‘When the poison of the far-right leads to serious threats ... in my book, a line has been crossed.’
Keir Starmer has defended Jess Phillips after Elon Musk made comments attacking both the safeguarding minister and the prime minister’s record as director of public prosecutions (DPP).
Musk recently shared posts on X claiming that Phillips “deserves to be in jail” and calling her a “rape genocide apologist” for opposing a call for a national inquiry into historical child grooming in Oldham.
The prime minister said that “those that are spreading lies and misinformation, they’re not interested in victims, they’re interested in themselves”.
Without referring directly to Elon Musk, he also said that people who are “cheerleading Tommy Robinson aren’t interested in justice, they’re supporting a man who went to prison for nearly collapsing a grooming case”.
Starmer said that he is proud to call Phillips a colleague and friend, and said she has done “a thousand times more” to protect victims of sexual abuse than those who are attacking her “have even dreamt about”.
Starmer emphasised: “I am prepared to call out this for what it is […] when the poison of the far-right leads to serious threats to Jess Phillips and others, then in my book, a line has been crossed.”
The owner of X has spent days attacking Starmer’s stint as DPP, stating that he was “complicit in the rape of Britain”, and even calling for him to be jailed.
During a press conference in Surrey this morning, where Starmer was outlining his plan to tackle NHS waiting times, he said that as chief prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, he tackled child sexual exploitation “head on, because I could see what was happening”.
Last week, Musk called for Tommy Robinson, the founder of the now-disbanded English Defence League, to be released from prison.
He claimed that Robinson had been jailed for speaking the truth about grooming gangs, despite the fact that the far-right figurehead is serving a prison sentence for contempt of court for repeating libellous claims about a Syrian refugee.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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