MEGA-THREAD: "Groomer" and "Grooming Gang" homophobic and racial scratching post

[Artaxerxes II]

https://bylinetimes.com/2024/06/01/spec ... loitation/:

Special Investigation: The Network of Far-Right Groups Exploiting the Survivors of Child Sexual Exploitation

Part Two: The interconnectedness of far-right groups reflects the extent to which those holding extreme beliefs have used the issue of child sexual exploitation to further their own ends

United Hull’s support of survivors of child sexual exploitation seems, on the surface, to have been a strange course for the group to take.
According to this newspaper’s research, United Hull was founded by several former football hooligans linked to Hull City FC. It was originally set up as a street protest group, aiming to force the local police to reopen an investigation – Operation Marksman – into an alleged paedophile ring operating in the area that had not been fully addressed by the force. It was a story similar to the systemic policing failures to tackle paedophile gangs in Rochdale, Telford, and Rotherham.

Over the years, the extreme politics of United Hull’s leadership and members became increasingly apparent.
The far-right Patriotic Alternative rally, which multiple United Hull members and a leader attended, was a turning point.
Dubbed “Britain’s largest far-right white supremacist movement” by The Times last year, Patriotic Alternative has become one of the most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the country.

Earlier this year, Byline Times revealed that the Equality and Human Rights Commission threatened the group with legal action after one of its campaigns – ‘Operation White Christmas’ – asked people to donate only to white families in need.
In the aftermath of the Patriotic Alternative rally, a United Hull leader who eventually stepped down said that he was “first and foremost a street protestor and a patriotic campaigner”. But he was not a singular example of far-right tendencies within the group.

In Facebook posts, United Hull members discuss patrolling night clubs to hunt predators, protesting and “guarding” proposed sites for migrant accommodation, and the need to “form an army like the IRA and defend our country”.
One United Hull member, Sam Melia, was jailed for two years in March this year on charges of stirring up racial hatred. A fan of Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler, and an organiser for Patriotic Alternative, the judge said he was an antisemite with Nazi sympathies.

Another United Hull member, Alek Yerbury – who has been subject to a slew of negative press for his resemblance to Hitler – has posted multiple times in United Hull’s Facebook group, including organising details for multiple protests at asylum seeker accommodation. Yerbury was also a leading member of Patriotic Alternative, before leaving in February last year to ally himself with a new group of hardened far-right activists in Yorkshire with hopes to form a “new EDL”, according to Hope Not Hate.

United Hull has also taken part in livestreams with Sharon Binks, an organiser for a group called Justice for Women and Children. It also has links to the far-right, with Binks’ praise for far-right figurehead Stephen Yaxley-Lennon previously the subject of a BBC Newsnight investigation.

Yaxley-Lennon, known as ‘Tommy Robinson’, is one of the most prominent far-right campaigners in Britain, even being appointed as a ‘grooming gangs’ advisor in 2018 to the then UKIP Leader Gerald Batten.
Yaxley-Lennon and other UKIP leaders were the original founders of another far-right group, Hearts of Oak. With the help of UKIP’s Lord Malcom Pearson, it recently funded a landmark civil case by a Rochdale abuse survivor against her abuser, as a result of which she was awarded £425,000 in damages.

In 2019, a Rochdale-based abuse support group, Shatter Boys, said it was approached by Lord Pearson and other UKIP figures with promises to introduce them to millionaire donors and to fund an open-top bus that could raise the alarm about ‘grooming gangs’ in the area. At the time, the charity’s founder, who refused the request, said “I think their fight is about Islam”.
The interconnectedness of the network of these far-right groups reflects the extent to which those holding extreme beliefs have used the issue of child sexual exploitation in recent years to further their own ends.

Sexual Abuse and the Far-Right

Holly Archer, one of the most prominent survivors of the Telford sex ring, who has written a biography of her experiences I Never Gave My Consent, last year revealed how she returned to Telford to see the far-right Britain First group campaigning about child sexual abuse.
She said the group’s then Acting Leader, Jayda Fransen, “handed me a leaflet with a picture of my book on it, and quotes that had been twisted and misconstrued to make me say the most racist things… They’d made it about immigration. About all these migrants ‘coming over here to rape our girls’. I felt a rage inside me that I didn’t know what to do with”.

Another prominent survivor of child sexual exploitation, Caitlin Spencer, has said she was pressured to say that Muslims were to blame for widespread child abuse. When she later challenged far-right narratives, she said she received virulent personal insults and was even lectured about her experiences of abuse online.

The experts Byline Times spoke to raised the same concerns about the furthering of a far-right anti-Islam agenda.
For Waqas Tufail, a Reader in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University and an expert on child sexual exploitation, the problem is clear: “The far-right don’t care about these survivors, they want to exploit them for political ends.”

This is given further weight by the track record on child sexual exploitation of individuals in the far-right movement.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was sentenced to six months in prison after he filmed outside, and shared restricted details of, a CSE case being heard at Leeds Crown Court in 2018, risking undermining the entire legal process.

He defended close friend and ally Richard Price when Price was convicted of making four indecent images of children in 2010, claiming that he had been “stitched up” and calling for his release.
A previous investigation by Hope Not Hate uncovered at least 20 cases of members and supporters of the English Defence League (EDL) being convicted of child sexual exploitation offences. This included Robert Ewing, who murdered schoolgirl Paige Chivers in 2007 after developing an “inappropriate sexual interest” in her.

The failure to deal with sexual abusers in its own midst, however, has not hampered the far-right’s focus on the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative.

[Artaxerxes II]

https://bylinetimes.com/2024/06/01/spec ... and-press/:

Special Investigation: ‘Muslim Grooming Gangs’ – An Old Conspiracy Mainstreamed by Today’s Politicians and Press

Part Three: In 2020, a two-year study of crime data and academic research by the Home Office concluded that ‘group-based offenders are most commonly white’

The narrative of ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ entered the mainstream in 2011, when The Times published an exposé on a “conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs”. According to experts, the story contained the two key planks that became central to the narrative: that Pakistani-heritage men were preying on white British girls, and that the authorities failed to intervene for fear of being branded racist.
In the years since, thousands of articles on ‘grooming gangs’ have been published by The Times and other newspapers – helped by endorsements from mainstream politicians.

The issue was also given supposed scientific support through a ‘study’ by the controversial Quilliam Foundation. The now defunct group, once headed by conspiracy theorist Maajid Nawaz, claimed that it had found that “84% of grooming gang offenders are Asian”, in a piece of work dismissed as “shoddy pseudoscience” by academics for its failure to use complete data in its analysis.
In the narrative as told by groups such as Quilliam, the perpetrators of child sexual exploitation from Muslim backgrounds commit these crimes because of problematic beliefs in their culture and faith (while those from a white British background are individual deviants).

By extension, police failures in the cases of abusers from Muslim backgrounds are due to political correctness (while failures to deal with historic sex abuse by the likes of Jimmy Savile, for instance, are of a different order).

In 2020, a two-year study of crime data and academic research by the Home Office concluded that “group-based offenders are most commonly white” and that there was no credible evidence that one ethnic group is overrepresented in the perpetrators of child sexual exploitation.
Despite these findings, politicians have continued to discuss ‘Muslim grooming gangs’. One prominent example of this has been former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who has repeatedly and baselessly claimed that south Asian Muslims account for a significant number of paedophile rings operating in the UK.

In September last year, the press regulator IPSO told the Mail on Sunday to amend an op-ed in which she claimed that “almost all” child grooming gangs are British-Pakistani.
When Byline Times asked the Home Office about the impact of Braverman’s comments, a spokesperson said that “child sex abusers can come from any walk of life” and insisted that her claims only related to the specific cases in Rotherham, Telford, and Rochdale.
But Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s former lead on child sexual abuse, believes that Braverman’s intervention on the issue had a significant impact.

“The far-right have got traction because of Braverman and others like her,” he told Byline Times. “When you have ministers, and the former Home Secretary, talking about this issue as being a ‘dividing line’ in our communities, that provides encouragement to those who are already exploiting it to continue.”

Dr Ella Cockbain, a University College London professor specialising in research on trafficking and child sexual abuse, agrees. She said there is “growing evidence” of the far-right actively seeking out survivors of child sexual exploitation, and their families, to exploit their trauma for its own gains.

“The deliberate spread of racialised stereotypes around child sexual abuse has been a gift to the far-right helping to mainstream and normalise what used to be fringe positions,” she told Byline Times.

When far-right terrorist Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 the words “for Rotherham” were painted on his gun.
Eighty-one-year-old grandfather Mushin Ahmed was murdered as he walked to prayers at a mosque in a racially-motivated attack in Rotherham seemingly in response to the child sexual exploitation scandal in the town in 2015.

Darren Osborne, who killed one person and injured nine others when he drove his van into a group outside London’s Finsbury Park Mosque, described a film about the Rochdale scandal as a “trigger”. He vowed to “kill all the Muslims” before committing his attack.

An Old Trope

Inaccurate stories about people from certain ethnic groups being more likely to rape white girls are the manifestation of a long-running trope masquerading as a ‘call to arms’ used by the far-right.
The high-profile scandals of on-street grooming in recent years, and the subsequent investigations into why such abuse went uncovered by authorities for so long – including claims of concerns about ‘political correctness’ – have seen it channelled into its modern form through concrete examples of perpetrators of colour and injustice.

“The far-right have long sought to capitalise on the issue of on-street grooming by gangs,” Hope Not Hate’s Nick Lowles told Byline Times.
“In 2004, the British National Party (BNP) gained several seats on Bradford Council by exploiting local anger that accompanied revelations that as many as 65 girls had been abused in Keighley.

“The following year, BNP Leader Nick Griffin made the issue the focus of his campaign to win the parliamentary seat of Keighley. Fortunately, he failed miserably, largely because Hope Not Hate was able to enlist the support of the woman leading the campaign to tighten up the law to protect survivors.
“Through a Hope not Hate tabloid, which was distributed to all 35,000 homes in the constituency, she explained how Griffin and the BNP were exploiting her daughter’s story for its racist aims, whilst offering no practical solutions to the issue. Her intervention made all the difference and Griffin came a distant third in the election with just 9% of the vote.

“Over the next 15 years, we have seen the English Defence League, Britain First, and other far-right groups try to exploit the issue with repeated demonstrations and protests in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford. They use the issue to whip up racism, disregarding the needs and wishes of the young women who have been abused.

“They have, however, forced police and councils to spend millions in ensuring the protests pass off peacefully, and in doing so diverting money and resources from the services that would actually help the survivors of abuse.”

Each crime of child sexual exploitation is horrific, and it is a fact that there are paedophiles from Muslim backgrounds perpetrating abuse. But to focus on the issue solely as a ‘Muslim’ issue, leaves a significant swathe of cases – at the hands of non-Muslim abusers – insufficiently recognised as symptoms of a much wider national crisis.

While this investigation has uncovered how a new, more organised, far-right is, once again, leaving survivors of child sexual exploitation at risk, the fact is that a growing number of survivors are choosing to engage with such groups.

To understand why, experts believe that, as a society, we must confront our continued unwillingness to acknowledge the complexity and scale of child sexual abuse in Britain – and the lack of support services in place to help those who have been through the most traumatic experiences to come to terms with their pasts.

[Artaxerxes II]

https://bylinetimes.com/2024/06/01/spec ... e-at-risk/:

Special Investigation: Society’s Reluctance to Acknowledge the Scale of Child Sexual Abuse and a Lack of Political Support for Its Survivors is Keeping the Vulnerable At Risk

Part Four: The far-right is able to present itself as ‘filling the gap’ left by a lack of services with its own range of ‘support’ for survivors

The lack of support for survivors of child sexual exploitation is a major reason why vulnerable women are susceptible to far-right groups offering support, experts told Byline Times.
Cuts to council budgets have impacted child social care services provided by local authorities – even as demand has increased. Byline Times has previously reported on the crisis in children’s homes that has seen private equity firms, and even the Qatari Government, make hundreds of millions of pounds from putting vulnerable children in unsafe accommodation. In at least one case, staff failed to stop at-risk children from being sexually abused by men in the area.

Mental health support is another area under huge pressure.
The risk of CSE survivors attempting suicide can be as much as six times greater than in the general population, but no ring-fenced, long-term, specialist support is provided by government or the NHS. To access even general mental health support, CSE survivors face a waiting list with nearly two million others.
Most survivors, or children at risk of abuse, are forced to rely on a patchwork of charities – some government-funded, some not – to help deal with their trauma. But these charities are themselves struggling.

A number of those Byline Times spoke to for this investigation said charities are struggling to meet the record levels of need from a growing number of survivors while operating on shoestring budgets. Although the Government recently announced that it is doubling its funding for child abuse charities to £2.4 million, this amounts to just £22 for each of the 107,000 child sexual abuse cases logged by the police in 2022.
These problems help explain why the far-right is able to present itself as ‘filling the gap’ left by this lack of services with its own range of support for survivors.

But it is often not just about financial support. According to several of the experts Byline Times spoke to, survivors of child sexual exploitation, and their experiences, have too often been disregarded by the Government, media, and police.
In many of the high-profile cases of on-street grooming – such as Rochdale and Rotherham, but also less well-known examples across the country – there have been systemic issues with how authorities have reacted to reports of abuse.

One report into the mass grooming of underage girls in Rochdale found that police had repeatedly failed to record evidence and testimonies of those who came forward begging for help. Authorities across the region then repeatedly failed to investigate for years after victims first came forward. Dozens of children had been sexually exploited at the hands of a gang of perpetrators operating in the area.

Despite the press attention the issue has received in the years since, these systemic failings continue. One academic Byline Times spoke to said they had recently attended a meeting where police dismissed the testimonies of a CSE survivor as they were deemed to not be acting as upset as they should have been if they were actually a victim (despite lack of emotion being a common response to shock).

“It is important to understand and address the reasons why some survivors and their loved ones might be susceptible to approaches from the far-right, which means thinking carefully about what they offer,” University College London’s Dr Ella Cockbain said.
Perhaps at the core of the problem is the fact that society still struggles to get to grips with the scale of child sexual abuse being perpetrated. One in 10 children – and one in six girls – are estimated to experience sexual abuse before the age of 16. Even that figure, authorities believe, is likely to be an underestimate.

Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s former lead on child sexual abuse, said: “It’s far too common. I always say that it’s the pandemic that will outlive the pandemic we’ve just been through. By focusing on the exploitation of it, we mustn’t minimise the fact that it occurs and its impact.”
Diverting Focus From Survivors To Perpetrators
For some experts, this cuts to the core of why the narrative of ‘Muslim grooming gang’ persists, even as the evidence calling into question its credibility has become clear.

“We can’t cope as individuals by accepting that, actually, this can happen to my child, my niece or nephew, or could be perpetrated by someone we know,” Helen Beckett, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Central Lancashire, told Byline Times.
“It’s much easier to think of it as a problem ‘out there’ that affects ‘other people’. So the ‘grooming gangs’ idea fits into this othering narrative – that it’s other people over there doing this who are not like us.”
The “societal stigma and silencing” around child sexual abuse, she said, leaves us unable to contemplate, let alone discuss, its existence and scale, unless we are able to project it elsewhere, as something alien or imported.
This can have serious repercussions for society as a whole. But, more than anything, the biggest victims of that failure are sexual abuse survivors themselves.

The experts Byline Times spoke to warned that, by solely focusing on Asian grooming gangs, thereby ignoring the scale of abuse elsewhere in society, a “hierarchy of abuse” is created. When everyone, from the media to the police, begin to place greater focus on ‘cracking down on Muslim grooming gangs’, it fails other survivors – “whose abuse is overlooked because it doesn’t fit that narrative”.

Afzal said that he has been contacted by lawyers who have struggled to get the police to open criminal cases into perpetrators of child sexual exploitation who are not from Muslim or south Asian backgrounds. He said he has also been told of social services training programmes in which at-risk children are solely told to avoid getting into cars with south Asian men.

“You’re almost giving them a false sense of reassurance that, if they don’t hang around with certain people they won’t be abused, even when eight out of 10 sex abusers in prison are British white men,” Afzal told Byline Times.
Following Suella Braverman’s comments last year about the threat of Muslim groomers, a coalition of charities and experts in child protection – including the NSPCC and Victim Support – wrote an open letter, stating that narratives based on “misinformation, racism and division” were putting children at risk by drawing attention away from other sources of sexual abuse.

Better funding and serious reforms to the policing of sexual abuse, statutory requirements to offer prolonged psychological support to survivors, and a huge uptick in government funding for charities and support services were all floated as potential solutions to the crisis.
But doing any of that would also require coming to terms with how, as a society, we have enabled this – through our refusal to acknowledge the scale of child sexual abuse and address it with the funding and support people need.

One of the biggest tragedies of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative, according to survivors Byline Times spoke to, is that it redirects the focus from survivors onto the race or religion of the perpetrator – and reinforces the very stereotypes that survivors face as a barrier to being heard in the first place.
“I was abused by all men and the police didn’t give a f**k about any of them,” Lara (not her real name) said. “Because it’s not about how the police saw those men – it’s about how the police saw me. That’s what it was about: how the police see young women from working-class backgrounds.”

[KnightofHope]

This is worth knowing about Tommy Robinson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkP14WVrEaM

[Artaxerxes II]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede ... h-politics:

The world’s richest man has become fixated on child sexual exploitation in deindustrialized English towns—much of which took place more than a decade ago.

For the past week, British public life has reverberated with the impact of Elon Musk’s tweets—percussive, repetitive, basically vile—calling for the overthrow of the elected government and weaponizing a national scandal relating to the rape of young girls in impoverished English towns. It’s been hard to keep your head, and not everyone has. The onslaught began on January 1st, when Musk responded to a report by GB News, a right-wing cable-news channel, which said that the country’s Labour government had rejected a national inquiry into non-recent sexual abuse in Oldham, a town just outside Manchester, in northern England. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual story is more complicated than that. For years, local politicians in Oldham have been divided about how best to address catastrophic failings among the town’s police and local officials in their handling of rape and abuse cases of girls in the town in the two-thousands and early twenty-tens. (By way of example: in 2012, a social worker named Shabir Ahmed, who worked for Oldham Council for eighteen years, was convicted of thirty child-rape charges and sentenced to twenty-two years’ imprisonment.) The scandal is distressingly familiar. A number of towns and cities across England, including Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford, have experienced comparable episodes, often characterized by the politically charged fact that most of the perpetrators have been men of South Asian descent, with Muslim backgrounds, and that most of the victims have been young white girls.

Last October, a few months after Labour defeated the Conservatives in the country’s general election, councillors in Oldham wrote to the Party’s safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips—a prominent campaigner against violence toward women and girls—asking for a national investigation of what had taken place in the town. Like one of her Conservative predecessors, who had turned down a similar request in 2022, Phillips recommended a locally led process instead. (A recent inquiry along these lines that took place in Telford, a town eighty miles south of Oldham, found more than a thousand cases of child sex exploitation there going back to the seventies; it is considered a model of its type.) Despite acknowledging the “strength of feeling” in Oldham, Phillips wrote that it was for “Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.”

A tricky call. Maybe Phillips got it wrong. Maybe she got it right. These aren’t easy, or settled, questions. The interplay of local politics, racial and religious tensions, retrograde attitudes toward women, and, often, terrible prejudice toward the victims themselves has made these cases fiendishly difficult to prosecute and prevent over the years. “This dreadful, life-altering crime has not gone away—in Telford, or elsewhere,” Tom Crowther, a former judge who led the town’s widely praised investigation, wrote in 2022.

But Musk didn’t buy Twitter, now X, for its nuance. “Jess Philips [sic] is a rape genocide apologist,” he posted at 6:40 a.m. Eastern Time on January 3rd, to his two hundred and eleven million followers. Twenty minutes later, he lit into Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, who was the chief prosecutor for England and Wales from 2008 to 2013 and oversaw some of the first successful prosecutions of British Asian “grooming gangs” during his tenure. “Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN,” Musk wrote, in a tweet that, as of this writing, has received fifty-nine million views.

Since then, Musk has tweeted dozens of times on the subject—mostly amplifying anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tropes, which British right-wing activists have attached to the abuse scandals for many years. Like them, Musk has suggested that a mighty woke coverup has been at work, rather than acknowledging the truth, which is sadder and harder to bear: that these crimes took place in plain sight, that many of the girls—poor, desperately vulnerable, often young teens and even pre-teens—were regarded as sex workers or sluts, rather than children, and that almost no one cared. “Now why would Keir Starmtrooper order his own party to block such an inquiry?” Musk tweeted. “Because he is hiding terrible things. That is why.” Shortly before 8 a.m. on January 8th, Musk updated his pinned tweet to read: “Please call your member of parliament and tell them that the hundreds of thousands of little girls in Britain who were, and are still are, being systematically, horrifically gang-raped deserve some justice in this world.”

It is genuinely hard to find the words to describe the crassness, the ignorance, the potential violence wrapped up in each one of Musk’s interventions. The sudden fixation of the world’s richest man on child sexual exploitation in deindustrialized English towns—much of which took place more than a decade ago—has forced British people like me, who follow the news, who live here, who think they actually care about such things, to check that we are not out of our minds. So we have remembered the voluminous reporting, in all forms—official, journalistic, conspiratorial, dramatized-for-television—that have documented these awful stories for the past fifteen years. We have remembered that reliable data on sexual abuse, particularly toward children, is notoriously hard to compile. (Last November, the Labour government published the first-ever British statistics to include the ethnicity of perpetrators, which showed that seven per cent of offenders in 2023 were “Asian,” roughly in line with their share of the population.) We have remembered that Starmer did a decent job as a public prosecutor. We have remembered that in 2014, Alexis Jay, a Scottish academic and former social worker, led a shocking inquiry, which documented the abuse of some fourteen hundred girls in the town of Rotherham alone. Jay subsequently steered a seven-year national independent inquiry into child sexual abuse—with fifteen strands of investigation—that included interviews with more than seven thousand victims, from all corners of Britain. We have remembered that political will has been lacking. In 2022, Jay’s monumental work made twenty recommendations, none of which were enacted by the previous Conservative government.

But the hard graft of protecting vulnerable children, or prosecuting rapists, or enacting legislative change, is not what Musk is after. “The truth is a concept that Elon Musk clearly has very little interest in,” Andrew Norfolk, a recently retired investigative reporter for the Times of London, who covered the grooming-gang cases for years, told his old newspaper this week. What Musk craves is disorder and proof of his power. Since endorsing Donald Trump’s bid for the Presidency on X, in July, he has stepped up his digital incursions on behalf of right-wing parties and causes in democracies from Argentina to Germany. During last summer’s riots in the U.K., following the deaths, by stabbing, of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class near Liverpool—which were inflamed by online misinformation identifying the alleged killer as a Muslim immigrant (he wasn’t)—Musk tweeted, “Civil war is inevitable.”

At this point, more instructive than anything Musk says, or tweets, is how people and politicians react to his presence. During the past week, Starmer has reverted to quiet, serious prosecutor mode. At a news conference on Monday, which was supposed to be about reforms to the National Health Service, the Prime Minister declined to mention Musk by name. “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they’re not interested in victims,” he told reporters. “They’re interested in themselves.” Phillips, who is no stranger to online abuse, has had to step up her security arrangements since being targeted by Musk’s tweets. “You know, Elon Musk is going to Elon Musk. I’ve got bigger and more important things to be thinking about,” she told Sky News. When Ed Davey, the perfectly inoffensive leader of the Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party in the House of Commons, criticized Musk on X, saying people were fed up with his meddling in British politics, Musk dismissed him as “a snivelling cretin.”

The most unnerving reaction has come from the Conservatives. The Party has been dazzled by Musk for some time. In November, 2023, the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, held a fawning “in conversation” event with Musk, in London, where he praised him as a “brilliant innovator and technologist.” Sunak resigned after the Party’s election defeat last summer and has been replaced by Kemi Badenoch, a forty-five-year-old former digital director of The Spectator, Boris Johnson’s old magazine. Badenoch has declined to spell out new policies for her party until 2027, preferring a roving and confrontational style in the meantime. The day after Musk started his latest barrage, Badenoch and the Conservatives decided that there really should be a national public investigation into British Asian grooming gangs—something that she and her party could have done at any point in the past fourteen years. Robert Jenrick, the Conservatives’ shadow Justice Secretary, who was the runner-up to Badenoch in the fall’s leadership contest, lowered the Party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric to Trumpian levels. “Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here,” he wrote on X. Presumably hoping for a retweet, the Party’s shadow Business Secretary, Andrew Griffith, chimed in: “The @elonmusk purchase of X may have saved humanity.”

On Wednesday at noon, in the House of Commons, Badenoch used all six of her questions at Prime Minister’s Questions to pressure Starmer to agree to a new national inquiry into the “rape-gang scandal.” Starmer resisted, pointing out that Jay’s large-scale investigation of sexual abuse in Britain took seven years and its findings had not been implemented. “What is needed now is action on what we already know,” the Prime Minister said. “We already know—myself from personal knowledge when I was chief prosecutor—that warped ideas, myths, and stereotypes about victims are at the heart of this. We have known that for a decade.”

Badenoch ploughed on, “Does he not see that resisting this one means that people will start to worry about a coverup?” Starmer observed, acidly, that this was the first time in her nearly eight years as a Member of Parliament that Badenoch, a former children’s minister, had raised the issue. But context is for the legacy media, and legacy politicians, too, I suppose. Badenoch started to read out the bleak litany of towns affected by these crimes—Telford, Rochdale, Bristol, Derby, Aylesbury, Oldham, Bradford, Peterborough, Coventry, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, and Ramsgate—and the Commons chamber was overwhelmed by shouts of “Shame!” by Labour M.P.s who represent those places and were furious at the Conservative leader for her opportunism. I watched from the press gallery above and, to be honest, I shivered. This was British politics entirely contorted and angry—hyperfocussed, to use a Muskian expression—by the thumbs and antic mind of a very rich man, very far away.

Watching it all, with eyebrows raised, was Nigel Farage. Since last year’s election, Farage has sat as one of five backbench M.P.s for Reform, the latest iteration of the populist, anti-immigrant political movements that he has led for the past twenty years. Farage is on his own roller-coaster journey with Musk. The two met at Mar-a-Lago last month, and there were reports that Musk was willing to donate a hundred million dollars to Reform. But on January 5th, in the midst of another U.K.-facing X bombardment, Musk tweeted that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead Reform, an apparent reference to Farage’s refusal to associate himself with the case of Tommy Robinson—a jailed far-right founder of the English Defence League, an extremist Islamophobic organization—whom Musk has allowed back onto X.

Farage hasn’t seemed too bothered. At Prime Minister’s Questions, he laughed gleefully when Starmer teased him for getting dumped by Musk. Farage shrugged from the backbenches and made an “easy-come-easy-go” kind of gesture. He and his outriders have campaigned on the racial dimension of the grooming-gangs scandal for years. Musk’s hyperfocus and reckless incitement, presumably, will move on and find another target soon. But the anger—and the energy—in British politics is flowing where Farage has always wanted it to go.

[RoosterDance]

Is musk really tweeting these things? I never use Twitter, so I wouldn't really know. But was this his whole reason for buying twitter in the first place? To just influence world politics on a whim? Just when I thought it couldn't get any more absurd.

(Last November, the Labour government published the first-ever British statistics to include the ethnicity of perpetrators, which showed that seven per cent of offenders in 2023 were “Asian,” roughly in line with their share of the population.)

Also, am I reading this wrong? Isn't this saying that the ratio of asian perpetrators is the same as the ratio of asians in the total population? Wouldn't that imply that the number of asian perpetrators is not statistically significant?

[Pegasus]

Musk, what you have in money, you have in imbeciles, in idiots.

[Artaxerxes II]

Is musk really tweeting these things? I never use Twitter, so I wouldn't really know. But was this his whole reason for buying twitter in the first place? To just influence world politics on a whim? Just when I thought it couldn't get any more absurd.

Sadly, it is true, with Musk openly calling for the democratically elected British government to be overthrown over a nigh-decade old scandal: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 74829.html

[WavesInEternity]

Another article on the same topic, more opinionated but also more informative in my opinion: https://www.thefp.com/p/muslim-grooming ... -elon-musk

The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Of course, they call the criminals "pedophile rapists", but it's likely that most of them were in fact opportunistic/situational offenders, not MAPs, and the victims were generally in the hebephilic age-preference range.

[Outis]

I don't get wound up by Elon, Elon is a salesman and his product for sale is brand Elon. He says a lot of mental stuff because he knows it'll get picked up and get a few more minutes of air time. I'm pretty sure he learned that from observing Trump.

Trump isn't insane but he knows what all the most successful celebs know, you're only relevant if you're in the news and you're only in the news if you're doing or saying something crazy enough to be news worthy. So Trump says and does a lot of insane stuff just to get in the headlines. He isn't a president, he's just selling his own brand any way he can. It works, he became president from it. Elon has all the money and that just leaves craving attention so he's doing the Trump thing and with all the money he gets to buy the places like Twitter where people are talking.

But in the end they're both irrelevant long term, they're short term self promoters. I give them the same amount of time I give any other self promoting celebrity which is very little.

In Britain he's more irrelevant, I mean he isn't British and has no British companies. His only link to Britain is selling his electric cars, white goods, like washing machines and fridges but these ones are for driving. Even the most successful self publicists become yesterdays news eventually.