Elon Musk has reopened the national scandal surrounding gangs of men who groomed, assaulted and raped girls across England.
In dozens of messages posted on his X platform over the past week he has ranged from including excerpts of court transcripts to calling Sir Keir Starmer “complicit in the rape of Britain”.
They represent the latest intervention by the tech billionaire, who will work in Donald Trump’s incoming administration, into the affairs of the UK.
What was the scandal?
Musk has claimed on X that “hundreds of thousands” of “little British girls” were targeted for gang rape and murder.
It is unclear where this number comes from, however widespread abuse has been uncovered that stretches back for decades.
The 2014 Jay report into abuse in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, led by Professor Alexis Jay, conservatively estimated that 1,400 children had been targeted between 1997 and 2013. Some of them were as young as 11. A similar story has been replicated in towns and cities across the country.
While the first prosecutions for on-street grooming began in 2010, the number of known victims has run into the thousands.
Was there an official cover-up?
Evidence of gangs operating in different towns and cities has emerged slowly — often from court cases and then inquiries — and the pattern is often similar.
Local police forces and social services have been repeatedly criticised for failing victims, by deprioritising such crimes, either by refusing to believe the children, or blaming them.
Vulnerable children were considered to have brought their plight upon themselves, after being plied with gifts and attention by the perpetrators.
As a result, many cases were either not investigated or not progressed to the Crown Prosecution Service.
In Rochdale, two whistleblowers — former detective Maggie Oliver and former social worker Sara Rowbotham — repeatedly warned that agencies had turned a blind eye to what was happening despite them raising the alarm.
In cases involving gangs of British-Pakistani men, agencies have also been criticised for failing to act because of a concern over appearing racist, including in Rotherham.
An independent inquiry into grooming in the Greater Manchester town of Oldham, published in 2022, looked specifically at allegations of an orchestrated “cover-up”.
While it found the claim to be unsubstantiated, it did identify multiple safeguarding failures by local agencies.
What was Starmer’s role?
Starmer ran the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008 and 2013, when the scandal first erupted.
Musk wrote on X this week that “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”.
Allegations that Starmer bears some responsibility for failings in bringing the grooming gangs to justice stem in particular from a case in 2009 when a decision was taken not to prosecute alleged perpetrators in Rochdale. Lawyers believed the victim would not come across as reliable or credible.
Starmer had been director of public prosecutions for nine months when the decision was taken. No evidence suggests he was made aware of the details of the case at the time.
In 2011, Nazir Afzal, the new chief prosecutor for north-west England at the time, overturned the 2009 decision and a total of nine men were ultimately convicted.
Afzal afterwards said: “The only way we could bring that case was to admit that we had failed these victims when they had first made a complaint in 2008.”
He added: “Keir was 100 per cent behind the decision to publicly admit that we had got it wrong in the past.”
He later added: “Keir left in 2013, the CPS having gone from being dire at doing sex-abuse cases to having the highest conviction rate in our history. That wouldn’t have been possible without the support, resources and the protection I was given by Keir, at a time when it would have been easier to give up.”
Starmer in 2013 revised CPS procedures and guidelines on how prosecutors should deal with grooming cases in an effort to ensure that young victims would not be dismissed in future because of stereotypes believed to undermine their credibility.
Should a government-led national inquiry be held?
Since the first cases of on-street grooming gangs began to be tried 15 years ago, multiple independent local inquiries have been conducted into how they were able to operate under the nose of the authorities, including in Rochdale, Manchester, Rotherham and Telford.
It emerged last week that Jess Phillips, the UK’s minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, had declined a request made by Oldham council to carry out a national inquiry into grooming gangs in the town. She said the council should commission a local inquiry instead, as happened in Rotherham and Telford.
Nationally, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, launched in 2015, included an in-depth examination into how local agencies had responded to such criminal networks.
As yet, none of its recommendations has been implemented.
Health secretary Wes Streeting said on Sunday the government was not conducting a national inquiry “because there’s already been a national inquiry”, adding that “victims today, tomorrow, next week deserve the full implementation of the . . . recommendations”.
Reports by the policing inspectorate have also been critical in relation to how individual forces had handled the issue.
“The idea national inquiries are always better is contested,” said Ella Cockbain, associate professor in crime science at University College London, pointing to the fact that a government-commissioned national inquiry that cost more than £180mn had already taken place.
Why is Tommy Robinson in prison?
Alongside posts about the grooming scandal, Musk has repeatedly raised the situation of Tommy Robinson, the jailed rightwing activist whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
“Why is Tommy Robinson in a solitary confinement prison for telling the truth?” Musk wrote on X on Thursday, adding that he “should be freed and those who covered up this travesty should take his place in that cell”.
The comment suggested he thought Robinson was imprisoned for his public outpourings about the grooming gangs.
Robinson, who has other criminal convictions, was in fact imprisoned late last year after admitting contempt of court for repeating libellous and false allegations against a Syrian refugee in a documentary.
In an interview over the weekend, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said he would explain to Musk that Robinson was in prison for lying in court rather than exposing criminal gangs.
In response, Musk wrote on X on Sunday morning: “I know he’s in prison for contempt of court . . . but there is NO justification for such a long prison sentence or for solitary confinement!”
