Violence broke out in several towns and cities across the country after three young girls were killed in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in the seaside town of Southport in northwest England last week. Amid false rumors that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker, mobs have since attacked hotels housing asylum seekers, as well as mosques, leading to hundreds of arrests. The suspect Axel Rudakubana, 17, was born in the Welsh capital of Cardiff and had lived for years in a village near Southport itself, police said
Musk’s remarks were quickly rebuffed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office, which said in a statement that such comments had “no justification.”
In a separate video message posted to X, Starmer said: “Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest. It is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities, so the full force of the law will be visited on all those who are identified as having taken part in these activities.”
Starmer didn’t sway Musk, who responded: “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on *all* communities?” Directly tagging Starmer in a later post, he asked: “Why aren’t all communities protected in Britain?”
In recent years, Musk, whose daughter is transgender, has taken a hard-right turn into conservative politics and has been outspoken against policies designed to support that community. This month, he said he was pulling his businesses out of California to protest a new state law that bars schools from requiring that trans kids be outed to their parents.
The U.K. riots have become one of the first major challenges for Starmer, whose center-left Labour Party took power last month in a landslide election victory, ousting the Conservative Party, who after 14 years in government left office without dispute.