A senior British politician has rejected Elon Musk’s criticism of the government’s handling of historic child grooming scandals.

The US technology billionaire on Thursday accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to bring “rape gangs” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions more than a decade ago.

In a flurry of posts on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk also suggested that safeguarding minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” for refusing a request for a national public inquiry into the Oldham scandal.

On Friday, British Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Musk’s views were “misjudged and certainly misinformed”. He urged Musk, a close confidant of US President-elect Donald Trump, to work with the government on tackling the issue of child sexual exploitation.

“So if he wants to work with us and roll his sleeves up, we’d welcome that,” he added.

The widespread abuse of girls, which emerged more than a decade ago in several English towns and cities, including Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, has long stirred controversy.

Advertisement

A 2022 report into safeguarding measures in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 found that children were failed by local agencies, but that there was no cover-up despite “legitimate concerns” that the far right would capitalise on “the high-profile convictions of predominantly Pakistani offenders across the country”.

Streeting told ITV News that the government took child sexual exploitation “incredibly seriously” and that it was supportive of an inquiry into the Oldham scandal, but that it should be led locally.

Musk appears to be taking a keen interest in the United Kingdom’s political scene since the left-of-centre Labour Party won a landslide election victory in July 2024, bringing an end to 14 years of Conservative rule.

He has retweeted criticism of Starmer and the hashtag TwoTierKeir – shorthand for an unsubstantiated claim that the UK has “two-tier policing”, with far-right protesters treated more harshly than pro-Palestinian or Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Musk has also compared British attempts to weed out online misinformation to the Soviet Union, while during summer anti-immigrant violence across the UK, he tweeted that “civil war is inevitable”.

On Friday, he also backed calls for a UK general election, barely six months after the last one. “The people of Britain do not want this government at all. New elections,” he wrote on his X platform.

Musk also recently expressed his support for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder of the far-right English Defence League, who is better known as Tommy Robinson and who is serving an 18-month jail term for contempt of court.

Advertisement