THE government stands blindsided by a media frenzy, too cowardly to retort to a tycoon close to incoming US president Donald Trump, too unprincipled to separate the issue of child sexual exploitation from its racist framing by the right.
Elon Musk’s attacks are ferocious: a minister’s view that an inquiry into historic child abuse in Oldham should be council-led rather than government-led makes her a “rape genocide apologist”; the King needs to dissolve Parliament; the Prime Minister should be in jail.
Staying silent before this onslaught, or worse, saying they hope to work with Musk, is a humiliation. The government looks pathetic, licking boots that stamp repeatedly on its face. The malicious characterisation of child abuse as a specifically Asian or Muslim problem, in defiance of the Home Office study which found most grooming gangs were white, goes unanswered.
The right-wing media may move on, but only to new attack lines.
The playbook should be familiar to the Starmer clique, who ran with it when Jeremy Corbyn led Labour: an initial scattergun series of attacks (Corbyn was a Czech spy, an IRA sympathiser, danced on his way to the Cenotaph and other such nonsense) gave way to a concerted campaign to portray Labour as anti-semitic, once the attackers realised this was the mud that was sticking. The relentless hostility of much of the press to the Labour government shows that, as with Corbyn, it will not give up.
The Labour right may be aggrieved at the injustice of Conservatives who were in office until six months ago blaming them for crimes committed on their watch. They may be startled by the willingness of the whole British right to amplify the unhinged smears of the world’s richest man.
They should not be: decorum, honesty and all sense of proportion were similarly abandoned when they egged on the media war against Corbyn, and the institutional encouragement of the most vicious lies about the Labour left have simply shown the right how much it can get away with.
They are used to the media being on their side: it was, when their restorationist project was engaged in smashing the left. But restoration of a pre-Corbyn status quo, the essence of the Starmer project, is no longer enough. An aggressive, international hard right wants Britain to follow the new Trump administration in an intensified war on the working class and the public sector.
The passivity of the government is easily explained: they are committed to Britain’s status as a US vassal, and dare not risk an open row with one of the new emperor’s favoured courtiers. But the left needs to confront this political offensive.
It should not do so by closing its eyes to the reality of child sexual exploitation, the horrific scale of which has been detailed in previous investigations. Nor by claiming grooming gangs are a side issue because most child abuse occurs in the home.
Child sexual exploitation by gangs is a distinct criminal business which has often been winked at by councils and the police: this needs addressing, however many uncomfortable questions it throws up about porn culture and the sex industry. Too often we frame these issues in terms of sexual morality, with its unfashionable religious connotations, rather than as questions of exploitation and oppression based on class and sex.
A commitment to working-class liberation requires us to confront these criminal trades. This would spike the guns of the right: their concern is faked and therefore inconsistent. Musk cares nothing for Trump’s closeness to the paedophile ring around Jeffrey Epstein; the Tories ignore their own research showing a majority of grooming gangs are white.
A left serious about ending sexual abuse would soon expose these contradictions. The alternatives are to acquiesce in Musk’s attacks or close our eyes to horrific scandals which have scarred working-class communities: either way lies irrelevance.
