The dangerous lies of Elon Musk

Musk’s intervention went on to dominate UK political discourse for the day – a clear concern for a Labour government desperate for a reset at the start of 2025.

But his actions also pose a challenge for Reform’s Nigel Farage. He quit Ukip when its then-leadership began getting close to Robinson, complaining that he was too far-right even for him (notably Farage has been silent on that matter this time).

Keeping the mercurial billionaire and potential $100m donor on-side, let alone on-message, was always going to be a headache for Farage and Reform. Musk’s rhetoric has always been inflammatory – but it has recently become even more dangerous than that of Yaxley-Lennon.

Musk has written on Twitter/X that “Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN… he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”. Of Phillips, he simply said she was “a rape genocide apologist”.

Any British politician or media outlet should be clear and open in their condemnation of these false and inflammatory accusations because claims of this kind can have hideous consequences. During the 2016 Brexit vote, the Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered by a far-right fanatic who screamed “Britain First” as he attacked.

Musk’s taste for incitement has increased with his social media use. In recent months he appears to have posted on social media for up to 18, 20, or even more hours in each 24-hour period – some of the posts apparently enhanced by his use of ketamine.

The drug, which Musk has admitted using on prescription for depression (there have also been reports of his use of several illegal recreational substances, which Musk denies), is known for its dissociative effects, which might help explain why Musk’s political interventions have become so detached from reality.

Despite being the world’s richest man, and someone with immense political power – and with it access to the best sources of information in the world – Musk will parrot any old conspiracy theory, steal and share memes, and generally fail to do the slightest bit of research before leaping into incredibly contentious political issues.

Put simply, ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a vacuous grifter who did nothing to help the rape and sexual abuse victims of the gangs in the UK, and who in fact risked allowing their attackers to walk free. He is behind bars for repeatedly telling a lie, not a truth. 

He is a loudmouth with a messiah complex, offering nothing and benefitting no-one but himself. No wonder Elon Musk is drawn to him: like, after all, attracts like.

By the time Yaxley-Lennon was regularly making videos about the trials of the rapists in Rotherham and other cities, authorities had finally taken action – far, far later than they should have. Which means that, at the moment when ‘Robinson’ claimed the mainstream was “covering up” the attacks, the perpetrators had already been investigated, arrested, charged, and prosecuted.

Into that mess he wandered, trying with incredible crassness to profit from other people’s effort to lock up child rapists. As head of the Crown Prosecution Service during some of this period, Keir Starmer had files re-examined (re-opening some prosecutions) and introduced measures making it easier for victims to testify, alongside other provisions.

As to Yaxley-Lennon, the reason he was reporting details others wouldn’t was not because of media unwillingness to report on Asian perpetrators due to political correctness, nor some specific establishment cover-up over these offences, but the UK’s routine contempt of court laws – which heavily restrict what can be reported during a trial. When these laws are broken, the “journalist”, or the outlet that breaks them, can face consequences up to and including prison, but more importantly the defence team of the accused can use the contempt to try to secure a mistrial, or lesser measures to re-tilt the trial in favour of their client.

The UK’s rules on contempt of court are, in modern times, straightforwardly bad: they act against the principle of open justice. They leave a gulf of silence around high-profile crimes into which extremists and grifters can step – as they have with the Southport attacks – and they are in urgent need of reform. 

But while they exist, breaking them only risks collapsing trials. Yaxley-Lennon did nothing to help jail any of the Rotherham rapists. He could have helped guilty men walk free.

Yet none of this relates to why ‘Tommy Robinson’ is currently in prison. Instead, he’s in jail for repeatedly breaking a court order relating to a “documentary” video he produced, which had nothing to do with any of the “grooming gangs” story. Instead, it related to a young Syrian refugee who had been attacked in school, after footage of the assault went viral.

Yaxley-Lennonfalsely claimed that the victim of the attack had been attacking children himself, which resulted in the teenager having to abandon his education and his family fleeing their home. The teenager sued, and won – a court found the allegation to be untrue. Yaxley-Lennon is not in trouble for spreading uncomfortable truths, he is in jail for repeating racist lies.

Usually, of course, defamation is a civil matter – it results in paying compensation, rather than jail. But ‘Tommy Robinson’ continued to falsely accuse the teenager, in contravention of the court order. 

In his eventual guilty plea, Yaxley-Lennon admitted to ten counts of repeating the libel. The main person to blame for Tommy Robinson being behind bars is therefore… Tommy Robinson.

The next most culpable person for Yaxley-Lennon’s jail time is, in fact, Elon Musk. It was Musk who unbanned ‘Tommy Robinson’ from X when he bought Twitter, which gave him a platform to spread his content. When Musk called for Robinson to be freed, he also re-promoted the video containing the false information for which Robinson was jailed. 

As Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank British Future has noted, if that video were taken offline (thus “curing” the contempt of court), Yaxley-Lennon’s prison sentence would be shortened by months. Ironically enough, Musk actually has the power to “free Tommy Robinson” a little early.

Elon Musk will continue to be a volatile but unignorable arsonist, setting fires everywhere and making British politics stupider each time. But the mainstream makes it more difficult with their flat-footed responses to the issues of the far-right that connect with regular voters.

Labour is particularly bad at this, trying to engage in a war on immigration against Reform that they will never win – having watched Rishi Sunak try and spectacularly fail to do the exact same thing for the last two years. But at the same time, they have ceded the issue of tackling the scandal of mass-scale child abuse to the far right.

Labour MPs and ministers who called for independent inquiries or national measures in opposition are now refusing them. There is an effort to point to previous inquiries, such as the wide-ranging Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which reported in 2022, as having addressed these issues. But local councils feel there is still a need for further investigation, and the ministers who are now doing nothing once thought the same. The inaction is a gift to the far-right.

And, as if on cue, up stepped Musk to put his ignorance on full display once again, posting on Twitter/X that Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” over her role in the scandal. It was a bizarre remark, given that Phillips has only been the safeguarding minister for six months and, when she was a backbench MP, she was one of the most persistent campaigners for justice for the victims. On Friday, the Telegraph splashed with news of the bizarre attack on Phillips, laundering Musk’s bizarre remarks into the supposedly respectable mainstream.

That telling the public not to care about these issues doesn’t work, and it helps the far-right look like they’re on to something. The details of these criminal cases are horrifying. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was primarily focused on a different scandal – of institutional child abuse in organisations run and managed by the state.

Public confidence that something like the Rotherham scandal couldn’t happen again is low. It is a straightforward failure of mainstream politics that ministers – especially of a governing party that hasn’t been in power for 14 years – can’t grasp that and tackle it. The result is that a worryingly large slice of the public looks to Tommy Robinson, the wider far-right – or even Elon Musk – as the only people who care about abuse.

But in reality, Elon Musk and Yaxley-Lennon are opportunistic grifters spreading obvious falsehoods. Our real source of alarm should be that mainstream politicians can’t win an argument against them.