Elon Musk attacks Britain and defends Tommy Robinson in a wave of posts on social media

He called for the release of a convicted criminal and far-right instigator. He falsely accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute child rapists when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. He endorsed a pamphlet calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call an election to remove Britain’s seven-month-old Labor government, which was constitutionally impossible.

Elon Musk has once again set his sights on Britain, putting the country at the center of a fickle world consumed by its online obsessions. In a series of posts beginning before the new year, Mr. Musk went beyond enthusiastic Strengthening the far-right party in Germany To target Britain on multiple politically sensitive fronts.

After mostly ignoring Mr. Musk’s trolling, which has been going on for months, the British government responded on Friday, but in a characteristically polite manner.

“Elon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps he should focus on the issues on the other side of the Atlantic,” the government’s health minister, Andrew Gwynn, said in an interview with LBC Radio. “Some of the criticism that Elon Musk has made, I think, is certainly misjudged and misguided,” Health Minister Wes Streeting told reporters.

Britain is one of several European countries where Mr. Musk is trying to replicate the influence he exercised on behalf of President-elect Donald J. Trump in the US election last fall. In addition to Germany, where he supported A A far-right party with ties to neo-Nazisthe alternative to Germany, has disturbed that country’s politics ahead of elections scheduled for next month, which Mr. Musk has sponsored. Close relationships Right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

In Britain, Musk’s hostility toward the Labor government is partly rooted in its aggressive response to online hate speech. Officials said False and inflammatory posts It helped incite anti-immigrant riots that followed the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport last July. They arrested more than 30 people, prompting Mr Musk to condemn the government for what he called an attack on the freedom of expression he extols on his X platform.

He said that Britain was “turning into a police state.”

However, since then, Mr Musk has waded into other volatile issues, from declaring his support for the anti-immigrant party, Reform UK, to sparking outrage over the government’s response to a decade-old child. Sexual assault scandal In the northern city of Rotherham. An estimated 1,400 girls have been exploited by “grooming gangs” made up mostly of British Pakistani men.

Perhaps most provocative, Mr. Musk has taken up the cause of Tommy Robinson, a far-right anti-immigrant agitator whose real name is Tommy Robinson. Stephen Yaxley Lennon. He has been in prison since October convicted By defying a court order by repeating false allegations about a teenage Syrian refugee, he successfully sued him for defamation.

Mr Robinson was previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud and traveling on a false passport to the US, where he took refuge. He sought to establish relationships With right-wing groups.

“Release Tommy Robinson!” Mr Musk posted it on January 2 as a pinned item on his X account, which has 210 million followers.

Mr Musk’s endorsement of Mr Robinson has put his other right-wing allies in Britain in an awkward position. Mr. Robinson, who founded the English Defense League, a nationalist, anti-Islam group known for its violent street protests in the late 2000s, has long been shunned by Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Reform Party and a close ally of Mr. Trump.

Mr Farage, who has enjoyed Mr Musk’s endorsement and courted him in the hope of winning a donation to Corrections UK, echoed his demands for a new investigation into the child sex abuse scandal. But he remained conspicuously silent about Mr Robinson.

Such as in Germany, where Mr. Musk’s promotion of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party sparked a wave of protests Widespread backlash Against him, Mr. Musk’s interventions have won him few admirers in Britain. But analysts say his closeness to and influence over Mr. Trump means that his views, amplified by his social media platform, cannot be ignored by the government.

“His message is not working in Britain and Germany, and yet governments are constrained by their relations with Trump,” said Sander Katwala, director of the British Future Foundation, a research organization in London. It will be difficult enough to have a relationship with Trump. “What Musk is doing is putting this non-government official in the middle of the court.”

Mr. Katwala said it makes sense for the government to respond to Mr. Musk’s more extreme or false statements, if only because his unpopularity makes him an attractive target for other critics. “They are leaving an open goal by not saying anything,” he said.

British officials privately say they hope that after Mr. Trump’s inauguration later this month, Mr. Musk will be too busy reforming the US federal government to continue his daily barrage of criticism of Britain and Germany. But at the same time, his online reach is broad enough “that it influences the political climate,” Mr. Katwala said, citing the child sex abuse scandal as an example.

Mr Musk’s posts helped spark a firestorm over an issue that has been the subject of local and national investigations dating back to 2014. After one of Mr Starmer’s ministers, Jess Phillips, backed away from calls for another national inquiry – saying it was a matter for the local council, a leader followed suit. Opposition Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has followed Farage’s lead in criticizing the government. “No one in power has connected the dots,” she posted on X on January 2.

On Friday, Mr Musk claimed that Ms Phillips, the undersecretary for protection and violence against women and girls… Long campaign For women’s rights, he was a “rape genocide apologist” — language that feminists said put Ms. Phillips’ safety at risk. He has also tried to turn the scandal against Mr Starmer, who ran the CPS from 2008 to 2013, when the abuse first came to light.

Although several men were jailed, investigations found that police and prosecutors were slow to respond to these allegations, partly because victims were reluctant to come forward, and partly because of concerns about racism, given that most of the accused were British Pakistanis. .

“Starmer was complicit in the usurpation of Britain when he was chief prosecutor for 6 years,” Mr Musk said in a post pinned to the top of his account earlier on Friday. He added: “Starmer must go and face charges of complicity in the worst mass crime in British history.”

Indeed, in 2013, in the wake of the scandal, Mr Starmer published new guidelines on how prosecutors should handle cases of child sexual exploitation.

After A. won An overwhelming parliamentary majority In July, Mr Starmer will face no immediate risk of losing his job. But the drumbeat of misinformation and criticism from Mr Musk, coupled with the prospect of him giving money to Reform UK, has alarmed people across the political spectrum in Britain. Lawmakers have called on the government to tighten laws to prevent foreigners from donating to British political parties.

Mr Musk’s endorsement of leaflets calling on Charles to intervene and call an election demonstrates his ignorance of how Britain works. Under the terms of a constitutional monarchy, the king can dissolve parliament, but only at the request of the prime minister, who decides when to call elections.

“He’s a 21st century Citizen Ken,” Mr. Katwala said of Mr. Musk. “He has a picture of Britain, and a picture of Germany, and he is looking for information that confirms those pictures. The problem he faces in exporting them to Britain or Germany is the clear lack of knowledge about Britain or Germany.