Elon Musk and the red lines of rightwing politics

Good morning. I hope you were able to have a good restorative break. My thanks to Jim, Robert, Miranda, Lucy, Jen, Jude, Chris and Georgina for minding the fort while I was on holiday.

Parliament returns today after a week dominated by Elon Musk’s social media attacks on the Labour government. (Lucy’s write-up has all you need to know about the factual basis of what the government is and isn’t doing here.)

Musk has fallen out with Nigel Farage, saying that Reform UK needs a new leader (given the structure of Reform, that is not going to happen). Meanwhile, the Conservative opposition is calling for a fresh national inquiry into child sexual exploitation. Some thoughts on that below.

The art of fact

One of Nigel Farage’s most long-standing positions is that his parties allow no room for members of the BNP and other political parties to his right. He quit Ukip when its then-leadership embraced and welcomed Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka “Tommy Robinson”, who is currently imprisoned for contempt of court. Now Elon Musk has said on X that Reform “needs a new leader”. This appears to be partly driven by Farage’s refusal to endorse Musk’s latest claims, including that Robinson’s prison sentence is inappropriate, or to open Reform’s doors to Robinson.

Whether that is a deep-seated principle or just an example of Farage following the best practice of all the most successful rightwing populist leaders, from Marine Le Pen to Giorgia Meloni, in going “look, I’m not the far right. I’m not violent”, is an arid debate.

There is a lot of ink spilled about politicians and their principles and I just think, ultimately, your principles are what you do. They aren’t how sad you are about it, or how much you agonise to journalists about what a “difficult decision” it was before, afterwards or during.

Whether through conviction or opportunism, Farage has maintained a consistent line. As he put it when he resigned from Ukip owing to Robinson’s involvement in the party, Farage insisted that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, was “entirely unsuitable to be involved in any political party”, citing in part the fact that “his entourage includes violent criminals and ex-BNP members”.

Now he has potentially said goodbye to prospects of a $100mn cheque to maintain that line. Whatever you may think of Farage’s “real” reasons for holding that red line, he has maintained it. And that red line is a line with real and important meaning: Farage’s rhetorical exclusion of the politics of, in his words “violence and thuggish behaviour”, matters because Farage has influence over parts of the political spectrum that other politicians cannot reach.

What’s Kemi Badenoch’s red line? Does she have one? The Conservative party’s argument is that its calls for a fresh national inquiry into the grooming gangs and its demand that Labour “commit to publish” data on the ethnicity of perpetrators “regularly” is driven by a sincere, principled concern about the issue.

That demand about data — made in a letter by Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary and Alicia Kearns, the shadow safeguarding minister — caught my eye. The Labour government published the latest data on the ethnicity of both victims and perpetrators in November (you can read the full report here). (All data is for England and Wales, because policing is devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland.)

This is the first time that ethnicity data has been published about this specific part of child sexual exploitation: not because of a particular change of policy by the new Labour government, but because we are only just beginning to see the benefit of the improvements in data collection, recommended by Alexis Jay in her independent report in 2022, which you can read here.

That report was accompanied by a quote from Jess Phillips, the minister in charge:

“Child sexual abuse is a devastating crime which can leave victims traumatised for the rest of their lives. It is vital that we have the most up to date intelligence so that we can better protect victims and bring more perpetrators to justice. The Government is funding policing partners, including the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, to improve our understanding of these complex crimes — and target our efforts to stop them.”

So I am not quite sure which figures Philp or Kearns believe the government has not already committed to publishing, or what Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary, means when she tweets that “Labour are currently sitting on that [ethnicity] data” given that the figures were released in November. That latter remark, that Labour is actively suppressing information about this topic is a serious and inflammatory claim that needs to be backed with collateral.

If Labour has intimated privately to the main opposition party that what Phillips actually meant by “it is vital” was “we never again publish it”, then it would have been a good idea for Badenoch, Philp, Kearns or Coutinho to raise that issue in the House of Commons, either by way of a spoken or a written question, which they haven’t.

Arguing in the Mail on Saturday that now was the time for a further inquiry into grooming gangs, Badenoch said that “the fact that perpetrators of this sexual violence appeared to have deliberately picked victims because they were white and not from their own of the community or religious background must not be ignored” and that previous inquiries had “failed to examine this”.

But this is not a fact. There are very few known “facts” about this issue, because, as the Conservative government concluded in 2021, “the quality and extent of data that is collected on offender and victim characteristics, including, but not limited to, age, gender and ethnicity, is inadequate”.

November’s data release represents the first time we have ever had something approaching decent data on this topic, and I use the word “approaching” quite deliberately. Previous studies have found that many victims of child sexual abuse only report what has happened to them years after the fact, so in addition to the fact that this release is the first since the implementation of Jay’s recommendation for a core centralised dataset, we would expect that this data will itself change considerably over time.

(There are further debates that it would be valuable for government and parliament to have about the quality of this data and how to supplement it, which I will discuss in a future newsletter.)

But in the here and now, it is both unclear to me a) how the claims that Badenoch makes in her Mail article can be reconciled with November’s data release and more importantly b) how any fresh inquiry could at this point adequately examine them, given how poor the collected data is.

Once we have a few more years of records, we may end up drawing quite different conclusions from what the data currently suggests, and it may well be that at that point, with the Jay report’s recommendations implemented, a fresh inquiry is both necessary and effective. But I can see no basis, having read Jay’s report and the government’s November data release, to think that the British state is in a position to learn or improve anything with a fresh inquiry in 2025.

Nor has the opposition front bench sought to explain why it did not begin a new inquiry in government or why it had not raised these concerns in parliament in its new capacity with shadow ministers.

The Conservative front bench did not declare that the 2022 report required further examination when Badenoch was minister for women and equalities or when Philp was policing minister. So I find it hard to believe that the reason why the Tories have now decided that the 2022 report is inadequate is anything other than an attempt to curry favour with Elon Musk.

Now try this

A lot of you asked who my most-listened to artists in Spotify’s “Wrapped” was. I am a boring purist who believes that you shouldn’t check your end of year (and also, full disclosure, I actually use Apple Music: I just prefer to link to Spotify in this newsletter as you can listen to what I recommend without a subscription).

In at number one was Caroline Shaw, the terrific and versatile American composer, Fleetwood Mac, followed by PJ Harvey (largely as a result of her brilliant soundtrack to the National Theatre’s new musical London Tide), the Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi with the Last Dinner Party in fifth place.

Top stories today

• Sore spot | The number of businesses planning to raise prices in the coming months has jumped sharply as increases in the UK Budget in tax and wage costs caused confidence to “slump”, the British Chambers of Commerce has warned. 

• Becoming ‘hard to defend’ | The UK City minister Tulip Siddiq is under mounting pressure to resign after becoming embroiled in a scandal tied to the ousted Bangladesh government. The FT uncovered last week that she was given a two-bedroom flat near King’s Cross in 2004 without making a payment, according to Land Registry filings. While Starmer is still standing by Siddiq, a senior Labour official told the FT that the party’s leadership was finding it “hard to defend” her personal financial affairs.

• Jenrick slammed for X comments | Robert Jenrick has been criticised after he attacked the “importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures who possess medieval attitudes” to the UK, the Huffington Post reports.

• ‘We have to accept that it has already collapsed’ | The Liverpool Echo gets a view from the ground of a “scary” crisis in the NHS.

• On that note | Keir Starmer writes that “I will not let our NHS die” in the Times this morning and gives his prescription for improvements in the health service.