Of Packs and Herds

Elon Musk, the British Right, and the 'Grooming Gangs' Scandal

Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a horrendous crime that can occur in any society and at any time. It can take many forms, from financial and other ‘rewards’ in exchange for sex, to physical coercion, intimidation or emotional manipulation. It can be carried within institutions, such as the Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Kincora Boys’ Home, or Ampleforth and Downside public schools. Children can be abused by powerful men like Rolf Harris or Jimmy Saville, operating in plain sight under cover of institutional impunity; they can be abused within families, or through organized networks.

Some perpetrators operate in so-called ‘grooming gangs’ that lure vulnerable children into paedophile networks and then transform them into commodities to be trafficked and shared between groups of men. The concept of ‘grooming gangs’ is not a legal category, and the term tends to be applied selectively. In April 2023, for example, twenty-one people were sentenced in what the Evening Standard called ‘one of the largest child sex grooming gangs ever’.

The defendants - all of whom were white men and women - received 145 years imprisonment between them for what one detective called ‘the most abhorrent and cruel abuse’ carried out over a ten-year period against seven children under the age of twelve in Walsall and Wolverhampton. A few readers may recall the mugshots above, but these crimes received little media attention, and generated no political response whatsoever. The Evening Standard was one of the few media outlets to actually refer to the perpetrators as a ‘grooming gang’.

Most media commentary referred to the network as a ‘child sex abuse ring’ or a ‘paedophile gang’, and such commentary barely went beyond bare-bones reporting. Though the Sun described the perpetrators of these ‘barbaric’ crimes as ‘twisted’ and ‘sickos’, this case did not have any wider social or political ramifications. There was no media soul-searching, no demonstrations by the EDL, no grandstanding pledges from politicians, no dark mutterings about the ‘conspiracies of silence’ supposedly prevalent amongst particular communities and social groups.

On April 2 2023 - only days before the Walsall and Wolverhampton sentences were announced, the then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced the formation of a ‘Grooming Gangs Taskforce’ to tackle offences that she claimed were perpetrated by ‘groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani’. In an article in the Daily Mail, Braverman pledged a crack down on the ‘systematic rape, exploitation and abuse of young girls by organised gangs of older men’ and described ‘the disgraceful failure of the authorities to act despite ample evidence’ as ‘a stain on our country.'

Few people familiar with Braverman’s disreputable political record were surprised when she went on to describe the perpetrators of these crimes as 'groups of men, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values'. In September that year, the Mail withdrew the reference to ‘British-Pakistani men’ following a complaint by the Centre for Media Monitoring, with the explainer that this reference was limited to ‘high-profile cases’ such as Rotherham and Rochdale. The Mail also noted that ‘the perpetrators of child sexual abuse, more broadly, are a variety of ethnicities’.

Musk Joins the Bandwagon

Such nuances and retractions are rare amongst the right-wing British press, and they are entirely absent amongst the ethnonationalist right that does not have the same claims to mainstream respectability. For these sectors, ‘grooming gangs’ or ‘rape gangs’ are only of interest when the perpetrators are South Asian, Pakistani or Muslim men. For some years now, far-right organizations have claimed that white girls have been raped ‘on an industrial scale’ by men from these communities, and now these allegations have attained a spurious legitimacy, thanks to the World’s Richest Man.

By now, few people who read a newspaper or scroll on their mobile phone will be unaware of Musk’s latest hazy k-hole take on British politics. Not content with amplifying disinformation during the summer’s riots, Musk has now entered the debate about grooming gangs, with the malign ill-intent and downright ignorance that characterizes almost all his public utterances.

There is a long and forensic article by Sian Norris on Open Democracy on Musk’s latest interventions and their context, which I highly recommend. For the purposes of this article, let’s just recall that Musk resumed his attempts to destroy the Labour government just over a week ago by claiming that something called ‘rape genocide’ has been unfolding in the UK for years with the complicity of Keir Starmer and the Labour party.

What is ‘rape genocide’? Well nothing actually. It’s intellectual vomit - the kind that you might emit as you slide off the couch into a ketamine slump with fragments of the Great Replacement Theory coursing through your drug-addled brain.

Musk also called Jess Phillips a ‘rape genocide apologist’ and a ‘wicked witch’, because she rejected calls for a national inquiry into CSE offences, on the grounds that such inquiries are more effective when carried out by local councils. The valiant crusader went on to accuse Gordon Brown of having ‘sold those little girls for votes - another baseless, ridiculous lie. He claimed that more than one million white girls have been raped in the UK by South Asian grooming gangs - an insane allegation based on estimates from the MP Sarah Champion claimed which she herself has called ‘completely unreliable.’

Musk went on to describe Tommy Robinson - an equally brazen far-right grifter who has made ‘rape gangs’ and ‘grooming gangs’ his trademark grift - as a ‘political prisoner’. Never mind that Robinson is in jail (again), not because of his truthtelling, but for contempt of court, in repeating slanderous claims about a Syrian refugee, in other words for his lie-telling.

It takes one not to know one, and so Musk claimed that Robinson is in jail for ‘speaking out’ against grooming gangs - all of which will undoubtedly bring Robinson a lot of money when he gets out of prison.

The Financial Times has written about how Musk got these ideas from some very right-wing accounts on his own platform X. In (dis) information terms, Musk increasingly resembles the scene from Scarface, when Al Pacino goes out of his mind hoovering up piles of his own cocaine. But given Musk’s position as the Richest Man in the World, and his new role as Donald Trump’s sinister henchman, his baseless claims immediately set in motion the kind of rolling news and political cycle that you might expect if Moses had just descended from Mount Sinai.

Nigel Farage immediately defended Musk’s attacks on Jess Phillips on the grounds of freezepeach and it may be offensive but the left is just as bad, etc, etc. There was a kind of morbid humour in this intervention. Musk had previously withdrawn his support for Farage, because Farage will not accept, at least publicly, any future role for Robinson in Reform. But even though Farage’s political instincts are sharper than Musk’s, he knows what side his party’s bread is buttered on. And so he tried to ingratiate himself with the World’s Richest Man with his usual oily dishonesty, by asking - just askin’ questions! - why Robinson is in solitary - thereby echoing Musk’s assertion that Robinson is in a ‘solitary confinement prison for telling the truth.’

This is how these bastards roll.

The answer to Farage’s question is that Robinson appears to be in solitary for his own protection, because a lot of his fellow-prisoners hate him, not because the British state is trying to ‘silence’ him. If these allegations were made - and they often are - by some anonymous avatar on X, they would not even be worth a millisecond of the world’s contempt. But because the man who made them is the World’s Richest Man, and because we live in a world in which the most sordid far-right political talking points are now common currency on the platform that Musk owns, an array of politicians, influencers and tawdry scriveners without even the semblance of a moral compass immediately embraced the possibilities that Musk had given them.

These nationalist-populists hunt in packs or herds - I’m never sure which - and when a rich billionaire blows on his bugle, they will immediately follow the scent that has been presented to them. Frank Furedi, the synthetic leftwing intellectual-turned-Orban fanboy argued in his substack column, that ‘Racial Vengeance gets a free pass in grooming gang Britain.’ How so? Because, according to Furedi:

the rapist gangs happen to be mainly Pakistani, and their victims white, is not an accident. Why? Because these men are not simply motivated by misogyny nor by sexual domination, but also by racial vengeance.

You can’t argue with reasoning like that, any more than you can embrace fog. But such observations led naturally to Furedi’s equally incisive claim that:

The refusal to publicly acknowledge the racial dimension of these crimes constitutes a betrayal of the victims. The most powerless section of British society is sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism.

Such righteous indignation. Such principled truthtelling. It’s enough to make Suella Braverman weep. According to the Jay Report on sexual exploitation in Rotherham:

Representatives of women’s groups were frustrated that interpretations of the Borough’s problems with CSE (Child Sexual Exploitation] were often based on an assumption that similar abuse did not take place in their own community and therefore concentrated mainly on young white girls.

One local Pakistani women’s group told the inquiry that ’Pakistani-heritage girls were targeted by tax drivers and one occasion by older men lying in wait outside school gates at dinner times and after school.’ The inquiry cited a 2013 report from the UK Muslim Women’s Network, which ‘highlighted that Asian girls were being sexually exploited where authorities were failing to identify or support them’ in ways that mirrored the ‘abuse committed by Pakistani-heritage perpetrators on white girls in Rotherham.’

This is vile, despicable stuff, but it is not politically-useful vileness, and therefore the likes of Furedi don’t even acknowledge it. Far better to frame these crimes as acts of ‘racial vengeance’ perpetrated exclusively by Asian-heritage men against white girls.

This racialization of particular crimes is not new. As the criminologist Paul Knepper once observed (paywalled) in the decades leading up to World War I, ‘journalists, politicians, and anti-immigrant agitators introduced a vocabulary blending racial identity and criminality’ with regards to Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe in the East End who were associated with prostitution and sexual trafficking.

Chinese migrants in late-nineteenth century Britain were similarly associated with drug addiction, gambling and ‘white slavery.’ The allegations of the ‘industrial-level’ rape of white girls by Pakistani or Muslim men belongs to the same grim tradition. This is not to suggest that these crimes are invented. There is no doubt that white working class girls (among others) have been sexually exploited by organized or semi-organized networks in cities in the north of England, whose members consist overwhelmingly of South Asian heritage men.

There is some anecdotal evidence - cited in the Jay and Casey reports - to suggest that local councillors have been reluctant to address these crimes, because of fears that they would be accused of racism. The Jay report also claims that the police refused to see the victims of these crimes as victims, and held them in contempt.

These are serious individual and institutional failings, which the Jay report has sought to address in its recommendations. But the report also notes that ‘there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation, and across the UK the greatest numbers of of perpetrators of CSE are white men.’ A 2020 Home Office report also argued that

Research on offender ethnicity is limited, and tends to rely on poor quality data. It is therefore difficult to draw conclusions about differences in ethnicity in offenders, but it is likely that no one one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending. A number of studies have indicated an over-representation of Asian and Black offenders in group-based CSE. Most of the same studies show that the majority of offenders are white.

Once again, such conclusions are not politically-useful to the anti-grooming gang crusaders. To those who already believe that certain immigrant communities are ‘alien’ intruders in white society, it is far more convenient to believe that an entire community of Asian heritage men has allowed to systematically rape white girls with the collusion of the liberal ‘multicultural elites’ who are supposedly dragging us all to ruin.

Such accusations were largely restricted to the far-right, until Musk began to get high on his own radicalized supply. Now the Daily Telegraph can be found thundering that ‘child victims of rape were denied justice and state protection to preserve the illusion of a multicultural society.’ On Matt Goodwin’s podcast, he and the repellently racist Reform MP Rupert Lowe chorus ‘deport them all.’ Naturally, Robert Jenrick - one of the most wretchedly amoral politicians in the wretched ranks of his dying party, can be found in the Telegraph, opining

we need to end mass migration. Not all cultures are equal: importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here. And after 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we now have entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicide for some MPs to confront this.

Elsewhere, Daniel Hannan, another great friend of the working class, was playing the same tuneless dirge::

Somewhere in a corner of a half-empty studio in America, Liz Truss also managed to sum up the intellectual energy to suggest that Jess Phillips was in league with ‘Islamist thugs’ and should not be minister for safeguarding women and girls. This tweet was clearly intended to reach the attention of the World’s Richest Man, and it succeeded: Musk retweeted Truss’s disgraceful slur with the comment ‘She [Phillips] should be in prison.’

Well done Liz! Go you!

Meanwhile, in the mother of parliaments, Kemi Badenough called for a national inquiry into grooming gangs, even though neither she nor her government had implemented made in the last one, when it actually had the chance to do so. Alexis Jay has herself rejected these calls for a national inquiry, and said that the government should implement the reforms her inquiry recommended.

But like Furedi and all the others, Badenough knows what Elon Musk knows. And so she tried to undermine Starmer while, Farage and Tice chortled on the backbenches, and Rupert Lowelife brayed about deporting all ‘guilty foreign nationals’ and their family members.

There might once have have been a time when you could look at your political opponents and think that perhaps they had a different ideological take on a common problem that was at least worthy of consideration, even if you didn’t agree with them. That cannot be said of Rupert Lowelife’s depiction of the ‘mass rape of young white working-class girls by gangs of Pakistani rapists’ as a ‘rotting stain on our nation’.

Such claims are not intended to bring justice to the victims. They are not intended to widen understanding of why these crimes occur, enhance the safeguarding of children or develop policies to address historic failures in responding to these crimes. The immediate goal of Musk, Furedi, Lowlife and all the others is to use these crimes to attack the Labour government. In the longer term, they seek to build on the summer’s riots, whip up more hatred toward (dark-skinned) immigrants, and call the whole idea of a multi-cultural society into question, until we reach the point when ‘remigration’ becomes not only desirable but even essential.

Trump also plays this game, in his constant depictions of Latino immigrants as murderers and rapists. Yet according to an article on GB News by Spectator writer and Bruges Group luminary Lee Cohen:

For Trump’s America, the grooming gang scandal signals a moral and ethical decline in British leadership…The US values strong, principled allies—nations that uphold the rule of law and safeguard the welfare of their citizens.

This is where satire crawls into a ditch to die like a dog. The figurehead of ‘Trump’s America’ is a convicted felon and rapist, with close and long-demonstrated links to the serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Just today, the US Department of Justice released a report claiming that Trump would have been convicted of criminal behaviour for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

So much for morality and ethics.

And as for children’s safety, last year Trump appointed a paedophile and sex trafficker as his Attorney General, who very nearly got the job. Musk’s concern for working class (white) girls doesn’t extend to the victims of these crimes, nor is his outrage directed at their perpetrators.

The same can be said about so many of those who are following his lead. To his credit, Starmer has finally attempted to push back against what he called the ‘lies and misinformation’ on this issue, instead of trying to mollify the man responsible for it. Starmer didn’t mention Musk’s name directly, when he said that the people making these accusations are ‘in victims, they’re interested in themselves.’

This is entirely right. The crimes are bad enough, without the World’s Richest Man and his acolytes using them to fuel their dark agendas or further their disreputable careers. It’s a sordid game, best-played in the gutter, and that is the zone that Musk and his pals inhabit as they poison society one drop at a time, in the hope that they will benefit from it.