Lately, Elon Musk has become an armchair journalist’s dream, even more so than the ever-newsworthy plumes exhaled by the reliably voluble Donald Trump. It usually goes like this: Musk gets agitated about something and blasts out swarms of tweets. His couple of hundred million followers get similarly agitated and tweet some more, and suddenly we have roiling headlines and political turmoil. It is low-hanging fruit for reporters. Wait for an angry Musk tweet, sit back and read the explosion of after-effects. The story usually writes itself.
And so it was on 1 January when Musk came out with all guns blazing after a decision by Jess Phillips, the UK safeguarding minister, to block a public inquiry into the sexual exploitation of children in the Manchester borough of Oldham, suggesting the matter could be handled at a local level.
Musk said: “So many people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this.”
On 3 January he went further, attacking the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, directly:
“Starmer was complicit in the rape of Britain when he was head of Crown Prosecution for six years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
The stories about sexual grooming and child rapes have been around for a long time (since the late 1980s), but they have remained largely under the fold (as they used to say in the age of printed newspapers). They never really made the headlines (or dockets) they deserved. Which is its own dark affair; we’ll get to that.
What happened (and apparently continues to happen) in Rotherham, Oldham, Rochdale, Telford and other localities is so horrifying, so ugly and so beyond the pale that it is near impossible to describe in detail.
Rather than repeat the distressing details of the suffering of thousands of young girls (many in foster care, and some as young as five), let me just say this: What various cadres of young men did to these children for decades, unchecked, underreported and under-investigated, is a stain on almost everyone connected with the events — the perpetrators, the police, the government, the press, the parents. It is unlikely that any of the victims (many are adults now) will ever be able to heal the damage done to their younger minds and bodies. Their cries were largely muted by those who should have been listening.
Swept under the carpet
The crimes themselves are indeed evil, but this article addresses an orthogonal matter: the question of why this was swept under the carpet by all and sundry for so long.
A friend sent me an article by a reporter named Charlie Peters, who writes for a media organisation called GB News, which reaches about 10% of the British public. Peters followed the most notorious of these child exploitation cases for years. When the seven men convicted of child rape in Rotherham finally stood up in front of a judge to hear their sentences on 12 September last year, Peters was the only reporter in the room. Sky, the BBC, The Guardian and The Telegraph had not deemed this hearing important enough to send a reporter.
That was then, but now the larger story has exploded on to the global stage, largely because of Musk’s tweets, immediately illuminating the big elephants in the room — ethnicity, culture and religion.
It seems that the media, government and police long ago pushed the story into the long grass because of the treacherous political and social terrain that would have to be navigated. It was not as though nothing was done, but reports, investigations and police action were low-energy affairs, never rising to the status of national emergency.
The reason was quite simply this: The perpetrators were Pakistani by ethnicity and Muslim by religion. The victims were white, English and Christian. No one wanted to go near that particular Pandora’s box.
When challenged, many of the organisations that looked the other way hit back (sometimes angrily), talking about cultural sensitivities, the complexities of social dynamics, the dangers of racial stereotyping, the hardships of immigration and the warping effects of poverty. Some have whispered about the practical need to speak quietly and to hobble justice so as not to alienate an important constituency.
Musk’s tweets and the accompanying furore have blown that all up, and it is now threatening to bring down the UK government. Racists, extreme right-wingers and regular rank-and-file conservatives have found common cause here, and even reliable Labour lefties have felt their hackles rise at the decadeslong inaction of responsible institutions. And, as is usually the case with 240-character snippets fuelled by Musk’s outrage, polite and rational conversation is absent. It has become a predictable and numbing cage fight between extreme positions.
What remains to be said? These are bad young men; they should be behind bars for a very long time. There are also bad young white Englishmen. Children are abused by men (and occasionally by women) of all races and classes and religions and ages. Lines of causality are hard to find and waters are easily muddied.
On the other hand, a conversation needs to be had. Was there a cultural element to this? Was the industrial assembly line of abuse indicative of something else, a clash of civilisations? Or were these just bad young men exploiting a moral blind spot hidden behind a wall of political correctness?
I am not sure any of this can be definitively unravelled, but that is no reason not to have the conversation. Musk’s tweets, while typically over-the-top in their tone, are certainly having that effect.
More importantly, the voices of the victims demand it. DM
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital. His new book, It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.