BILLIONAIRE social media boss and Tesla founder, Elon Musk has embroiled himself in UK politics taking aim in particular at a West Midlands MP over grooming gangs.
Mr Musk took to his social media site X to slam MP for Birmingham Yardley, Jess Phillips over her refusal for a Home Office-led public enquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, Greater Manchester.
In a post, Mr Musk called the MP, who is the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, a “rape genocide apologist” and said she “deserves to be in prison” for denying the request.
Ms Phillips said in a letter to the local council that Oldham must follow in the footsteps of other towns such as Rotherham and Telford and commission its own inquiry into historical abuse of children.
Mr Musk also said Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer had failed to bring “rape gangs” to justice while director of public prosecutions and called the Prime Minister’s response to his comments about Ms Phillips “insane”.
Responding to questions about Mr Musk's posts, Sir Keir said “a line has been crossed” when safeguarding minister Jess Phillips and others receive serious threats as a result of the “poison of the far-right”.
He also accused the tech mogul and others of “spreading lies and misinformation”, adding they were “not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves”.
The Prime Minister also defended his own record on tackling grooming gangs as director of public prosecutions, saying when he left office “we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record”.
Amongst the heated exchanges, leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, has called for a “full national enquiry into the rape gangs scandal” and called Sir Keir a “man of the past with no answers for today’s problems, let alone tomorrow’s”.
Speaking on Monday, January 6, Sir Keir accused the Tories of “amplifying what the far-right is saying” on child sexual abuse after failing to act “for 14 long years”.
The dispute follows weeks of hostile tweeting by Mr Musk, one of US President-elect Donald Trump’s new top aides, in which he previously criticised Sir Keir’s handling of the summer riots and expressed support for jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
On Monday morning, Mr Musk went as far as to post a poll on his X account asking whether America should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”.
The last public enquiry into grooming gangs in England and Wales, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), looked at institutional failings and found there were tens of thousands of victims across the two nations when its final report was published in October 2022.
Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired the IICSA, has distanced herself from calls for a new national inquiry, saying it was “critical” that her own recommendations were fully implemented.
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