Keir Starmer has hit out at Elon Musk for spreading “lies and disinformation” over grooming gangs.
The Prime Minister’s comments followed a series of increasingly provocative tweets from the tech billionaire. Here we explain the cause of the row and what it could mean for US-UK relations.
What provoked the war of words between Keir Starmer and Elon Musk?
Musk seized on a media report that the Home Office minister Jess Phillips had rejected a call for a Government inquiry into the Oldham child grooming scandal.
Ms Phillips said it was for the local council to instigate an inquiry – the same position taken by the Conservatives when in power. Musk, who owns X/ Twitter, then posted a series of tweets in which he smeared Phillips as a “rape genocidal apologist” who “deserves to be in prison”. He has backed calls by opposition parties for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
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What is the child grooming scandal?
Newspaper investigations revealed that hundreds of young girls had been groomed and sexually abused in towns and cities. In Rotherham 1,400 children were abused between 1997 and 2013 predominantly by British Pakistani men.
The Sunday Mirror revealed in 2018 that more than a thousand children were sexually exploited in Telford over a 40-year period. A subsequent inquiry found that the crimes were not properly investigated because of nervousness about race. There have been investigations into grooming gangs in other places in England, including Oldham, Rochdale, Bristol and Cornwall.
What else has Musk said?
Musk told his 210million followers on X/Twitter that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute the grooming gangs when he was Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008-2013. He claimed that when the Prime Minister was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), “rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice”.
The Tesla boss also backed the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court. On Monday, he posted a poll on X on whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”
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What is Starmer’s record on grooming gangs?
Starmer has been praised for intervening to make it easier to prosecute rape gangs. Under his watch, the CPS brought the first major prosecution of a grooming gang in Rochdale. He also overturned decisions not to prosecute and ordered a national audit of all cases of child sexual exploitation.
“When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record,” he said yesterday. However, the Government is resisting calls for a new national inquiry, arguing it is more important that the recommendations of previous inquiries are implemented.
What does it mean for US-UK relations?
Starmer’s willingness to stand up to Musk is not without risk. The tech billionaire has been given a key role in Donald Trump’s administration and has the ear of the President-elect. There are fears that Musk drive a wedge between Starmer and Trump at a time when Britain is trying to fend off threats of a trade war with the United States. But Starmer believes Musk’s comments, especially his attacks on Jess Phillips, “crossed a line” and could not go unchallenged.