U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer hits back at Elon Musk and the "poison of the far right"
Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer hit back at Elon Musk on Monday after the world's richest man repeatedly lobbed a host of inflammatory allegations at the country's leader over his government's record on a long-running national child grooming scandal.
Musk has accused the United Kingdom leader of being "complicit in the rape of Britain" on his X platform and has repeatedly elevated claims without evidence that Starmer knowingly refused to prosecute child groomers when he was the country's top lawyer.
Throughout the past 48 hours alone, Musk has called for Starmer to be imprisoned and posted a poll to his X followers posing the question as to whether "America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government."
While the British leader did not name Musk directly, he widely condemned what he said was the spread of false information.
"Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they're not interested in victims. They're interested in themselves," Starmer said, addressing reporters at a news conference Monday.
Musk's barbs are in reference to a years-long scandal in Britain over the state's response to child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, mostly consisting of Pakistani men, who targeted vulnerable young girls in multiple towns across northern England.
A 2014 government-commissioned report found that some 1,400 vulnerable children were targeted and sexually abused in the town of Rotherham– the largest specific case of child grooming in the country— between 1997 and 2013. The report detailed how children as young as 11 years old were subject to trafficking, rape and other forms of physical assault.
That report was heavily critical of "the collective failures of political and officer leadership" and said that "growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham" was ignored and even suppressed by authorities.
Starmer served as director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, a role that in practice made him the top prosecutor in the country when the child grooming scandals came to light.
On Monday, Starmer vigorously defended his prosecutorial record.
"I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang in this particular case… it was the first of its kind. We changed, or I changed, the whole prosecution approach, because I wanted to challenge, and did challenge, the myths and stereotypes that were stopping those victims being heard," the prime minister said.
"When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record," Starmer added.
A 2013 British parliamentary report praised Starmer's handling of child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs.
"Mr. Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as Director of Public Prosecution.. his response should provide a model to the other agencies involved in tackling localized grooming," the report said.
Starmer, who took office following Labour's sweeping election victory last summer, has been thus far resistant to pressure from critics to launch a new national review into such historic child sexual abuses, saying that plenty of reviews at a national and local level have already been conducted on the matter.
Responding to those comments from this morning, Musk posted on X that the "real reason" that Starmer is not conducting a national review is because it would "show how Starmer repeatedly ignored the pleas of vast numbers of little girls and their parents, in order to secure political support."
Musk, a key advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, has been embroiled in a feud with Starmer's center-left Labour government since far-right rioters wrought chaos across the United Kingdom last summer.
Musk at that time called Britain a "police state" after Starmer's government aggressively prosecuted those involved in the riots.
Over the course of this past week, Musk has also advocated for the release of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, a central figure in shaping last summer's violence.
Robinson — whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon— is a longtime far-right agitator who led the English Defense League, a group that U.K. police authorities linked to the original violent protest that sparked riots across the country in August.
Robinson is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
The very public spat with the British government is just the latest of a series of interventions by Musk into the domestic politics of key U.S. allies in Europe.
In an op-ed for German outlet Welt am Sonntag published last month, Musk publicly endorsed the far-right, anti-immigrant AfD party in the country's upcoming elections in February.
"The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the last spark of hope for this country," Musk wrote in his translated commentary.
European leaders have been vocally critical of the tech billionaire's meddling and have publicly expressed concern about Musk's influence considering his ownership of the X platform.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said that Musk is intervening directly in Germany's affairs.
"Ten years ago, who could have imagined it if we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany," Macron said in a wide-ranging foreign policy speech.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere also said on Monday that Musk's influence was concerning.
"I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries," Stoere told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, according to the Reuters news agency.
"This is not the way things should be between democracies and allies," Store reportedly said.
