Musk threatens British democracy

Do not underestimate the power of his lies

Jan 12, 2025

The richest man in the world wants to overthrow the elected government of the United Kingdom. I know, I know, what a sensationalist opening sentence to a news piece.

It sounds like the plot of an airport novel, not a serious report from a stable democracy.

But it is the fate of the British to live in times which read like a cheap thriller. A billionaire American with extreme right-wing politics and a distant relationship to the truth wants to impose his will on us, and has found many eager collaborators here in the UK to help him do it.

The Financial Times reported three days ago: “Elon Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election.”

And who might those allies be? The Mail reports this morning that the government believes Dominic Cummings, who orchestrated the “leave” victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum, “has encouraged Mr Musk’s incendiary social media posts calling for Sir Keir to be removed from office and even imprisoned amid criticism of the Prime Minister’s record on the grooming gangs scandal.”

Taking back control means handing control to US billionaires, apparently. After wrecking the British economy, it appears that Cummings is ready to wreck British democracy.

The spirit that led Donald Trump to refuse to accept the results of the 2020 US presidential election and led to his supporters storming Congress has spread across the Atlantic.

The Mail’s story has the ring of truth about it. The far right is as riven by sectarian feuding as the far left. Musk denounced Nigel Farage for not supporting the jailed thug Tommy Robinson, whom Musk sees as an inspirational leader in the fight against Muslim immigrants.

Who would have guessed that of all people Nigel Farage had lines he would not cross? And yet as much for electoral reasons as anything else Farage steers clear of the violent men Musk admires.

Cummings, meanwhile, wants nothing to do with Farage. He shut him out of his Brexit referendum campaign, and now wants to launch a party to rival Farage’s Referendum party. An alliance with Musk makes sense.

You may be tempted to utter a mirthless laugh. The UK is a mature democracy, you might say. We can’t be pushed around by half-mad conspiracists with a weedy coward’s admiration for the men in leather jackets who fulfil their violent fantasies.

Or you might concede ground and believe, as I do, that there is no harm in another inquiry into the grooming scandal. Victims should be given whatever they need to help them move forward.

Such soothing thoughts risk a false optimism, however.

Let us be clear: no inquiry will satisfy Musk and his friends. As Andrew Norfolk, the great Times reporter, who more than a decade ago revealed the widespread abuse of young white girls by predominantly Asian men in Rochdale, said a few days ago, “the truth is a concept that Elon Musk clearly has very little interest in.”

Norfolk continued that, far from being a villain, Keir Starmer did everything he could to tackle the abusers

“I want to put the record straight on this. It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.”

Any new inquiry would be bound to say the same and would meet a tsunami of abuse from the global far right.

Its number does not only include Musk and his British collaborators. The supposedly respectable Conservative party is playing a slimy role. Unlike Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch appears to have no lines sand she will not cross.

She has backed Musk’s demands even though Badenoch and her colleagues refused to order a fresh inquiry into the scandal when they were in power just months ago.

Meanwhile four compelling reasons remain why our government should be alarmed.

Musk lies to an obscene degree
He can get away with it because of his equally obscene wealth
That wealth has given him control of X (Twitter) a platform with an unparalleled reach, surpassing even the dreams of the most megalomaniac press barons of the 20th century.
As a member of the incoming Trump administration, he combines political with economic power.

Here is how the four combine to produce a threat to the UK.

We all lie but normally a sense of honour and a sense of shame hold us back. Musk lies without restraint. Every falsehood he invents or decides to believe follows a pattern of legitimising race-based hatred.

The BBC’s Ros Atkins fact checked just one day’s worth of Musk’s Tweets and the results were grim.

“Gordon Brown sold those little girls for votes,” Musk declared in one.

In fact, Brown was out of power before the scandal broke and there is no evidence that he sought to obstruct justice for political gain.

Nor is there evidence that Keir Starmer sought to obstruct justice either. On the contrary, and as we have seen, he made it easier to prosecute rapists when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.

Yet Musk continues to claim that “Starmer was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.”

The conspiracy theory he is building is that left-wing politicians invited in Muslims to the UK because they knew they would vote Labour. They then gave them a free hand to rape white girls in return for their support in elections.

I could be pedantic and say that large numbers Muslims deserted Labour at the last election because it refused to unequivocally oppose Israel. But to assert the primacy of fact is to miss the darkness of Musk’s message

The centre-left are race traitors and rape enablers. They cannot be allowed to remain in power and must be destroyed by any means necessary.

This is the closest we come today to outright fascism.

And it is a message that the world can hear because Musk has the money to buy his very own social media network. He has 210 million followers – more followers than anyone else in the world. Meanwhile he ordered X’s engineers to rig the algorithm so that his Tweets would be more widely viewed.

I don’t follow him. Nevertheless, every time I log onto X, his puffy face appears uninvited in my timeline.

Journalists are rightly criticised for taking stories from social media instead of going out hunting for real news. But Musk’s reach is so vast what he says is real news, even if it is also fake news.

For the UK government, the most staggering aspect of Musk’s power is that he is a member of the incoming administration of what was once our closest ally.

The UK has never experienced anything like this. Tied to the US through security and intelligence alliances, we now face a member of the Trump team spreading lies about our prime minister while threatening to incite racial violence on our streets.

Musk’s political connections are the crucial ingredient to his power. As Vladimir Putin showed when he took down Russia’s oligarchs, politics is always more important than economics. The state still remains the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes: the ultimate source of coercion. With the Leviathan of the US government soon behind him, Musk will target anyone daring to challenge him.

J.D. Vance has already made that clear. He suggested in September that American support for NATO should be predicated on the European Union not regulating Elon Musk. Trump’s America wants to be free to follow its paranoid frenzies without hindrance from its former allies.

I do not envy ministers. Yet they must prove the British state is not as feeble as Musk and Trump assume. If they fail, where does this end? Riots? Arson attacks on mosques? Assassinated politicians?

At some point we will have to do what the bullies always fear the most and fight back.

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Writing from London

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