12th January 2025
Musk and Farage – potential partners in crime
The whiff of musk which followed Donald Trump around the campaign trail in his bid to return to the White House in the United States has become an acrid and pervasive smell. Worse still, the odour has been caught on the Atlantic winds and made its way across the ocean to become a stench in danger of immobilising further the political life of Britain.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has an estimated worth of US$421 billion. Not content with a role gifted by Donald Trump to run a Department of Government Efficiency, effectively Trump outsourcing cuts in public services, Musk has recently been intervening in British politics on the subject of grooming gangs, which has stirred considerable controversy, and his on again off again threat to fund Nigel Farage’s Reform Party to the tune of $100 million.
Since acquiring the media platform formerly known as Twitter, now X, in October 2022, Musk has diluted verification measures on the site and, according to a wide range of campaign groups, has overseen a growth in racist hate speech, homophobic slurs and antisemitic comments on the platform. In November 2023, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate released a new report claiming 98% of misinformation, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other hate speech, in relation to the Israeli genocide in Palestine, remained on X after 7 days of reporting, generating over 24 million views.
To say that Musk has significant power and influence would be an understatement. That this influence is being used in an attempt to distort the political landscape in Britain, consistent with the distortions already evident in the US, would be hard to deny.
The recent controversy around grooming gangs, repeated in a wave of social media posts, including some amplified by Musk, allege that a 2008 Home Office document advised police not to intervene in child grooming cases because victims had “made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour”.
The unfounded claim about a Home Office circular to police stems from an interview Nazir Afzal, former Crown Prosecution Service chief prosecutor for North West England, gave to the BBC on 19 October 2018. He now admits that he had not seen any such circular himself, despite apparently stating its existence as fact.
In a statement to the BBC, the Home Office said it had never instructed police not to go after grooming gangs:
“There has never been any truth in the existence of a Home Office circular telling police forces that grooming gangs should not be prosecuted, or that their victims were making a choice, and it is now clear that the specific circular which was being referred to does absolutely no such thing.”
However, none of this has gained traction on X, though Musk’s suggestions that Keir Starmer failed to prosecute gangs and that Home Office minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison”, as well as being described by Musk as a “rape genocide apologist”, have gained widespread coverage.
The Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry, which published its findings in 2022, makes clear that “abuse must be pursued and challenged everywhere with no fear or favour”. Professor Alexis Jay, who led that inquiry, has said that she felt “frustrated” that none of its 20 recommendations to tackle abuse had been implemented more than two years later.
However, none of this makes it an issue for Elon Musk, and his intervention has only accelerated disinformation around this issue. The far right have pounced upon the issue of child sexual exploitation (CSE) to suggest that grooming is predominantly an issue of race or religion, citing the fact of men of Pakistani heritage being involved in cases in Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford. However, Home Office research published in 2020 draws no such conclusion, in fact stating that “Research has found that group-based CSE offenders are most commonly White.” (Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation Characteristics of Offending – December 2020)
Clearly the Tories, who have also jumped on this bandwagon, failed to do anything about the Jay Inquiry when in office. In fact Tory leader Kemi Badenoch opted this week to try and stop Labour’s Bill aimed at protecting children. Labour have the opportunity to consider and implement the Jay recommendations. This must be a priority as a minimum in relation to this issue.
To add to the looming disinformation wars Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, announced this week that the third party fact checking network set up in 2016, in relation to Facebook and Instagram is to be dismantled, accusing them of being “politically biased”. How effective the network has been is open to debate but the fact that Zuckerberg sees fit to jettison it, just as Donald Trump calls in the removers for his return to the White House and Elon Musk decides on the arrangement of furniture, is further cause for concern.
Zuckerberg has stated that he will,
“work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
Lies, deceit and disinformation are an endemic part of the capitalist system and core to its functioning to discredit the Left and any opposition. The smear campaigns run against Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader may yet come back to haunt Starmer as the world wide bastions of right wing authoritarianism mobilise around Trump’s return to the White House.
Labour may have been seen as a safer pair of hands than the Tories in the short term as far as British capital was concerned but US imperialism may not see things the same way. Toying with funding for Farage sends just such a signal.
We have already heard threats against, Greenland, Panama and the desire for Canada to become the 51st US state coming from the President Elect. Some of this may be bluster but may equally be laying the ground for the looming conflict with China, which the US is keen to engineer. If that does happen there could be many innocent victims but there is a guarantee that for Trump and his international media cronies, truth will certainly be one of them.
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