An attempt to wrestle back the narrative after days of anger on social media over Britain’s history of racist child rape gangs targeting predominantly white girls has seen a government spokesman hit back at Elon Musk as misinformed.
The world’s richest man is speaking out on child rape gangs in Britain because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, Labour government politician Wes Streeting said on Friday, saying of the tech billionaire: “Some of the criticisms that Elon Musk has made are misjudged and certainly misinformed”.
Until now, the government’s position appears to have been to ignore Musk’s strongly-worded criticisms and hope he eventually gets bored and moves his attention elsewhere. Just yesterday, Downing Street declined to comment, the Financial Times reported, stating the Prime Minister was too busy to concern himself with something so unimportant.
But now, after days of discussion on social media about what is euphemistically called ‘grooming gangs’, in which it is reckoned abusers in dozens of towns and cities have systematically raped thousands of young girls over the course of decades, and the amplification of these issues by X/Twitter Musk, the government has now responded.
While Streeting’s remarks were anodyne in the most part, he did make a point of acknowledging “political correctness was able to get in the way of going after perpetrators of serious crimes”, the left-winger articulating something that not so many years ago was considered by the UK political mainstream a dangerously racist conspiracy theory.
Streeting used the opportunity to make the conversation about government control of social media. While many children are targeted by abusers online, the call on Musk to “roll his sleeves up” and help the government target online paedophiles did also neatly side-step the present discussion around child rape gangs which have plagued English towns and cities since long before the advent of social media, and even widespread public access to the internet.
Anger over ‘grooming gangs’ emerged apparently organically in recent days, with claims stating it began at least in part in response to a prominent ‘Conservative’ thinker insisting the United Kingdom is a successfully integrated multicultural society. As reported:
Over half a century such gangs have worked in dozens of UK towns, have abused thousands of victims, and have involved acts of the most extreme depravity. It is descriptions of these abuses of children, as found in Judge’s sentencing remarks — and therefore a matter of legal fact, not allegation or whipped-up moral panic — that have driven much of the outrage in recent days.
One such viral post showing a Judge sentencing Mohammed Karrar of the Oxford grooming gang describes a “very young” girl, who had been raped while younger than the age of 13, and how she had been anally gang raped, and punished for trying to resist by being raped with a baseball bat. This just illustrates two lines from one judgement for one grooming gang, there are hundreds if not thousands of such instances that many will be encountering now for the first time.
In Musk’s online criticism of the Sir Keir Starmer, posts have particularly focused on the new decision by the UK government to block a central government inquiry into abuses, shunting responsibility to the local authorities which presided over the problem — and, it is alleged, helped cover the attacks up for years — instead.
Musk called the rape gangs “the worst mass crime against the people of Britain ever”, and accused the government minister responsible for denying the request for an inquiry an “apologist” for “rape genocide”.