Musk’s Toxic Brand of Politics Has Hit a Wall in the U.K.
He is using legitimate public anger over the government’s handling of a past grooming scandal for illegitimate extremist ends
Having hacked American politics, tech billionaire Elon Musk is now using his considerable influence to meddle in the political affairs of other countries. His ideological ambitions are global, not national—as the United Kingdom is realizing.
Prior to his acquisition of Twitter, Musk was less politically active than he is today. Since then, his full-blown radicalization into reactionary politics—that he backs with his financial, digital, and ideological support—has positioned him at the vanguard of radical, right-wing causes not just in the U.S. but around the world. He is now an all-purpose superbacker of the global far right.
While his admirers see him as a counterpart to George Soros—a comparison Musk himself has embraced, despite also demonizing Soros as a humanity-hating supervillain—it is a false comparison. Soros, after all, never repurposed critical digital infrastructure in service of his political views, doled out million-dollar checks to swing state voters, or publicly demanded that a political party in a foreign country dump its leader for not being radical enough. Deep-pocketed donors are a fixture in politics, but Musk represents something entirely different: He is both banker and booster—and has a level of international reach and influence not previously seen.
Global Supersponsor of the Far Right
In the last year alone, Musk publicly vilified Brazilian authorities in defense of Jair Bolsonaro and his allies who had tried to pull off their own Jan. 6-style insurrection; endorsed—and repeatedly promoted—the far-right AfD party as Germany’s only hope for survival; cozied up to various ultraconservative leaders around the world, such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders. But outside the U.S., Musk has pried into British politics more than anywhere else.
Why the U.K.? Because it has perfectly teed up two of Musk’s core ideological obsessions: the idea that immigration is an existential threat to national identity and that liberal democratic regimes are inherently corrupt. Both of those found a fortuitous convergence for him in a decades-long, organized grooming scandal in the U.K. involving Pakistani men. So Musk decided to resuscitate this ugly episode (more on the specifics below).
But he has not just resurfaced it. He has also mass-amplified some of its graphic details to gin up outrage against British authorities—the current Labour Party government in particular—and rehabilitate far-right hardliners like Tommy Robinson with whom he shares a deep-seated distaste for liberal democracy.
London Calling
Although it is true that British authorities—both liberal and conservative—failed to address this scandal with sufficient resolve, Musk misdiagnoses the causes in an ideologically self-serving way. A dispassionate assessment of this scandal reveals that it had less to do with “wokeness” and more to do with bureaucratic self-protection. The latter, of course, is not any less damning—but the point, contra Musk, is that the scandal is less amenable to a simple ascription of blame to any particular political party or movement.
If Musk were truly interested in seeking justice for the victims and to hold the political class’ feet to the fire for its hidebound ways, he wouldn’t be campaigning for thuggish and violent agitators like Robinson. But the unfortunate reality is that Musk’s efforts are all in the service of far-right politics: to advance his crusade against “wokeness” and discredit liberal principles like multiculturalism. Even those who reject “wokeness” and multiculturalism, however, should find Musk’s efforts to use violent figures and groups to advance his agenda highly concerning.
Musk’s interference in U.K. politics has created a great deal of turmoil. But his efforts to mobilize some of the country’s most radical elements—a playbook he ran in the U.S., with some success, as the owner of X and also as Trump’s top surrogate—have also managed to provoke a backlash. One reason is that the British public by and large does not have a taste for America’s aggressive, hardline, and demotic populism. In fact, it finds it frightening.
Let’s take a closer look at his meddling in British politics and how it is playing out.
Outside Agitator
Last August, in reply to a post on X bemoaning “mass migration” in Britain, Musk claimed that “civil war is inevitable,” provoking a rare government rebuke toward a political outsider.
Musk’s post was triggered by race riots across the U.K. in response to a horrific murder of three minor girls at a dance class. The suspect, it was later revealed, was a 17-year-old British citizen who was born in Wales and grew up in Banks, Lancashire. But no sooner had the crime occurred that social media posts falsely blasted the name of a Muslim asylum seeker as the culprit, prompting far-right groups to go on a rampage that left over a hundred police officers injured.
The riots were in no small part fueled by Musk’s own platform. Per CNN:
Less than 24 hours after the attack …the false name had already received over 30,000 mentions from more than 18,000 unique accounts on X alone—and was amplified by prominent far-right leaders. ... That false name had been also recommended to users through X’s algorithm, and was trending as a top recommended search result for users under the “What’s happening” sidebar.
In other words, Musk helped propel a race riot, facilitated the spread of misinformation, and then, with the U.K. in flames, declared that civil war was an inevitability.
But Musk didn’t stop there. He began aggressively campaigning for the rehabilitation of the aforementioned Tommy Robinson, a far-right, xenophobic agitator who founded the now-defunct anti-Islam English Defence League and has called adherence to the Muslim faith a “mental health issue.” Robinson, who is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for violating a court order related to his ongoing harassment of a young Syrian refugee, was also accused of inciting last August’s race riots. But Musk issued numerous posts in support of Robinson, falsely claiming that he was in prison for exercising his free speech rights. And earlier this year, Robinson’s representatives revealed that Musk is providing funding for his legal fight.
Late last year, Musk also considered giving some $100 million to Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party, which started as a pro-Brexit party and has now morphed into a rabidly anti-immigration one. But Robinson’s thuggish, violent streak is a bridge too far even for Farage—and when he distanced himself from Musk’s glowing assessment of Robinson, Musk called for new leadership in Reform.
In other words, being an anti-immigration and fierce culture warrior was not enough to land Musk’s beneficence. He also demanded rallying around the country’s most notorious far-right activist.
Recycling Rotherham
Musk’s advocacy for Robinson is connected to the tech mogul’s repeated amplification of the country’s “grooming gangs” scandal in which an organized rape network consisting of adult men, mostly (though not entirely) of Pakistani origin, sexually exploited vulnerable white and Sikh working-class girls and women in many British towns from the late ’90s to recently.
The scandal dominated headlines for years, as it should have. But Musk, like Reform, has resurfaced it in a naked attempt to polarize and destabilize England and topple the government. He has charged Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer of being “complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN” and “the worst mass crime” in the nation’s history.
That is absurd given that Starmer, in fact, was among those who worked the hardest to bring the culprits to justice.
Starmer began his tenure as head of the Crown Prosecution Service in 2008. This agency decides which crimes get tried, and in 2009 it declined to prosecute a case connected to the grooming scandal because the main witness was deemed unreliable. However, two years later, the new chief prosecutor for that region, Nazir Afzal, reversed the earlier decision and brought charges and secured nine convictions against those involved in the rape network. He has emphasized that Starmer, who continued running the service until 2013, was key in ultimately bringing justice to the victims: “Keir was 100% behind the decision to publicly admit that we had got it wrong in the past.” Here is what Afzal said:
Keir left in 2013, the CPS having gone from being dire at doing sex-abuse cases to having the highest conviction rate in our history. That wouldn’t have been possible without the support, resources and the protection I was given by Keir, at a time when it would have been easier to give up.
Still, British authorities as a whole did not cover themselves in glory in their handling of the scandal and there is—understandably—pent up rage among the public, especially because this was just one particularly egregious manifestation of a broader failure of governance. That’s why, despite having received major coverage in the British press for years, the grooming gangs scandal remains a renewable resource for political mobilization.
So Musk has weaponized it for his own political ends. He has generated fresh outrage by amplifying some of appalling details from court transcripts—which are extremely expensive to obtain—that had not previously been aired.
Reform and Musk have called for a national inquiry into the scandal—which an overwhelming 76% of the British public supports, according to a recent survey. It would not only be politically astute for the government to acquiesce but also the right thing to do to bring closure to the victims. That it hasn’t already been done is a shame. And there are three overlapping reasons for that failure, none of which have much to do with multiculturalism or political correctness, as right-friendly commentators claim. Indeed, both Labour and its Conservative predecessor refused a national inquiry, which would suggest that there is something other than woke, left-wing politics at work there.
The most obvious reason—and, unfortunately for Musk, the least ideologically validating one—is just quotidian self-protection: governments everywhere refuse scrutiny that makes them look bad. And should a far-right one assume office, it’s likely to be even more true of it. Governments are, to put it mildly, reluctant to expose the incompetence of state institutions that they run. And true to form, in this case, British authorities went out of their way to soft-peddle and coverup the ineptitude of the police, local municipalities, and social workers.
The second likely reason is plain old political calculation, namely, that neither the Conservatives nor Labour want to help Reform, given that the inquiry’s conclusions would inevitably be seized on by Reform to lay the blame at their feet.
The third underlying reason is Britain’s notorious class bias: the crimes weren’t deemed a high priority since the victims were women and working class. This means that it is not the “woke mind virus” but class prejudice on the part of middle-class professionals and straightforward misogyny that were responsible for the broader institutional failure.
Indeed, state inaction in this scandal is part and parcel of a series of disastrous failures on the part of the public administration concerning: the Post Office’s Horizon scandal that blamed sub-postmasters for what was the central office’s failure; the Grenfell Tower disaster in which 72 people were incinerated in a building fire; the Windrush nationality affair under which hundreds of Commonwealth citizens were wrongly detained, deported, and denied legal rights; and the tainted blood debacle from the 1980s when 30,000 patients were infected with HIV and Hepatitis C.
All these incidents occurred because state institutions obsessed with formal process rather than delivery and suffering from “producer capture”—being run in the interests of staff rather than the public—tried desperately to avoid bad publicity at any cost. This has significantly undermined public confidence in public institutions and the political and media classes, which is what Musk is exploiting to advance his radical ends.
Musk’s Attempts to Red Pill the U.K.
But his effort to discredit liberalism, steer British conservatives in a decidedly more reactionary direction, and rehabilitate the reputation of a genuine far-right extremist who is the public face of a plebeian street politics associated with violence and hooliganism is not likely to succeed. Whatever the British public’s beef with its political institutions, Musk and his brand of red-pilled politics are deeply unpopular.
One recent poll found that 53% of voters believed Musk was having a negative impact on British politics, compared to just 12% who thought he was having a positive one. On his comments about grooming gangs specifically, 47% said they thought Musk was being “unhelpful,” compared to 26% who thought the opposite. A YouGov poll found that 71% of the British public had a negative view of Musk.
That is why Farage has been astute enough to deny Musk’s call to embrace Robinson. He knows that would be a political kiss of death that would condemn Reform to minor party status—if that. This is precisely the fate that his former vehicle UKIP (the U.K. Independence Party) has suffered. No amount of money would make up for the electoral damage.
All of this shows that Musk simply does not understand the British public or British politics. Farage has a populist style that trucks in nativism, homophobia, and anti-trans bigotry that has become part and parcel of the culture-war right. But he understands the limitations of this politics and is trying to combine nationalism with free markets and a Thatcherite commitment to small government.
Musk and Robinson, however, represent a politics that is far more radical, violent, and less disciplined—and therefore likely to spin out of control quickly as the race riots demonstrated. It appeals to a certain, fringe class profile but frightens everyone else. Ironically, the prejudices of the British middle-class have served to contain it for now.
The failures of the British state and establishment are undoubtedly clearing the way for a populist upsurge in the U.K. But it is very unlikely to take the form Musk wants. Still, the fact that a tech billionaire has created an architecture to intervene and upend any country’s politics at will is deeply worrying.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
 | A guest post by
|
That’s an undoubted phenomenon but it wasn’t a factor in this case. The overwhelming majority of the unfortunate girls who were the victims were in council ‘care’ and so removed from their families. The complete failure of the care system is another part of the state failure here. (This is only one of several major failures in that particular service over the last few decades). The ones who weren’t in care were usually from highly dysfunctional and chaotic families.
It is interesting to see how persons who belive they are patriotic and community oriented can at the same time support riots and destruction of demcracy