‘It has taken a man of Elon Musk’s influence to drag this into the light,” claims the Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe. The US tech entrepreneur’s discovery of Britain’s grooming gangs scandal, and his tirade of derogatory tweets directed at Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips and others, has turned Musk into a supercharged hero for certain sections of the right. And in this hero worship, his acolytes are rewriting history.
Long before Musk started lobbing X-shaped bricks across the Atlantic, journalists and campaigners, often women on the left such as Julie Bindel, Anna Hall, Suzanne Moore and Samira Ahmed , had turned the spotlight on “grooming gangs” – better described as rape gangs and sex traffickers – and called out the failures of the authorities.
