere, Tesla sales across the continent have plummeted. The billionaire openly supports Germany’s far right and is trying to bring down what he calls the “leftist” government of the United Kingdom. In the latter case, he attempted to exploit a long-running scandal involving the mass abuse of minors — one that British authorities failed to properly investigate for years. However, Musk’s interference in the country’s internal affairs was met with widespread backlash in the UK, damaging the billionaire’s reputation much more severely than that of the prime minister. 

Content
  • Europeans, drive out the migrants!

  • Britain in danger

  • The rise of Pakistani rape gangs

  • Us or them

  • Musk vs. Pakistanis, Brits vs. Musk

RU

Europeans, drive out the migrants!

In his quest to reform the U.S. government, Elon Musk has apparently taken to sleeping at DOGE headquarters. But the billionaire entrepreneur has not forgotten about Europe. Since the second inauguration of Donald Trump last month, it seems there is hardly a country on the continent whose domestic affairs Musk has not commented on. He has grown close to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that they even had to deny rumors of a romantic relationship.

A fake video of Elon Musk and Giorgia Meloni kissing went viral on social media
A fake video of Elon Musk and Giorgia Meloni kissing went viral on social media

Musk has his own take on the cancellation of elections in Romania. He condemns Ireland’s migration policies as flawed and believes that Sinn Féin, the former political wing of the terrorist Irish Republican Army, has become “as scary as a plush toy” because it no longer fights against migrants. By contrast, he sees the radicals who took to the streets in an anti-immigration protest in Dublin as “standing up” for the country.

In the Netherlands, Musk supports Geert Wilders, the far-right politician whose party finished first in the 2024 elections and became part of the ruling coalition — albeit without securing the prime minister’s office. The billionaire agrees with Wilders’ view that “The biggest problem we face today is a collapse of our own culture and Western values due to open borders, mass immigration, an uncontrollable amount of non-western asylum seekers and last but not least too many weak politicians advocating cultural relativism.”

Musk has been even more active when it comes to inserting himself into the political landscape of Germany, where he endorses the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as the only force capable of saving the country. AfD’s platform is broad, including proposals for Germany to leave the EU and lift sanctions on Russia, but at its core is the same anti-immigration alarmism that now appears central to Musk’s worldview.

In Britain, Musk backs the right-wing populist party Reform UK and is rumored to be offering it as much as £100 million. At the same time, he is reportedly pushing for the removal of its leader, Nigel Farage, whom he sees as too weak — particularly for refusing to call for the release of Tommy Robinson (real name: Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon), a far-right anti-Islam activist currently serving his fifth prison sentence, this time for contempt of court. In Musk’s view, Robinson is in prison “for telling the truth.” He appears unfazed by Robinson’s previous convictions for libel, stalking, and using false documents to cross a border — nor by the fact that British authorities are investigating Robinson for tax evasion.

Britain in danger

Even against this backdrop, Musk’s online war with the UK’s Labour government — and with Prime Minister Keir Starmer personally — stands out. Musk claims that Britain is a “tyrannical police state,” that the country is becoming Stalinist because the government changed inheritance tax rules for farmers, and that it is headed for inevitable civil war.

“Britain is a tyrannical police state,” says Elon Musk

According to Musk, the prime minister himself deserves to be in prison for his crackdown on far-right protests. Another reason, he claims, is Starmer’s role in the investigation of mass child sexual abuse cases in the UK. In Musk’s version, Starmer — a former attorney general — is personally involved in the “rape of Britain.” By coincidence, or perhaps not, The Rape of Britain is also the title of one of Tommy Robinson’s propaganda films. And Musk’s verbal attacks are having an effect: he called Jessica Phillips, the deputy minister responsible for women’s protection, a “rape genocide apologist,” and she is now under increased security.

According to Musk, Prime Minister Starmer, a former attorney general, is himself a participant in the “rape of Britain”
According to Musk, Prime Minister Starmer, a former attorney general, is himself a participant in the “rape of Britain”

The allegation centers on the issue of grooming and rape gangs, which for nearly four decades are said to have been targeting girls from troubled families or under state care, luring them with sweets, soda, and sometimes drugs before repeatedly assaulting them — the gang members were primarily young men of Pakistani descent, and their victims were primarily white. Now Musk and the right-wing populist Reform Party are demanding a nationwide investigation into these crimes. The government, however, insists that the story has long since been investigated, and that action is needed rather than continuing the search for culprits.

The rise of Pakistani rape gangs

The scandal first erupted in the summer of 2003 when seven mothers from Yorkshire approached Anne Cryer, a Member of Parliament, with complaints that social service workers and police officers were ignoring their pleas to protect their daughters from British-Pakistani “boyfriends.” According to Cryer, police and social workers feared being labeled racist and preferred to sweep the issue under the rug. As a result, Cryer herself was branded a racist and had to install a panic button in her home.

A year later, the documentary Edge of the City was released, focusing on social workers and parents' attempts to stop groups of young men of South Asian appearance who were grooming underage girls.

In 2007, The Times exposed a “hidden world in which Asian men ‘groom’ young white girls for sex.” One of its reports was headlined: “If it had been white guys, it would have been reported sooner.” The problem persisted, but the authorities continued to turn a blind eye. For instance, in July 2009, prosecutors dropped a child grooming case in Rochdale before trial, deciding that the victim was unreliable and that DNA from one of the attackers found on her underwear had ended up there with her consent.

The scandal escalated in 2011 when The Times correspondent Andrew Norfolk launched an investigation into grooming gangs in towns and cities across northern England and the Midlands. He found that 53 out of 56 defendants prosecuted for grooming since 1997 were of South Asian descent, mostly Pakistani.

Us or them

Local councils, police, and charities insisted that ethnicity played no role in these crimes. However, investigations repeatedly led back to the Pakistani community in the UK. It is known, for example, that the organized sexual abuse of children in Rotherham — a town in northern England where such cases were thoroughly investigated — began no later than the late 1980s, and that the grooming gangs, both then and later, consisted primarily of first- and second-generation Pakistani immigrants. Between 1997 and 2013, approximately 1,400 girls — most of them from children's homes — fell victim to these gangs.

There are no nationwide statistics in the UK on the ethnic backgrounds of criminals. Data collection varies by region, and no centralized records are maintained. Studies indicate that, overall, the ethnic composition of those convicted of sexual offenses against minors mirrors that of the general population, with the majority being white and 1–2% of offenders being of Pakistani descent.

However, when it comes specifically to grooming gangs, the picture is quite different, though it is not immediately clear why that is. Many British Pakistanis work in markets and so-called “night professions,” such as taxi driving, and some argue that they simply took advantage of their circumstances. Critics counter that this explains opportunity but not motive — after all, many other ethnic groups also work night shifts, including as taxi drivers, yet it was disproportionately Pakistani men who were found to be involved in these gangs.

One theory attributes the crimes to the perpetrators’ view of the girls as inferior because they “had sex outside of marriage and drank alcohol,” according to Kate Elisya, who 18 years ago was one of approximately one thousand victims in Telford, a town north of Birmingham.

How was such widespread sexual exploitation possible, and why was it ignored for so long? Kate recounted that after her first rape, she went to the police, where she was told that if she reported it, they would have to arrest the rapist. As a result, she “had to say it was consensual because if they arrested him [she] was at risk,” since the rapist still had friends who were free.

According to far-right activists, local authorities — mostly from the Labour Party — feared losing votes from ethnic communities, and the police consented to turn a blind eye, systematically avoiding investigations in the name of political correctness and a misguided effort to preserve interethnic harmony.

Kate Elisya says that British politicians generally try to avoid difficult topics, especially discussions of criminals’ ethnic backgrounds, out of fear that the far right will seize on the issue.

In 2015, at the behest of the Conservatives, professor Alexis Jay led an independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. She concluded that the problem was neither a conspiracy nor simply a matter of political correctness. However, she also acknowledged that authorities failed to act due to a “their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away.”

Nazeer Afzal, former Chief Prosecutor for North West England and the son of Pakistani immigrants, explained that at the time, prosecutors chose not to press charges based on the principle that “if the police aren't happy that she will give credible evidence then we're not happy either.”

The inquiry explained the authorities' failure to act by a “desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour”

In an interview with The Guardian, Nazeer Afzal suggested that “white professionals' oversensitivity to political correctness and fear of appearing racist may well have contributed to justice being stalled.” He has no regrets about his own actions: it was he who convinced Keir Starmer, who became head of the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales in 2008, that previously closed cases of sexual exploitation needed to be reopened — an effort that eventually helped reveal the true scale of the problem.

The findings of Alexis Jay’s commission were published in the fall of 2022 and confirmed that grooming gangs had operated in dozens of cities, with at least thousands of victims. She outlined 20 recommendations, including criminal liability for failing to report cases of child sexual abuse, a measure Starmer had advocated a decade earlier when he was head of the CPS. But at the time, the Conservative government had other priorities, as the ruling party was consumed by endless scandals and internal conflicts of its own.

Musk vs. Pakistanis, Brits vs. Musk

By 2024, the issue of grooming gangs was no longer at the forefront of public debate. The Post Office scandal — which saw hundreds of postmasters wrongly convicted of theft between 2000 and 2010 due to faulty accounting software — dominated discussions. Another major controversy was the Infected Blood Scandal, in which it was discovered that around 30,000 patients in Britain had received blood transfusions tainted with hepatitis C or HIV from the 1970s through the 1990s.

But everything changed on Jan. 1, 2025, when GB News reported that the government had denied a request from the Oldham City Council — part of Greater Manchester — to launch a nationwide investigation into grooming gangs. Local officials explained that within the framework of local investigations, they could not compel witnesses to testify under oath.

At this point, Elon Musk suddenly and aggressively entered the fray. Starting on January 3, he posted around 200 tweets on the topic, pushing the issue of grooming gangs to the forefront of public consciousness.

“I am pleased that the subject matter and the inquiry recommendations are finally getting the attention they deserve,” commented Alexis Jay, former head of the Conservatives’ inquiry into grooming gangs. “But this is definitely not the way I would have chosen for it to happen.”

A clash erupted between the government and the opposition. Newly elected Tory leader Kemi Badenoch stated that trials were taking place across the country, but a fresh inquiry was needed to “join the dots.” The prime minister responded that demands for a large-scale investigation were merely an attempt to jump on a “far-right bandwagon.” Conservative MP Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, countered that these crimes had remained unknown and unprosecuted because those who raised such issues were “smeared.”

The call for a nationwide investigation was publicly supported by Andy Burnham, the influential Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, where several of the cases in question had occurred, as well as by several Labour MPs.

Although the government initially flatly refused to conduct a new investigation, mounting pressure from the opposition and the public led to a shift in its rhetoric. By Jan. 16, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced funding for investigations organized by local councils, along with a national audit of crimes in this category. The audit would analyze data on the ethnic and demographic characteristics of the gangs and their victims and examine any cultural and societal factors contributing to such crimes, including within different ethnic groups. The question now is whether this will strengthen Keir Starmer’s government or, as Musk would prefer, weaken it.

However, the American billionaire’s persistence is not sitting well with the British public. According to the latest YouGov poll, 71% of respondents have a negative or very negative opinion of Musk, and among readers of The Times, disapproval of the billionaire rises to 86%.

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