British minister says Musk ‘misinformed’ about UK childcare scandals | Distant News

British Health Secretary Wes Streeting says Musk’s comments are ‘ill-conceived and ill-informed’.

Britain’s top politician has dismissed Elon Musk’s criticism of the government’s handling of record-breaking child-rearing scandals.

A US tech billionaire on Thursday accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to bring “gangs” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions more than a decade ago.

In several posts on X, his social media platform, Musk also suggested that defense minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be jailed” for refusing a call for a national public inquiry into the Oldham scandal.

On Friday, British Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Musk’s comments were “ill-judged and misinformed”. He urged Musk, who is very close to US President Donald Trump, to cooperate with the government in fighting the issue of sexual exploitation of children.

“So if he wants to work with us and roll up his sleeves, we can accept that,” he added.

The widespread abuse of girls, which emerged more than a decade ago in several English towns and cities, including Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, has long sparked controversy.

A 2022 report on safeguarding measures in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 found that children were failed by local agencies, but there is no hiding despite “legitimate concerns” that the right will use “higher sentences for many Pakistanis who break the law across the country”.

Streeting told ITV News that the government had taken child sexual abuse “incredibly” seriously and that he supported an inquiry into the Oldham scandal, but it should be locally led.

Musk appears to be taking a liking to the political climate in the United Kingdom since the centre-left Labor Party won the July 2024 election by a landslide, ending 14 years of Conservative rule.

He repeated Starmer’s criticism and the hashtag TwoTierKeir – short for the unproven claim that the UK has a “two-tier police force”, with far-right protesters treated more harshly than pro-Palestinian or Black Lives Matter protesters.

Musk also compared Britain’s efforts to stamp out online disinformation to the Soviet Union, and during the summer’s anti-immigrant violence across the UK, tweeted that “civil war is inevitable”.

On Friday, he again backed calls for a UK general election, six months after the last election. “The British people do not want this government at all. A new election,” he wrote on his platform X.

Musk recently expressed his support for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder of the English Defense League, better known as Tommy Robinson and who is serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.