The British establishment will not hold a national inquiry into gangs of mostly Pakistani men who raped girls across the UK, but it will expend its resources on monitoring tweets shared by Elon Musk.
A government counter-extremism unit has been assessing the risk posed by Musk’s often outlandish claims, The Mirror has revealed. Last week, the Twitter/X boss labelled Labour’s Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, a “rape genocide apologist” after it emerged that she rejected a request for the government to commission a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, Greater Manchester, in October.
The monitoring unit is part of the Homeland Security Group, which claims to focus on “the highest harm risks to the homeland, whether from terrorists, state actors, or cyber and economic criminals.” However, it will now devote some of its time to Musk’s free-to-access ramblings, even while experts share concerns of the potential return of Islamic State terrorism.
Reform MP Rupert Lowe said this “spying” is “pathetic,” given that there is to be “no inquiry into thousands of foreign rapists.” (Musk later shared Lowe’s post.) And even before news of the monitoring came to light, Allison Pearson—the journalist who was visited by the police in November over a year-old tweet—pointed to one hideous incident in the rape gang scandal to suggest that the PM “genuinely seems more outraged” about Musk’s posts “than he is about the 12-year-old who was driven at night to a Yorkshire wood where she was forced to give oral sex to at least 10 men … before being left alone in the dark.”
Priority concerns aside, Free Speech Union director Toby Young told europeanconservative.com that “the idea the taxpayer needs to fund a government unit to ‘monitor’ Elon Musk’s tweets is ridiculous” since “it costs nothing to open an account on X and once you’ve done that Elon’s tweets are completely unavoidable.”
What, asked Young, is the government’s ‘report’ going to consist of? “A compendium of those tweets? You can see all of them by clicking on Elon’s avatar and it’s completely free.”
What piece of world class detective work is this spy unit going to produce next? The revelation that the person responsible for these ‘dangerous’ tweets is a close friend of the President of the United States?
Meanwhile, fresh calls for an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal continue to proliferate, including from survivors and, with potentially more influence, leading Labour figures. There is also talk of Starmer “appearing to soften his opposition to a new probe,” just days after he used a three-line whip to order Labour MPs to block one in Parliament—but skipped the vote himself.
