British Prime Minister Keir Starmer fired back at Elon Musk on Monday after days of inflammatory social media posts by Musk, the billionaire owner of X, indirectly accusing him and others of “spreading lies and misinformation” about gang victims of sexual abuse of minors. .
“Those who spread lies and disinformation, as far as they can, are not interested in victims,” Starmer told reporters at an event in south London dedicated to the NHS clean-up. “They are interested in themselves.”
Starmer also defended himself against Musk’s accusations that he did not act quickly enough against gangs who abused and exploited young girls when he was chief prosecutor. Around 1,400 girls are estimated to have been exploited in the northern town of Rotherham by “grooming gangs” made up largely of British Pakistani men in cases dating back to before 2010. Similar gangs were also found to operate in other towns and cities in the UK. ‘England, including Oldham and Telford.
The prime minister noted that when he was director of the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008 and 2013, his office brought the first case against an Asian grooming gang and drafted new guidelines for the mandatory reporting of child sex crimes . He had faced the scandal “head on,” he said.
“There is nothing secret about being the Director of Public Prosecutions,” Starmer said. “Every single case I have prosecuted has gone to court, been heard by a judge.”
Mr Musk has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that Mr Starmer had covered up the abuse. He also claimed that Jess Phillips, the Labor government’s under-secretary for protection and violence against women and girls, was an “apologist for rape genocide” because she had rejected calls for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester.
Ms Phillips, who has long campaigned for women’s rights, had instead called for a local inquiry to be carried out by local authorities in Oldham, rather than central government.
Mr Starmer staunchly defended Ms Phillips from Mr Musk and other online attackers, saying she had done “a thousand times more than they ever dreamed of when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse”.
The online allegations “crossed the line,” Starmer said, adding: “Once we lose the anchor that truth matters, in the robust debate that we need to have, then we are on a very slippery slope.”
While Starmer’s tone was robust, he avoided commenting on Musk’s wider motives in attacking Britain. Musk is a close ally of President-elect Donald J. Trump, with whom Starmer has sought to cultivate ties.
Instead, the prime minister criticized British politicians, including Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, as seeking to exploit the divisions created by Musk’s posts.
Ms Badenoch on Thursday called for a national public inquiry into what she called the “rape gang scandal”. It has already been the subject of local and national inquiries dating back to 2014, and a national inquiry into the wider problem of child sexual abuse concluded in 2022 after 325 days of public hearings.
“When politicians – and I mean politicians who have been in government for many years – are indifferent about honesty, decency, truth and the rule of law,” Starmer said, “calling for investigations because they want to jump on the bandwagon of party of the far right, this affects politics, because a solid debate can only be based on real facts.”
On Monday morning, Musk wrote “Prison for Starmer” in a post on the British people from their tyrannical government.”