Elon Musk has become a political lightning rod in the United Kingdom after he advocated for King Charles III to shutdown Parliament and call for a new election.
The Tesla boss endorsed a social media post criticizing the government’s handling of criminal gang investigations in Manchester. “In the UK, serious crimes such as rape require the Crown Prosecution Service’s approval for the police to charge suspects. Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer, 2008 -2013,” Musk posted on X (formerly Twitter) on New Year’s Day.
“Who is the boss of Jess Phillips right now? Keir Stamer. The real reason she’s refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Stamer [head of the CPS at the time],” he wrote in a follow-up post.
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“The King must step in. We can’t have Keir heading the country, while he was the one heading the Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] while all this was happening,” he added in the thread.
Musk’s involvement has drawn criticism from Labour Party
Responding to his comments, Health Secretary Wes Streeting said they were “misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Labour Minister Andrew Gwynne echoed the sentiment during an interview with LBC radio, “Elon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps ought to focus on issues on the other side of the Atlantic.”
“The grooming issue is a very serious issue. We’ve already had inquiries into Telford, into Rotherham, we’ve had a local inquiry commissioned by Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, into the situation here in Greater Manchester, which includes Oldham,” Gwynne explained.
“There comes a point where we don’t need more inquiries, and had Elon Musk really paid attention to what’s going on in this country, he might have recognized that there have already been inquiries. What we need is justice for the victims, and we need to make sure that the criminal justice system follows up and makes sure that these atrocious things are never able to happen again.”
The debate intensified when Musk suggested that Minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” for her stance on launching a new public inquiry into grooming in Oldham. Phillips had argued that a local council-led inquiry, similar to those in Rotherham and Telford, would be more effective, per BBC report.
Adding fuel to the fire, Musk shared an article by Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick from The Daily Telegraph discussing the investigations. Jenrick commented that Musk’s remarks had “shamed the establishment by taking more interest in bringing these rape gangs to justice in one evening than most of the British establishment has for decades.”