In case you've been under a rock, Musk has accused Starmer of the "rape of Britain" and said Jess Phillips should be in prison for refusing a further inquiry into grooming gangs, or what Musk calls "rape genocide". For context, this is the kind of bullshit peddled by assorted fascists and neo-Nazis as an adjunct to their great replacement "theory"; that white women are being raped and having mixed race children to hasten the take over of the Western nations by black and brown people. Hence why grooming and rape gangs were okay when his friend Jeffrey Epstein organised them. Musk has undoubtedly been radicalised as he's become conscious of his political interests as a billionaire, and is banging on about this because he wants to push UK politics further to the right and visit naked class politics upon the country. As if we haven't already had a bellyful of this destructive rubbish.
Labour are on a sticky wicket. The situation demands a straightforward riposte and, because Starmer is opposed to "sticking plaster politics", retaliation in the form of enforcing the provisions of the Online Safety Act against hate speech. But this is complicated by Musk's being a powerful figure in the incoming Trump administration, and so any response would be overdetermined by Labour's customary obsequiousness to the United States, regardless of who is in office. And if that wasn't bad enough, Labour - and especially this leadership - are loathe to take billionaires on anyway.
As someone not at all fond of Wes Streeting, his comments on Laura Kuenssberg this Sunday morning walked the tightrope the government has set itself. He said the attack on Phillips was a "disgraceful smear". She and Starmer had done more to lock up rapists and "scumbags" than most people, and social media platforms should work toward online safety. He also said that the voices the government should be listening to are those of the survivors of sexual assault themselves. A text book response from the Blairite book of rebuttal. Appear to take a hard line by dismissing the argument, defend the record of one's colleagues, and proferr a course of action that steers away from more confrontation with someone Streeting, Starmer, et al would much prefer to cultivate. An effective rebuttal? I'll leave that up to readers to judge.
Writing prior to this weekend's farrago in The Lead, Zoe Grunewald argues that Labour should stick to the priorities and not get blown off course by criticism, be it from the Tories, disgruntled landowners and the like. Wisely, she suggests taking on the right on grounds of Labour's choosing instead of attempting to outdo them on immigration. It appears Starmer is in part agreement. According to Alex Wickham, there will be no new year address as such on Monday. He's going to plough on while ignoring the "gossip" and, presumably, the "distractions" of the daily headline generators. This studied aloofness didn't serve the government well over freebies or the removal of winter fuel payments, but as all the "difficult" (i.e. poor) choices are supposedly out the way Starmer can focus on the managerialism and, perhaps, recapture something of the appearance of his first week in office.
Smashing the delivery button so government churns out tractor production figures runs the risk of leaving the field to Labour's opponents, but right now that is not too bad an option. With Musk now calling for Farage's removal from Reform's leadership, the divisions among Team Trump over there are finding an echo over here. Despite toadying to Musk across the Sunday politics shows, he dared disagree with his would-be sugardaddy over the release of Tommy Robinson. Farage wants "respectable" distance between Yaxley-Lennon and his thuggery because there's only room for one senior personality on the extreme right, and undisciplined street violence is impossible to wield if one's chosen route to office is electoralism. This exacerbates divisions in Reform itself, which saw Lee Anderson of all people heckled at Reform's East Midlands conference for refusing to back Yaxley-Lennon and his thugs. Meanwhile, the Tories are nowhere with Kemi Badenoch pathetically repeating Musk's calls for inquiries into child sexual abuse, and Robert Jenrick has disgraced himself further with another racist diatribe that, at an earlier period, would have been on the receiving end of a prosecution.
Just as Boris Johnson was lucky in 2019 because of the divisions between his opponents, it's possible Musk's influence could destabilise the opposition on the right and make things easier for Labour than they might otherwise be.
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5 comments:
I think there's a deeper problem in that Musk is not just a millionaire "tech bro", he is in fact embedded in the Military Industrial Complex. It should be obvious that the likes of SpaceX, Starlink and xAI are military development companies lightly disguised as civilian businesses. Given how a Tesla Cybertruck recently withstood an internal bomb blast in the foyer of Trump Tower, I would guess that there is military development going on at Tesla too. Note also that his buddy Peter Theil's Palantir provides the US military with its missile targeting systems.
As such, Musk is part of the US deep state, and if he wants to redirect British politics, it means that forces within the deep state do too. It's also notable that Trump hasn't attempted to reign Musk in, which means he tacitly approves of what Musk is doing. Trump holds the Sword of Damocles over Starmer's head, because if at any time he retweets any of Musk's anti-Starmer missives, this will be a signal for the UK deep state to remove him.
Another aspect to this saga are the underlying rumblings that a number of senior Labour politicians, and senior policemen, are up to their necks in organised crime. I recently came across this piece, but I'm not sure how much credence to give it:
https://www.redwallandtherabble.co.uk/why-a-public-inquiry-is-the-only-way-to-uncover-the-truth-about-what-really-happened-in-oldham/
Sidenote: that a cybertruck 'withstood an internal bomb blast' is more down to a bad explosive than particularly good construction on the part of Tesla.
Give it no credence at all. Raja Miah is a prolific conspiracy theorist with extreme right links well known in this area
The "deep state" - what is that other than a far right, petty bourgeois conspiracy theory construct, as against the actual state, i.e. the state of the bourgeois ruling class - is no friend of Trump, nor Farage, and certainly not Tommy Robinson, nor even, for that matter Blue Labour.
If that state acts against Starmer and Blue Labour, it will not be on instructions from Trump or Musk, but on the basis that they threaten the interests of the global ruling class, with their reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalist politics, just as much as did Truss, which led to her downfall as that ruling class, via its control of financial markets crashed the £, and sent interest rates soaring.
They are just as likely to act against Trump as against Starmer, and a look at the rise in US bond yields over the last few weeks shows the same processes, and talk of the return of the bond vigilantes.
You see now you've got me pondering how this bourgoise global ruling class does not include the richest man in the world and his billionaire pals.
Hmmm.
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