New Delhi:

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has sparked a political storm in the UK by launching a series of controversial posts targeting Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Labour government. His comments have reopened discussions around the issue of child grooming gangs, sparking calls for fresh investigations.

Musk’s Allegations Against Starmer

On New Year’s Day, Musk accused Keir Starmer of failing to act decisively on grooming gang cases during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions (2008-2013). Musk claimed that Starmer allowed “rape gangs” to exploit vulnerable girls without facing justice, alleging that institutional failures were linked to Starmer’s leadership of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

The billionaire also criticised Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister – a position under the UK Home Office, accusing her of covering up for Starmer by rejecting a call for a public inquiry into alleged grooming scandals in Oldham. Musk suggested that Phillips’ decision was politically motivated to shield Starmer, claiming it represented a “cover-up” of systemic failings.

In a series of posts on X, Musk demanded a new national public inquiry and called for the Labour government to face an immediate general election. He went so far as to accuse Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist”.

The Labour government was quick to dismiss Musk’s remarks, with Health Secretary Wes Streeting labelling them “misjudged and misinformed.” Starmer’s defenders argue that as DPP, he introduced new guidelines in 2013 to better address child sexual exploitation cases. 

Grooming Gang Scandals

The grooming gang scandals have long been a flashpoint in UK politics. Investigations in towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford revealed widespread child sexual exploitation, often perpetrated by men of predominantly Pakistani descent. Reports suggested systemic failings by local authorities and law enforcement, with officials accused of ignoring or downplaying abuse due to fears of being labelled racist.

The 2022 Oldham inquiry found serious safeguarding failures but did not uncover evidence of organised exploitation in council-run facilities. National inquiries, such as the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), have repeatedly identified gaps in the system, while successive governments have pledged reforms.

These failures have been seized upon by far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment. Musk’s decision to amplify Robinson’s views has led critics to accuse him of spreading disinformation.

Musk vs Farage

The Tesla chief has aligned himself with far-right movements in Europe and expressed support for Britain’s Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage. Musk has also championed the cause of agitator Robinson, currently serving an 18-month sentence for contempt of court

On Sunday, however, Musk appeared to distance himself from Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s anti-immigration Reform UK party. Musk, who previously signalled potential support for Farage’s party, declared on his X platform that “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”

This public rift comes days after Farage revealed he had been in talks with Musk regarding a possible significant financial donation to Reform UK. Farage’s party, which split the conservative vote during the general election in July 2024, is seen as influential in Labour’s return to power.

Musk posted on X questioning why Robinson was in solitary confinement, claiming it was for “telling the truth” about grooming gangs, a series of scandals involving the exploitation of young girls by predominantly South Asian men in several UK cities.

Farage responded with a firm rebuke, stating, “Tommy Robinson’s imprisonment is not political. It’s about contempt of court.” While maintaining Musk’s “very supportive” stance toward Reform UK, Farage rejected the notion of aligning with Robinson, saying, “I never sell out my principles.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he would remove Canada’s 5% national sales tax on new homes sold for under C$1 million ($719,700) if he’s elected prime minister. Poilievre, whose party leads by about 20 points in recent polls, said the cut would save around C$2,200 a year in mortgage payments on a C$800,000 house. 

If the Conservatives win an election that’s currently scheduled for October 2025, he would also push the provinces to remove their sales taxes from new homes, Poilievre said in a news release.

The high cost of housing in Canada has helped sink Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s popularity, especially among younger voters. The benchmark home price has jumped 61% since he entered office in 2015, and interest rate increases have pushed housing affordability to near the worst level since the early 1990s.

Trudeau’s government has spent billions and promised much more to boost home construction. Through its C$4 billion housing accelerator fund, it has transferred about C$1 billion so far to municipalities that cut red tape and allow dense zoning for housing, including C$471 million to Toronto. It has also created a housing infrastructure fund that is set to be handed over to the provinces on Jan. 1 – if those governments agree to allow increased housing supply. 

Poilievre said he would cancel the remaining C$3 billion in the housing accelerator fund and axe the C$5 billion housing infrastructure fund entirely to help pay for the tax cut. 

He also said the tax cut would spur enough new homebuilding to generate an additional C$2.1 billion annually for the government. Therefore, his plan would produce enough in savings and new revenue over four years to offset the estimated C$4 billion annual cost of the tax cut, Poilievre said.

“This is a fiscally responsible plan to cut taxes, build homes and bring back the promise of Canada, of hard work enabling people to buy a home in safe neighborhoods,” Poilievre said at a news conference.

The government already offers a partial sales tax rebate, worth about 36% of the tax paid on new or substantially renovated homes worth up to C$450,000.

Trudeau’s housing minister, Sean Fraser, said there’s a fundamental problem with Poilievre’s proposal – he plans to fund it by cutting the government programs that are “actually going to deliver housing for middle-class and low-income families.”

The housing accelerator fund has pushed nearly every big city in the country to adopt more permissive zoning and move to digital permitting to make it easier and faster to build homes, he said. 

“These funds are making a difference. They’re going to have a bigger difference in the future and to cut them now would be nonsensical,” he told reporters in Ottawa.

Fraser also raised concerns that Poilievre’s plan would support real estate investors buying multiple homes through a corporate vehicle at the expense of low and middle-income taxpayers. 

Mike Moffatt, a policy director at the Smart Prosperity Institute and a former Trudeau economic adviser, estimated Poilievre’s tax cut would cost about C$4.5 billion annually. Though he voiced concern about the Conservatives’ plan to cancel the housing accelerator fund, Moffatt agreed the tax cut would spur more building.

“This could really help affordability for young, middle-class Canadians,” he said on X.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Britain’s outgoing Prime Minister Risihi Sunak, and his wife Akshata Murty, walk to a car as they leave after he delivered a statement after losing the general election, outside 10 Downing Street in London on July 5, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Britain outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on July 5 apologised to the public after his Conservatives were trounced by Labour in the UK general election, and said he would step down as party leader.

The 44-year-old former financier gambled on going to the country six months before he had to, hoping that better economic data would swing public support back towards the Tories.

But Thursday’s vote indicated that Britons wanted to send a clear message to the party by kicking them out of power after 14 years of economic hardships, Brexit upheaval and Tory infighting.

“To the country, I would like to say first and foremost, I am sorry,” he said outside the Prime Minister’s residence at Downing Street, before heading to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation as prime minister to King Charles III.

“I have given this job my all, but you have sent a clear signal that the government of the United Kingdom must change. And yours is the only judgement that matters.”

“I have heard your anger, your disappointment, and I take responsibility for this loss.”

The scale of the defeat made it inevitable that Mr. Sunak — the conservative party’s fifth leader since 2010 — would have to step down as Tory head as well.

But he said that he would stay on in the role until the arrangements were made for an internal leadership contest, which is expected to be a fight for the ideological soul of the party.

Mr. Sunak saw a record number of his top ministerial team lose their seats, including defence secretary Grant Shapps and House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt.

His immediate predecessor as prime minister, Liz Truss, also lost her seat.

Mr. Sunak — an observant Hindu who is Britain’s first prime minister of colour — wished his successor Keir Starmer well, calling him “a decent, public-spirited man who I respect”.

“One of the most remarkable things about Britain is just how unremarkable it is that two generations after my grandparents came here with little, I could become prime minister,” he added.

“And that I could watch my two young daughters light Diwali candles on the steps in Downing Street. We must hold true to that idea of who we are.”

London:

Britain’s Labour Party won mayoral polls in London and central England on Saturday, in crushing defeats for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s unpopular Conservatives ahead of a national election due later this year.

While Labour politician Sadiq Khan’s re-election as London mayor was widely expected, Labour also snatched a surprise, narrow victory in the central West Midlands region that is home to Britain’s second-largest city of Birmingham.

The wins are Labour’s latest in local elections to councils and mayoralties on Thursday and could fuel fresh calls for Sunak to step down.

Opinion polls predicted that Labour would win the next national election, propelling Keir Starmer to power and ending 14 years of Conservative government in Britain. Sunak has said he intends to call a vote in the second half of the year.

Conservative West Midlands Mayor Andy Street lost to his Labour opponent Richard Parker. Street’s 37.5% of the vote was eclipsed by 37.8% for Parker, a razor-thin margin translating to 1,508 votes.

Street, who has served as mayor since 2017, ran a campaign emphasising his personal record on investment while downplaying his Conservative affiliation. He publicly disputed Sunak’s decision to scrap the high-speed HS2 rail link from Birmingham to Manchester last year.

Parker had sought to link him to the unpopular national government. “I believe a Labour mayor working with a Labour government will help get Britain’s future back,” Parker said in a speech following the result.

Starmer said the result was beyond Labour’s expectations. “People across the country have had enough of Conservative chaos and decline and voted for change with Labour,” he said in a statement.

Sunak had been counting on getting an electoral boost from recent announcements on defence spending and the progress of his divisive plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Khan’s victory in London, his third in a row, came despite some public anger over knife crime and the Ultra Low Emission Zone that charges drivers of older, more polluting vehicles a daily fee.

“It’s been a difficult few months, we faced a campaign of non-stop negativity,” Khan said in a speech after the results showed he had won 43.8% of the vote against 33% for the Conservatives’ candidate, Susan Hall.

“For the last eight years, London has been swimming against the tide of a Tory (Conservative) government and now with a Labour Party that’s ready to govern again under Keir Starmer, it’s time for Rishi Sunak to give the public a choice.”

Khan, 53, became the first Muslim mayor of the British capital in 2016.

Hall had made scrapping ULEZ a centrepiece of her campaign but the 69-year-old Donald Trump fan made a series of gaffes and faced accusations of racism after being found to have engaged with far-right content online.

In one bright spot for Conservatives, Ben Houchen won re-election as mayor of Tees Valley in northern England on Friday.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Silicon Valley:

Since his tumultuous takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk has made an unabashed turn to the right politically, defying the orthodoxy that Silicon Valley is a citadel of well-heeled liberals beholden to Democrats.

Long considered non-identifiable ideologically, Musk’s politics are now hardline right wing as he uses his platform (now called X) to stoke the themes cherished by Fox News, conservative talk radio and far right movements across the West.

In just the latest example, repeating a conspiracy theory of far right chat rooms, Musk last week posted that US President Joe Biden was importing migrants for votes, laying the groundwork for “something far worse than 9/11.”

But beyond the posts, the question on everyone’s mind is whether the world’s second richest person will put his weight, and wealth, behind the bid of former US president Donald Trump to retake the White House.

The rumor mill went into overdrive when The New York Times reported that the two men met, along with other Republican donors, in Florida last week.

Trump is seriously trailing Biden in raising campaign funds, even if he sailed toward the Republican nomination to be US president, and Musk could single handedly make up the shortfall.

Musk turned to X to insist that “to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.”

But the funding of US elections is opaque and complicated, and Biden backers worry that Musk could change his mind or fund political committees that themselves finance Trump, or find other ways to help the Republican cause.

‘Techno-optimist’

Musk is not alone: other Silicon Valley mavens are also defending conservative causes, making noise in what electorally remains a liberal stronghold; in 2020, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was less than 25 percent.

Some tycoons are seeking to build a political movement that, even if not directly supporting Trump, embraces conservative causes, cryptocurrencies, and goes against the California grain.

One of the loudest voices in this shift is Marc Andreessen, the early internet tycoon who founded Netscape and now co-runs Andreessen Horowitz, a venerable venture capital company.

Once a typically left-of-center tech magnate, who had close ties to former vice president Al Gore, Andreessen now fights vehemently against left-wing priorities, especially so-called “woke” considerations about equality or workplace inclusiveness.

Last year, in a 5,200-word “techno-optimist manifesto,” Andreessen laid out a techno-utopian vision for the future that listed co-opted government, regulation and worries about discrimination or equality as enemies.

Like many of his fellow right-wing investors, Andreessen’s company is heavily invested in cryptocurrencies and last year launched a political war chest to make trouble for lawmakers, Democratic or Republican, who want the nascent industry more heavily controlled.

For tech analyst Carolina Milanesi, the newly emerging outspokenness could be less about aping Musk than worry from an old guard that the status quo is vanishing.

“As people are talking about wokeness, when you’re talking about either diversity, equality and inclusion, or you’re talking about sustainability, all of those things, basically are a threat to the status quo,” she said.

This exasperation with what Musk calls the “woke mind virus” is what drives a hit podcast called “All-In,” where four tech bigwigs, some friends with Musk, opine about the world and the latest tech developments.

The hosts include David Sacks, one of the members of the PayPal mafia, a group of men that includes Musk, who worked at that late 1990s startup and since became the representatives of Silicon Valley’s small but growing right-leaning faction.

Another PayPal veteran is investor Peter Thiel, a German-born arch conservative who associated himself with Trump when he entered the White House.

After the assault of the US Capitol in 2021, Thiel said he would stay out of politics and has since become a sort of philosopher king of Silicon Valley’s right-wing who remains above the fray.

‘Far left’ AI

The power of this new guard is beginning to be felt with the diversity minded tech companies on the back foot over criticisms that San Francisco is ridden with drugs and crime or that generative AI has become too “woke.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month found himself under fire, and his company’s share price bruised, after it emerged that its just launched Gemini AI app had generated images of ethnically diverse World War II Nazi troops and other ahistorical gaffes.

“The people running Google AI are smuggling in their preferences and their biases, and those biases are extremely liberal,” said Sacks in an All-In podcast segment titled “Google’s woke AI disaster.”

In a sign of rising conservative influence, Google’s Pichai called the AI snafu “completely unacceptable” and founder Sergey Brin said “we definitely messed up” in generating such “far left” imagery.

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)