The report that caught Musk's attention earlier this week claimed that Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips had rejected a request from the city council for a government-led inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester in the north of England, one of the areas that has brought allegations of abuse from grooming gangs.
While Musk and his allies claim this is part of a larger government cover-up, Phillips actually wrote in a letter that “Only Oldham Council would decide to conduct an investigation about child sexual exploitation locally, instead of letting the government intervene.” .” The previous Conservative-led government also rejected Oldham's call for a government-led inquiry in 2022.
Musk has called for Phillips to be jailed and called her a “rapist genocide apologist.” Neither Musk nor Phillips responded to WIRED's request for comment.
Musk is also using the report to again call for Starmer to be removed as prime minister.
“Starmer was complicit in RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of the Public Prosecution Service for 6 years,” Musk wrote on X on Friday morning, in a post now pinned to the top of his timeline. “Starmer must go and he must face charges of complicity in the worst mass crime in British history.”
Starmer, in his role as director of public prosecutions more than a decade ago, actually initiated the prosecution of a grooming gang in Rochdale and introduced new regulations to enable the prosecution of sexual abuse cases sex.
Starmer and the UK government press office did not respond for comment, but the Health Secretary Wes Streeting told the BBC that Musk's comments were “misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Musk also pulled a number of US right-wing figures into the conversation, including accounts like Chaya Raichik, who runs the strongly anti-LGBTQ TikTok Libs account, anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong, and disgraced former US national security adviser Michael Flynn.
US Senator Mike Lee also weighed in, writing on X: “Does the UK need to be liberated?”
“Yes,” Musk replied.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and Trump supporter, repeated Musk's story almost verbatim in a post on X. He then asked if the president-elect had “considered the appropriate sanctions against the UK until these concerns are resolved.
In a post on Friday morning, Musk issued a call for King Charles to dissolve the British parliament and order a general election. Although the monarch in the UK does dissolve parliament before a general election, this is only done at the request of the prime minister and the monarch's power is in fact little more than a rubber stamp.