Politics: Musk blows the doors off

By Richard North - January 4, 2025

I must admit, I’ve never seen anything like it. It started in a relatively low-key way, with a decision by Jess Phillips to refuse a government-sponsored public inquiry into historic child abuse in Oldham, after a council vote earlier this year calling for one.

There is a cruel irony here in that Phillips is Labour’s parliamentary under-secretary of state for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, and here she was refusing to intervene is what is still one of the most egregious examples of violence against women and girls in living memory – apart from all the others in as many as 40 towns and cities throughout the UK.

Although the refusal was not new, it was picked up by GB News which claimed to have seen a copy of the refusal letter in which Phillips stated it was “for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the Government to intervene”.

This, as is common practice for GB News, the clip was posted on Twitter under the headline “Labour REJECTS Oldham’s call for Government inquiry into grooming gangs scandal”.

This was on New Year’s Day, and there it might have rested after a brief flurry, but for the fact that it was very quickly picked up Liz Truss who remarked that Jess Phillips was “the same Home Office Minister who excused masked Islamist thugs”.

Her title of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, Truss wrote, “is a perversion of the English language”.

But what then happened was quite remarkable. Elon Musk responded, with a one-line comment, brief and to the point: “She deserves to be in prison”. Although it was initially a slow burn, the platform subsequently exploded.

Not least, it also broke out into the legacy media, with the Telegraph reporting: “Elon Musk: Jess Phillips deserves to be in prison over Labour refusal to launch grooming inquiry”, noting also that little Olukemi had also joined the “widespread criticism of decision”, saying a rape gang investigation was “long overdue”.

This indeed she had, in a longer tweet, writing that trials had taken place all over the country in recent years but no one in authority had joined the dots. “2025”, she added, “must be the year that the victims start to get justice”.

Badenough took more than a little flak for that, readers comments noting that the Conservative government had rejected a request for a public inquiry into grooming gangs in Oldham in September 2022. They had also failed to commission a national inquiry into grooming gangs during the 14 years they had been in government.

This brought Farage into the fray with his one and only intervention in this growing firestorm, when he asserted: “Talk is cheap. The Conservatives had 14 years in government to launch an inquiry”, then adding: “The establishment has failed the victims of grooming gangs on every level”.

Farage himself did not get a free pass, a reply quickly following which offered a quick reminder that he had “called people who attended the British rally against sexual abuse of children ‘thugs’”.

Another critic was blunter, declaring that Farage needed to “start talking about Muslim rape gangs, hate preachers that operate with impunity in mosques”, the Muslim Brotherhood, the and the 100k Pakistani migrants every year.

By then, despite the New Orleans car attack, which might normally have preoccupied the Twitterati, Pakistani “rape gangs” – as they were now being called – became an obsession, focused in a way that I have not seen before.

This had GB News remarking that: “’The lid has well and truly blown off this story. After years of coverage, something has changed. The dam has well and truly burst”. One prominent journalist on this subject was cited as saying that he believed that “politicians have finally recognised the grooming gangs scandal will not go away”.

In the Telegraph, Robert Jenrick joined the fray with an authored piece headed: “The truth about ‘grooming gangs’ is finally coming out”, with the sub-heading: “Are we sure the depraved abuse of vulnerable white girls is over? The victims of rape gangs deserve justice”.

Notable was the headline with “grooming gangs” in inverted commas and a reference to “rape gangs” in the sub-head. Jenrick elaborated on this when he posted the piece on Twitter, adding, “These weren’t grooming gangs – they were torture rape gangs”.

He went on to assert: “They will still be operating today because the institutional cowardice persists”, declaring that his piece was on “what is perhaps the biggest racially motivated crime in modern Britain”. Musk obliged by reposting the link, thereby increasing the reach of the piece.

Musk, however, had not finished – not by a long chalk. When the Telegraph posted a link to a report it had published, headed: “Labour blocks grooming gang inquiry into Starmer’s conduct as CPS head”, Musk again responded with a repost, stating because he’s guilty of complicity”.

In a follow-up report, GN News had Patrick Christys assert: “Labour are going to do absolutely nothing about the grooming gang epidemic because they don’t want to offend the Muslim community… It’s time to have a full, independent, national inquiry!”. Musk then reposted the clip, saying: “Only those afraid of the truth oppose it”.

That brought an interesting response, claiming that the MP Shaun Davis, when leader of Telford Council, “did all he could to impede investigations into the rape gangs operating there, has deleted his X account”. Labour had a lot to hide.

Musk was now in full flow, responding quick-fire to the torrent of comment. Playing to the crowd, he argued: “The people of Britain do not want this government at all. New elections”. Not long afterwards, he posted the extraordinary comment: “Jess Philips is a rape genocide apologist”.

Through the commentary, the focus drifted to Starmer, about whom Musk also had a view, stating: “Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”. That got 33 million views.

Shortly afterwards, he reposted a photograph of Starmer with the legend over-printed: “I facilitate child rape”. That one only got a mere 2.5 million views.

In and amongst all this, he made multiple reposts of posts made by Tommy Robinson, showing strong support for the man – much to the annoyance of Farage who was quick to disown him.

And so this extraordinary controversy continues, rightly meriting the description “unprecedented”, in many different ways. In the past, discussion on this issue has been suppressed with those bringing it up being branded as “racists”.

But this epithet has been used – and overused – so often that it has lost it power. And with Musk setting the tone, essentially opening his platform to the discussion, he has “blown the door off” (for those who remember the Italian Job). Whatever one might think of the man, I don’t think politics is ever going to be quite the same again.