Elon Musk has reignited a political row about gangs of men who groomed and raped girls in England over several decades.
In the past week the tech billionaire has shared a flurry of posts on his social media platform X accusing Keir Starmer and other senior politicians of covering up the scandal.
It is the latest intervention by the SpaceX founder in UK political affairs, and his most incendiary yet – even triggering calls for Starmer to sue for defamation. On Monday the prime minister hit back at those “spreading lies and misinformation” and said “they’re not interested in victims, they’re interested in themselves”.
What is the grooming scandal?
Prosecutions for grooming and sexual abuse of young girls in England began in 2010, and the number of known victims is in the thousands. The northern towns of Rochdale, Oldham and Rotherham were at the centre of the scandal.
In 2014, a landmark inquiry into the abuse in Rotherham by Prof Alexis Jay came to the “conservative” estimate that 1,400 children had been exploited there between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage.
In 2022, Jay concluded a prolonged national inquiry into child sexual abuse which warned it was “endemic” across England and Wales.
What has Musk said about it?
Musk has made a number of unsubstantiated claims about the scandal on X, claiming that Starmer is “complicit” and should go to prison.
He has also taken aim at Gordon Brown on the basis of a supposed Home Office memo sent to police forces during his premiership, telling them not to investigate alleged abuse because young girls had made a choice about their sexual behaviour.
The basis for this claim appears to be a BBC radio interview in 2018 with Nazir Afzal, the former chief prosecutor for north-west England who brought nine of the perpetrators to justice in 2012.
Afzal clarified on X that he had been referring to some officers incorrectly interpreting part of a Home Office circular in 2008, which was drafted by officials not ministers, “as permitting them to allow a child, past the age of puberty, to continue engaging in sexual activity where the officer perceived them to understand dangers”. In a separate post Afzal stressed that “there was NEVER any circular or guidance specifically on ‘child rape gangs’ or ‘grooming gangs’”.
Musk and the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, have called for a fresh national inquiry, but Afzal and Jay have both said ministers should implement the recommendations of the 2022 inquiry instead.
What was Starmer’s role in tackling the scandal?
Starmer ran the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008 and 2013, meaning he was responsible for bringing charges for alleged crimes in England and Wales.
In 2009, nine months after Starmer took up the role, a decision was taken not to prosecute alleged perpetrators in Rochdale. CPS lawyers argued that the victim would not come across as reliable or credible. There is no evidence that Starmer was made aware of the details of the case, but nonetheless Musk has claimed that “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”.
In 2011, Afzal, the then new chief prosecutor for north-west England, overturned the 2009 CPS decision. Nine men were ultimately convicted and jailed in 2012 for the sexual exploitation of 47 girls. Afzal said in 2022: “The only way we could bring that case was to admit that we had failed these victims when they had first made a complaint in 2008. Keir was 100% behind the decision to publicly admit that we had got it wrong in the past.”
In 2013, Starmer revised CPS procedures on how prosecutors should deal with grooming cases in an effort to ensure that victims would not be dismissed in the future. Afzal later said: “Keir left in 2013, the CPS having gone from being dire at doing sex-abuse cases to having the highest conviction rate in our history. That wouldn’t have been possible without the support, resources and the protection I was given by Keir, at a time when it would have been easier to give up.”
Musk claimed on Monday that Starmer “repeatedly ignored the pleas of vast numbers of little girls and their parents, in order to secure political support”, even though he did not become a politician until 2015.
Was there a cover-up?
Successive inquiries have concluded that police officers, social services and councils failed victims, but there is no evidence of any organised cover-up.
Jay’s landmark report on Rotherham found “blatant” collective failures by the police and council. One of the later trials in 2016 found four men, three brothers Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras Hussain and their uncle Qurban Ali, guilty of 48 offences. The court heard about the failure by the local authority in Rotherham tasked with child safeguarding and police to act on detailed information passed to them.
One of the victims in the trial had testified that her parents had constantly made complaints to the police about the man who groomed her but “they did nothing” because she would not give a statement. “They even caught me in bed with him,” but let the perpetrator go, she told the court.
Whistleblower Adele Gladman, a solicitor who worked with a youth project, pinpointed what was happening as far back as 2001, but said her concerns were repeatedly dismissed by police as anecdotal. When she submitted her report to South Yorkshire police, the feedback she got was that it was unhelpful.
Why is Musk getting involved?
Musk, who is lined up for a senior role in Donald Trump’s administration and has been described by Nigel Farage as a “free speech absolutist”, has pursued something of a vendetta against Starmer since the start of his premiership in the summer.
The SpaceX founder took a dim view of Starmer’s robust response to the riots that broke out in response to a stabbing attack against young girls in Southport in late July. In the last week, Musk has shared posts claiming people convicted of sharing extreme rightwing material online have been given harsher sentences than perpetrators of the grooming scandal.
