British Health Secretary Wes Streeting says Musk’s views are ‘misjudged and certainly misinformed’.
A senior British politician has dismissed Elon Musk’s criticism of the government’s handling of historic child care scandals.
The US tech billionaire accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday of failing to bring “rape gangs” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions more than a decade ago.
In a series of posts on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk also suggested Defense Minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in jail” for refusing a call for a national public inquiry into the Oldham scandal.
On Friday, British Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Musk’s views were “misjudged and certainly misinformed”. He urged Musk, a close confidante of US President-elect Donald Trump, to work with the government to address the issue of child sexual exploitation.
“So if he wants to work with us and roll up his sleeves, we’d welcome that,” he added.
The widespread abuse of the girls, which emerged more than a decade ago in several English towns and cities, including Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, has long fueled controversy.
A 2022 report into safeguarding in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 found that children were failed by local agencies but that there was no cover-up despite “legitimate concerns” that the far right would profit from “high-profile convictions of mostly Pakistanis. offenders across the country.”
Streeting told ITV News that the government took the sexual exploitation of children “extremely seriously” and was supportive of an inquiry into the Oldham scandal, but that it should be run at a local level.
Musk appears to be taking a keen interest in the UK political scene since the centre-left Labor Party won a landslide election victory in July 2024, ending 14 years of Conservative rule.
He has repeated criticism of Starmer and the hashtag TwoTierKeir – shorthand for an unfounded claim that the UK has “two-tier policing”, where far-right protesters are treated more harshly than pro-Palestinian demonstrators or black lives it matters.
Musk has also compared Britain’s efforts to stamp out online disinformation to the Soviet Union, while during a summer of anti-immigrant violence across the UK, he tweeted that “civil war is inevitable”.
On Friday, he also backed calls for a general election in the UK, barely six months after the last election. “The people of Britain do not want this government at all. New elections”, he writes on his X platform.
Musk also recently voiced his support for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder of the far-right English Defense League, better known as Tommy Robinson, who is serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
