British minister says Musk ‘misinformed’ about UK child grooming scandals | Far right news
British Health Secretary Wes Streeting says Musk’s views are ‘misjudged and certainly misinformed’.
A senior British politician has dismissed Elon Musk’s criticism of the government’s handling of historic child grooming scandals.
A US tech billionaire accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday of failing to bring “gang rape” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions more than a decade ago.
In a series of posts on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk also suggested that Security Minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in jail” for refusing a call for a national public inquiry into the Oldham scandal.
On Friday, UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Musk’s views were “misjudged and certainly misinformed”. He called on Musk, a close confidante of US President-elect Donald Trump, to work with the government to address the problem of child sexual exploitation.
“So if he wants to work with us and roll up his sleeves, we would welcome that,” he added.
The widespread abuse of girls, which emerged more than a decade ago in several English towns and cities, including Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, has long sparked controversy.
A 2022 report into safeguarding measures in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 found local agencies had failed children but there was no cover-up despite “legitimate concerns” that the far right would exploit “high-profile convictions of predominantly Pakistani offenders across the country”.
Streeting told ITV News that the government takes child sexual exploitation “incredibly seriously” and supports the investigation into the Oldham scandal, but that it should be conducted locally.
Musk seems to be keenly interested on the UK political scene since the centre-left Labor Party won the July 2024 general election in a landslide, ending 14 years of Conservative rule.
He retweeted Starmer’s criticism and the hashtag TwoTierKeir – short for the baseless claim that the UK has “two-tier policing”, with far-right protesters treated more harshly than pro-Palestinian or black protesters.
Musk also compared Britain’s attempts to stamp out disinformation online to the Soviet Union, while tweeting during the summer of anti-immigrant violence across the UK that “civil war is inevitable”.
On Friday, he also backed calls for a general election in the UK, barely six months after the last one. “The people of Britain do not want this government at all. New elections,” he wrote on his X platform.
Musk also recently expressed support for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder of the far-right English Defense League, better known as Tommy Robinson, who is serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
