Good morning. What is a news story in the UK? Whatever Elon Musk says it is. That is the conclusion you might draw, anyway, from the influence of the billionaire Trump adviser’s posts on X claiming that “a quarter-million little girls were – still are – being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain”, and demanding a new public inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation in Oldham, Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere.
There is no reliable basis for the quarter-million figure. In any case, Prof Alexis Jay, the chair of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales that looked extensively at grooming gang scandals and published a series of recommendations in 2022, said yesterday that “we’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions”, and urged the government to instead implement more of her proposals. But the political energy is still around the idea of a new inquiry as some sort of panacea, and the Conservatives will try to force a vote on one in parliament today.
If Musk is the puzzling originator of this row, he is not operating in a vacuum. Today’s newsletter explains where the owner of X drew his ideas from, and what their further dissemination reveals about the remarkable influence of the online radical right. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Social media | Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on Facebook and Instagram, founder Mark Zuckerberg has said. The suite of changes was met with dismay by critics, who described them as “a full bending of the knee to Trump”.
British army | Afghans who were killed by members of the SAS in Afghanistan were described dismissively as having been “flat packed”, according to a former member of the elite force’s sister unit. The soldier, known only as N1799, was giving evidence to an inquiry into the deaths of 80 civilians in Helmand province.
California | A fast-moving wildfire erupted in Los Angeles on Tuesday, quickly consuming nearly 3,000 acres and destroying homes in an affluent community along the Pacific Ocean. Amid a significant windstorm across much of southern California, a second unrelated blaze also forced evacuations in a different part of Los Angeles.
France | Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right National Front party, who sent shock waves through the country when he made it to the second round of the presidential election in 2002, has died at 96.
Drugs | Ketamine could be reclassified as a class A drug by the Home Office after illegal use reached record levels last year. Ministers are seeking “expert advice” on reclassification – it is currently a class B substance – after an estimated 299,000 people reported use of the drug in 2024.
In depth: Where Musk’s obsession with the UK comes from – and how his rhetoric is percolating into mainstream politics
It is true that multiple inquiries have found that the rape and sexual abuse of children by organised grooming gangs was shamefully allowed to continue for many years. The culprits in the high-profile cases brought to light in places like Rochdale and Rotherham were predominantly of Pakistani heritage; more generally, Alexis Jay’s inquiry found that a lack of police data in a series of case studies made it impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group was overrepresented, but that a background literature review suggested that most perpetrators of child sexual exploitation were young white men.
It is also true that: these inquiries have set out numerous steps to prevent that pattern being repeated; that the last Conservative government did not implement any of the measures proposed by Jay; and that the new Labour government only now appears to be acting to make it an offence to cover up abuse because of the renewed media spotlight.
What is much less clear, according to Jay, is that an additional new national inquiry would be a useful mechanism for the protection of children. She also criticised the “uninformed” politicisation of the story. A key question, then, is where Musk and his fellow travellers are sourcing their claims – and what is motivating his sudden interest in a subject which has been widely reported on and discussed in the UK for many years.
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How did Musk alight on the subject of grooming gangs?
Musk does not have a history of deep engagement in British political debates. Last summer, though, he became extremely animated about the policing of the anti-immigration riots that swept the UK. After Keir Starmer warned large social media companies that incitement to violent disorder was a crime, Musk said that Starmer’s statement was “insane”. He presented the crisis as a free speech issue, and said that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain.
The seeds of his most recent interventions appear to have been planted shortly afterwards. In September, he claimed that the UK was “releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts”.
It is not true that paedophiles were included in the cohort whose custodial sentences ended early in response to the prison overcrowding crisis, which had built up over many years. Nonetheless, in an interview last October with Tucker Carlson, Musk elaborated on his claim by saying that “there were … migrant rape gangs in England” and that people who “complained about it online” were “sent to prison”.
This appears to be a reference to Tommy Robinson and the claim that he has been jailed for telling the truth about child sexual exploitation. In fact, he is in prison after he admitted contempt of court for repeating libellous and false claims that a Syrian refugee schoolboy had attacked English girls.
Musk’s exposure to Robinson and his supporters appears to have been key to his interest in child exploitation in the UK. When it emerged that Labour’s Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding, had in October declined to order a new national public inquiry into child exploitation – pointing out the reviews and inquiries had already taken place – the groundwork had already been laid.
The 250,000 figure that Musk has quoted has been recycled many times on the alt-right. It appears to have first been aired by the Ukip peer Lord Pearson, who claimed in 2018 that “there appear to have been upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century”, a claim that was based only on his own calculation of extrapolating the number of victims in Telford, Oxford and Rotherham across the whole country.
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What else can we learn from the talking points Musk has picked up?
Strikingly, Musk and many of his US sources treat each detail they discover about the saga as a new revelation, rather than something they are now catching up on because they haven’t previously paid attention. Imagine a British social media user telling Americans that they have just uncovered that children are dying in mass shootings to have a sense of the effect.
Beyond that general tone, there is a clear pattern in Musk’s recent posts: he picks up an assertion about the grooming scandal from a dubious source, shares it uncritically, and then repeats the framing under his own name – effectively laundering the argument into the mainstream. Robinson’s incendiary and highly misleading “documentary” about grooming gangs is an obvious case in point.
Musk’s tear of posts last week quoted a number of prominent alt-right X users, some of whom have espoused plainly racist or conspiratorial thinking elsewhere. A look at some of these accounts offers clues as to how that tendency now intersects with Reform UK, which in turn feeds into the UK’s right-leaning media and parts of the Conservative party.
One post he shared, for example, quoted another which said: “people should have hung for Rotherham”. That was from a contributor to Pimlico Journal, a niche Substack publication with an online-right feel that is very sympathetic to Reform but also reportedly read by Conservative advisers and MPs.
Another striking feature of this discourse is the idea that Britain is now a failed state, taken over by Islamism, that needs an intervention led by the American right. That is an idea found on both sides of the Atlantic, and repeatedly entertained by Musk when he comes across it. For example, after Mike Cernovich, a prominent right-wing commentator in the US, posted yesterday that it was a “big mistake for UK politicians to run their mouths about our country and Elon” and called Britain a “joke country”, Musk replied: “They are in for a rude awakening.”
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Why is Elon Musk so obsessed with the UK?
Well, he may simply feel that above any other country in the world, the UK’s social crises are so horrific that he is honour-bound to intervene. But, while it is impossible to know his underlying motives, some posit a more self-interested explanation.
As well as his attacks on the UK over the freedom of speech and the grooming gangs scandal, Musk has taken issue with the provisions contained in the Online Safety Act, which was passed in late 2023 but is yet to come fully into force.
The act will allow the regulator, Ofcom, to exact fines of up to 10% of global revenue against social media companies that host illegal content on their sites, including the incitement of violence and racially aggravated public order offences – the kind of material, for example, that Musk criticised the UK for policing during the riots – and content relating to child sexual abuse. Service providers such as X will be subject to Ofcom enforcement from early this year.
Yesterday, Musk drew those two themes together himself, reposting an X user who said that “the UK threatens American and US companies with their stupid “hate speech” laws but when people start talking about their politicians covering up rape gangs, suddenly they don’t think other countries should get involved in theirs”. He added the comment: “Yup”.
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How have Musk’s demands percolated into the British mainstream?
Musk has been critical of the Conservative party, and while his attacks have not been as rough as those on Labour, they are potentially much more damaging – since any surge in support for Reform is bound to come primarily at the Tories’ expense.
One notable thing about many of the UK accounts that Musk has promoted is that they hate the Tories as much as they hate Labour, and have made a decisive break with traditional Conservatism. A regular theme in the ecosystem Musk is promoting, for example, is the “Boriswave”: the idea that Boris Johnson betrayed voters by failing to bring down immigration after Brexit, blamed by some on a Tory alliance with a cultural elite in London.
That may be part of the reason that Kemi Badenoch and her shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, have picked up Musk’s arguments and run with them, with Badenoch also calling for a full public inquiry. Jenrick, for his part, has taken an incendiary line, referring to Britons of Pakistani origin as “people from alien cultures” and adding that it is the arrival of “millions of people … into our country in recent times” from “countries and cultures with backwards attitudes to women” that explain the grooming scandal.
That is language which would once have been confined to the far right. But Musk’s ability to drive this issue to the top of the political agenda is a neat parable for how thoroughly the discourse has changed.
What else we’ve been reading
The impact of Trump’s victory on social media is not limited to Elon Musk’s relentless posting. In this excellent analysis of Meta’s decision to dump its factchecking teams, Chris Stokel-Walker describes “an extinction-level event for the idea of objective truth on social media”. Archie
Have you noticed how people drop out of social plans more often? How bailing has been reframed as “self-care”? Or that we now valorise ‘that feeling when someone cancels dinner’? Jedidajah Otte investigates the supposed rising wave of flaking, and what it says about our commitment to each other. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters
Labour saw a sharp fall in its support among black voters at the last election. Chris Osuh and Aamna Mohdin spoke to voters (pictured above) in two constituencies where that affect was particularly acute, and paint a picture of deep political disillusionment. Archie
Not unrelated to “flaking”, I enjoyed Matthew Schnipper’s piece in the Atlantic on the agony of texting among male friends, who can be spotty communicators at the best of time. “The stereotype that men struggle to communicate is an old one. But modern friendship’s reliance on texting illuminates how grim the problem is.” Charlie
Kemi Badenoch has had a choice of how to respond to the ascent of Donald Trump, writes Rafael Behr: “police the boundary where reputable Tory tradition shades into racially aggravated nationalism, or hasten the dissolution of that line”. Her response to Elon Musk’s recent behaviour suggests a decisive break from the Conservatives’ history. Archie
Sport
Football | Goals from Alexander Isak and Anthony Gordon (above) gave Newcastle a famous 2-0 win at Arsenal in the first leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final. While Arsenal had 23 chances in total, only three were on target.
Cricket | Australia all-rounder Ash Gardner and England opener Tammy Beaumont have put their rivalry to one side to call for the Women’s Ashes to be expanded with the addition of more Test matches. The series is currently played across seven contests, but only one of them is in the game’s longest format.
Football | Manchester United will listen to serious offers for any of Ruben Amorim’s squad, including Kobbie Mainoo, Alejandro Garnacho and Rasmus Højlund, who were previously deemed untouchable. The club’s position reflects its difficult financial position under profitability and sustainability rules as Amorim plans to reshape the squad to suit his tactics.
The front pages
The Guardian splashes with “Dismay as factchecking ditched on Facebook in ‘free speech’ drive”. The Financial Times leads with “Meta reins in factchecking as chief Zuckerberg builds bridges to Trump”. i reports “Social media giants defy UK crackdown on online safety”.
The Times reports “Patients to face two-day waits at A&E in flu crisis”, while the Mail has “A&E in crisis as flu spikes”. The Telegraph splashes on “SAS faces war crimes accusation by rival unit”. The Daily Mirror covers allegations of sexual abuse in McDonald’s franchises with “Predators’ paradise”, and the Sun says that five big stars have left Coronation Street in a month, with “Rovers and out”. The Daily Express says: “Wrap up warm! -20C arctic snow and ice blast hits UK”.
Today in Focus
Will Labour take on the power of private schools in the UK?
Professor of sociology Sam Friedman charts the enduring influence of private schools in the making of the British elite and asks whether the Labour government is looking finally to curtail it.
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
“There was a time in my life that reading books felt as enjoyable and obvious as coffee in the morning,” says Doosie Morris. “Then came children, social media, the smartphone and – the final death blow to my once robust bibliophilia – the pandemic.”
You may see yourself in Morris – like her, you may be trying to read more in 2025. But unlike her, you need not go in search of answers – for she has consulted the experts for advice on how to fall back in love with reading as part of the Guardian’s 66 days to change series. Among the counterintuitive tips? Easing into it with audiobooks.
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
• Yesterday’s First Edition incorrectly reported that the Environment Agency was monitoring flooding around the UK. In fact, it monitors flooding in England, and other services monitor flooding in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
