Subscriptions
Read Our Monthly Magazine
And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
With Donald Trump now sworn in as the US President and unleashing waves of executive orders on everything from citizenship to the environment, the man who helped secure him victory, Elon Musk, has been busy trying to destabilise British politics.
For the last few weeks, Musk has harnessed the power of his social network, X, to orchestrate a merciless attack on members of the Labour Party over supposed failures tackling “Asian grooming gangs” that have dominated the news agenda.
This, on January 8, led The Guardian, to suggest the news in the UK appeared to be, “whatever Elon Musk says it is”.
Musk’s attention was drawn to the issue — often relied on by the far-right to advance anti-immigrant sentiment — by a tweet from a contributor to Pimlico Journal on December 30 saying that “people should have hung for Rotherham”. Seven men were jailed for a total of 106 years for sexually abusing two young girls there in the 2000s.
The Journal tweet was re-shared by a popular right-wing account who added an excerpt from a court transcript from the trial of the grooming gang in Oxford, which sent the posts viral.
Thus began the chain of events which has seen Musk go to war with the Labour Government, accusing Jess Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist” and even, according to the Financial Times, looking into ways to oust Keir Starmer ahead of the next election.
Musk has suggested “a quarter-million little girls were — and still are — being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain” and demanded a new public inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation in not only Rotherham, but Oldham, Rochdale and elsewhere. As The Guardian noted in its report, there is no reliable basis for Musk’s figures.
Review Into Grooming Gangs Announced
However, a week ago, Yvette Cooper announced an urgent national review into the scale of grooming gangs amid a raft of other new measures to tackle them. The Home Secretary, however, stopped short of launching a statutory national inquiry.
The following day, Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, denied the Government had been pressured into the review by a social media storm, stirred up, in part by Musk, saying: “We’re not a government that governs by social media. We govern for the real world.”
Since Musk first started tweeting about grooming gangs, the X-owner has interacted with and amplified a constellation of anon accounts, podcasters and alt-right Youtubers that make up the very online far-right in Britain.
The Voices Musk Has Amplified
Some of these individuals, such as British YouTuber Carl Benjamin, were part of the original wave of ‘alt-right’ media personalities that “fought” in the so-called “great meme war” that helped spread Trump’s message and inject his 2016 campaign with a sense of countercultural, anti-elite rebellion.
In 2018, a report into this influence by think-tank Data and Society, named Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, as an important node in Trump’s network.
Benjamin, who ran unsuccessfully in the 2019 European Parliament elections as a UKIP candidate, has been repeatedly boosted by Musk to his 211 million followers since he began his crusade against Starmer.
Benjamin gained wider public attention — including from the police — when his tweets to Phillips, stating “I wouldn’t even rape you” were unearthed during his campaign.
As the scandal unfolded, Benjamin doubled down adding: “There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
Benjamin delet