Elon Musk Moves To Disrupt British Politics

Pioneers possible reset of business-government power balance

[The Editors is called The Editors, plural, not The Editor, singular, for a reason. When I launched it, a shrewd friend advised, “it can’t just be you.” I’m delighted to start including some additional voices. Today’s comes from Michael Mosbacher, who is associate comment editor at London’s Daily Telegraph. He is a past editor of Standpoint and The Critic, having co-founded both British magazines.—Ira Stoll.]

The leader of Britain’s Reform Party, Nigel Farage, in the House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions, September 2024. Photo provided by the UK Parliament.

Elon Musk seems to have a penchant for creative destruction — and right now he is doing his best to upend the British political scene. His vigorous and combative approach is certainly rather different from the subservient way big business has so often interacted with government over recent decades.

The tech billionaire has allowed speculation to spread that Musk, following his support for Trump in the 2024 U.S. election, is about to make a significant donation to Nigel Farage’s upstart Reform UK party, perhaps up to $100 million. In the British context, this is a totally unheard of sum; Britain’s largest ever single political donation has been £10 million ($12.4 million), and there have been precious few of those.

Stoking the speculation, Musk granted an audience to Nigel Farage last month and allowed photos to be released to the media.

Any donation would be slightly legally awkward, as those not on the UK’s electoral roll cannot make donations to political parties. But there is a way around that, as UK companies are able to do so, and Musk’s social media platform X has a UK subsidiary. And the donation is now looking rather less likely after Musk’s Sunday morning post that “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”

Now Musk is laying into the British political class as a whole, and Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer in particular, over free speech, Islam, and rape gangs.

Elon’s X posts are coming through thick and fast. He has been calling for a national public inquiry into the rape gangs (Labour has said no), an early election (it almost certainly won’t happen — we had an election in July which Labour won with a huge majority, albeit on a modest share of the vote), a government minister to be imprisoned (also highly unlikely), and anti-Islam street agitator Tommy Robinson to be released from prison. Robinson was ordered jailed for 18 months beginning in October 2024 for breaching a court order banning him from distributing a video making allegations that the courts had found to be untrue against a then-15-year old Syrian refugee.

The background to the story is that since the late 1980s so-called grooming gangs have been operating in some of England’s declining northern towns. Predominantly British-Pakistani men, many of them taxi drivers, have been preying on poor predominantly white girls. Many of the girls were under the “care” of local government authorities. In Rotherham — a Yorkshire town with a population of under 130,000 — between 1997 and 2013 1,400 girls were reportedly abused by such gangs.

For years the police did little. Social workers feared taking action, in case they were accused of racism. The police excused their lack of action on the grounds of avoiding stoking up community tensions. Prosecutors did likewise. In many of the areas where this was taking place, local councils turned a blind eye — in some instances, local politicians of Pakistani heritage were related to perpetrators or worse.

The scandal was also underreported — most of the media shied away from it for fear of being accused of racism.