British Well being Secretary Wes Streeting says Musk’s views are ‘misjudged and positively misinformed’.
A senior British politician has rejected Elon Musk’s criticism of the federal government’s dealing with of historic baby grooming scandals.
The US expertise billionaire on Thursday accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to convey “rape gangs” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions greater than a decade in the past.
In a flurry of posts on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk additionally advised that safeguarding minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in jail” for refusing a request for a nationwide public inquiry into the Oldham scandal.
On Friday, British Well being Secretary Wes Streeting mentioned Musk’s views had been “misjudged and positively misinformed”. He urged Musk, an in depth confidant of US President-elect Donald Trump, to work with the federal government on tackling the difficulty of kid sexual exploitation.
“So if he desires to work with us and roll his sleeves up, we’d welcome that,” he added.
The widespread abuse of women, which emerged greater than a decade in the past in a number of English cities and cities, together with Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, has lengthy stirred controversy.
A 2022 report into safeguarding measures in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 discovered that kids had been failed by native businesses, however that there was no cover-up regardless of “reliable issues” that the far proper would capitalise on “the high-profile convictions of predominantly Pakistani offenders throughout the nation”.
Streeting informed ITV Information that the federal government took baby sexual exploitation “extremely severely” and that it was supportive of an inquiry into the Oldham scandal, however that it must be led regionally.
Musk seems to be taking a keen interest in the UK’s political scene because the left-of-centre Labour Celebration received a landslide election victory in July 2024, bringing an finish to 14 years of Conservative rule.
He has retweeted criticism of Starmer and the hashtag TwoTierKeir – shorthand for an unsubstantiated declare that the UK has “two-tier policing”, with far-right protesters handled extra harshly than pro-Palestinian or Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
Musk has additionally in contrast British makes an attempt to weed out on-line misinformation to the Soviet Union, whereas throughout summer season anti-immigrant violence throughout the UK, he tweeted that “civil battle is inevitable”.
On Friday, he additionally backed requires a UK basic election, barely six months after the final one. “The folks of Britain don’t need this authorities in any respect. New elections,” he wrote on his X platform.
Musk additionally just lately expressed his help for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founding father of the far-right English Defence League, who is healthier often known as Tommy Robinson and who’s serving an 18-month jail time period for contempt of court docket.
