That doesn’t imply the issue is resolved; Alexis Jay, the educational who headed up a nationwide inquiry into the abuse, has stated that few of the suggestions in her complete 2022 report have been carried out. However the disaster has been out within the open for a while, even when Elon Musk solely just lately determined to make it a trigger célèbre.
In case you’ve been on X in current days, you may need the impression that there was some main new improvement on this terrible story. Musk, the platform’s proprietor, has been posting about it incessantly, smearing Jess Phillips, the Labour minister overseeing problems with violence in opposition to girls and women, as a “rape genocide apologist” and calling for her imprisonment. He’s additionally known as for the jailing of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and urged Britain’s king to dissolve Parliament and name new elections, one thing the monarch can’t do.
Because the world’s richest man and a quasi-official member of Donald Trump’s staff, Musk has monumental affect, and his admirers in each the USA and Britain have taken up the trigger. Kemi Badenoch, head of the Tories, is demanding a brand new nationwide investigation, which her occasion simply may have undertaken when it was in energy till final yr. Starmer, in flip, was compelled to deal with Musk’s claims on Monday.
On this uproar, we’re seeing a very feral right-wing model of an old school Twitter mob, however with far increased stakes. Musk is utilizing a real atrocity to pursue his campaigns in opposition to each Starmer, with whom he has a long-running feud over the regulation of social media, and in opposition to mass immigration. The visceral horror of the underlying story — particularly to people who find themselves solely simply discovering it — provides his demagogic assaults a sheen of righteousness. However a lot of what’s he’s saying in regards to the present authorities’s culpability is both distorted or flatly unfaithful, a part of his more and more vigorous campaign in opposition to the world’s remaining liberal leaders.
The proximate explanation for Musk’s ire is Phillips’s rejection of a request by the city of Oldham to open a nationwide inquiry into the historical past of grooming and youngster sexual exploitation there. Phillips stated the investigation needs to be commissioned regionally, as these within the cities of Rotherham and Telford have been. I do not know whether or not this was the suitable resolution, but it surely’s not a surprising one; as The Unbiased reported, the earlier Tory authorities turned down Oldham’s request for a similar purpose. However to Musk and his followers, it’s proof that Phillips, a girl with a protracted feminist historical past, is engaged in a monstrous cover-up meant to guard Starmer, the nation’s director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.
