Elon Musk and Keir Starmer's grooming claims war of words - What it means for UK-US relations
Share:
Keir Starmer has hit out at Elon Musk for spreading “lies and disinformation” over grooming gangs. The Prime Minister’s comments followed a series of increasingly provocative tweets from the tech billionaire. Here we explain the cause of the row and what it could mean for US-UK relations.
What provoked the war of words between Keir Starmer and Elon Musk?. Musk seized on a media report that the Home Office minister Jess Phillips had rejected a call for a Government inquiry into the Oldham child grooming scandal. Ms Phillips said it was for the local council to instigate an inquiry - the same position taken by the Conservatives when in power. Musk, who owns X/ Twitter, then posted a series of tweets in which he smeared Phillips as a “rape genocidal apologist” who “deserves to be in prison”. He has backed calls by opposition parties for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
What is the child grooming scandal?. Newspaper investigations revealed that hundreds of young girls had been groomed and sexually abused in towns and cities. In Rotherham 1,400 children were abused between 1997 and 2013 predominantly by British Pakistani men.
The Sunday Mirror revealed in 2018 that more than a thousand children were sexually exploited in Telford over a 40-year period. A subsequent inquiry found that the crimes were not properly investigated because of nervousness about race. There have been investigations into grooming gangs in other places in England, including Oldham, Rochdale, Bristol and Cornwall.
