That doesn’t mean the problem is resolved; Alexis Jay, the academic who headed up a national inquiry into the abuse, has said that few of the recommendations in her comprehensive 2022 report have been carried out. But the crisis has been out in the open for some time, even if Elon Musk only recently decided to make it a cause célèbre.
If you’ve been on X in recent days, you might have the impression that there has been some major new development in this awful story. Musk, the platform’s owner, has been posting about it incessantly, smearing Jess Phillips, the Labour minister overseeing issues of violence against women and girls, as a “rape genocide apologist” and calling for her imprisonment. He’s also called for the jailing of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and urged Britain’s king to dissolve Parliament and call new elections, something the monarch cannot do.
As the world’s richest man and a quasi-official member of Donald Trump’s team, Musk has enormous influence, and his admirers in both the United States and Britain have taken up the cause. Kemi Badenoch, head of the Tories, is demanding a new national investigation, which her party easily could have undertaken when it was in power until last year. Starmer, in turn, was forced to address Musk’s claims on Monday.
In this uproar, we’re seeing a particularly feral right-wing version of an old-fashioned Twitter mob, but with far higher stakes. Musk is using a genuine atrocity to pursue his campaigns against both Starmer, with whom he has a long-running feud over the regulation of social media, and against mass immigration. The visceral horror of the underlying story — especially to people who are only just discovering it — gives his demagogic attacks a sheen of righteousness. But much of what’s he’s saying about the current government’s culpability is either distorted or flatly untrue, part of his increasingly vigorous crusade against the world’s remaining liberal leaders.
The proximate cause of Musk’s ire is Phillips’s rejection of a request by the town of Oldham to open a national inquiry into the history of grooming and child sexual exploitation there. Phillips said the investigation should be commissioned locally, as those in the towns of Rotherham and Telford were. I have no idea whether this was the right decision, but it’s not a shocking one; as The Independent reported, the previous Tory government turned down Oldham’s request for the same reason. But to Musk and his followers, it’s proof that Phillips, a woman with a long feminist history, is engaged in a monstrous cover-up meant to protect Starmer, the country’s director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.
