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The report that sparked Musk’s interest earlier this week claimed that Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips had rejected a request from a city council for a government-led inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester in the north of England that was one one of the areas where allegations of abuse from grooming gangs were made.
While Musk and his allies claim this is part of a larger government cover-up, Phillips actually wrote in a letter that it was “for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.” The previous Conservative-led government similarly rejected Oldham’s calls for a government-led inquiry in 2022.
Musk has called on Phillips to be jailed and called her “a rape genocide apologist.” Both Musk and Phillips did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Musk is also using the report to call, once again, for Starmer’s removal as prime minister.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk wrote on X on Friday morning, in a post that is now pinned to the top of his timeline. “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
Starmer, in his role as director of public prosecutions over a decade ago, actually initiated the prosecution of a grooming gang in Rochdale and introduced new rules aimed at allowing sexual abuse cases to be prosecuted.
Starmer and the UK government press office did not respond for comment, but health secretary Wes Streeting told the BBC that Musk’s comments were “misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Musk has also drawn a number of right-wing US figures into the conversation, including accounts like Chaya Raichik, who runs the virulently anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong, and disgraced former US national security adviser Michael Flynn.
US senator Mike Lee also weighed-in, writing on X: “Does the UK need to be liberated?”
“Yes,” Musk responded.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and Trump supporter, repeated Musk’s narrative almost verbatim in a post on X. He then asked if the president-elect would “consider appropriate sanctions against the UK until these concerns are addressed.”
In a post on Friday morning, Musk boosted a call for King Charles to dissolve the UK parliament and order a general election. While the monarch in the UK does dissolve parliament ahead of the general election, it is only done at the request of the prime minister, and the monarch’s power is, in effect, nothing more than a rubber stamp.
