WILL NO ONE RID US OF THIS MEDDLESOME BILLIONAIRE?

The main political story in Britain at the start of 2025 has been the world’s richest man, owner of its most influential social media platform, putting his four hundred billion dollar thumb on the political scale to try and bring down Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government.

What was the “Rape of Britain”, this ‘worst mass crime in the history of Britain” and when did it occur? And why should Keir Starmer have to resign?

A quick precis: in May 2012 nine men were convicted of sex trafficking underage girls into prostitution in Rochdale, a working class suburb of Manchester. Beyond the shocking nature of the crime itself, the case became a cause celebre because the men were British Pakistani and the girls were white. What made the case even more horrendous is that from as early as 2003 a local social worker, Sara Rowbotham, had alerted the police to a pattern of sexual abuse in Rochdale, Oldham and other working class areas around the city.

One victim did come forward in 2008/9, but Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, not quite the equivalent of America’s Justice Department, more like a national District Attorney’s office, declined to prosecute because the young woman who came forward was not considered a reliable witness. Keir Starmer was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service at that time.

In 2011, with new evidence coming to light, Starmer agreed to the case being re-opened and appointed a British Pakistani, Nazir Afzal, to prosecute it. He was successful.

After the men were convicted, there was a Parliamentary investigation into the failure of the authorities to prosecute in 2009 or earlier when the first reports from Rowbotham were made.

The case was the subject of documentaries and a BBC dramatization. It was debated on talk radio and television panels. The primary framework for the discussion was almost always race and immigration, rarely class. Did the police and authorities not prosecute earlier because they were afraid of appearing “racist”? But another way to have framed the discussions were the victims were working class women from dysfunctional homes and were ignored for reasons of sexism and classism. Perhaps this was the reason the young woman who first came forward was not considered reliable? It was probably a combination of all three.

Anyway, the scandal was memory-holed by first Brexit, then the pandemic, and finally the utter dysfunction of the Conservative Government which went through three prime ministers in five years. This led to Labour’s landslide victory in May last year and Starmer becoming Prime Minister with a 170-seat majority in the House of Commons.

So why has it resurfaced now? In a world awash with social media sewage overwhelming the memory of what happened three days ago, 2012 is ancient history. Partially the reason is ethno-nationalist populism is enjoying one of its periodic bursts of support. In Britain, Nigel Farage, a politician whose world view belongs more to the Daily Mail of the 1930s, has finally been elected to Parliament.

In 2012 Farage was still licking his wounds from his sixth defeat trying to win a Parliamentary seat. Farage has been instrumental in reviving this story he missed out on then because he wasn’t in Parliament at the time.

Other right-wing voices have refuted him. Iain Martin, who once called for Farage to be given a peerage to help complete the work of Brexit, posted this on Musk’s public notice board:

Farage has other reasons for bringing the story up now. Having finally got to Parliament, as head of the new Reform UK party which has four other MPs, he is keen to exploit disarray in the Conservative Party and become leader of Britain’s largest right-wing party. Unfortunately for him, Starmer doesn’t have to call an election until 2029. Who knows what the world will look like then and whether it will have moved on from right-wing demagogues, so Farage wants to strike now.

Enter Elon Musk, with whom Farage has met and who he claims will back Reform UK with significant money.

Money is nice but Musk can and is doing something more important. He has reactivated the two-way circuit of public opinion influencing that has existed for decades between British and American right-wing news outlets and the wider ideological infrastructure of the “movement”. (I find it almost impossible to refer to this movement as “conservatism” and fascism is too emotive a term, although stripped down to its essentials it is closer to the F-word than the C-word.)

Going back at least thirty years, right-wing news media in the US and UK have exploited the Atlantic gap to make it seem like one side or the other is getting information that “liberal” local sources of news are censoring thus withholding the “truth” from the citizens of one country or the other.

Twenty-five years ago I wrote about this phenomenon while a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

The essay is a reasonable historical summary of the origins of this phenomenon going back to the confluence of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and Ronald Reagan’s presidency. This gave rise to new networks of communication that could be used to help “conservatives” in either country in their electoral campaigns. It was a phenomenon noted early in Clinton’s administration by White House counsel Mark Fabiani:

The process was not unlike a money laundering operation, except in this case it wasn’t illegal profits being washed clean. The currency in this case was innuendo, rumor and half-truth sent over the Atlantic to Britain, where it was published in the national press and then blown-back over the ocean as fact.

Rush Limbaugh was an effective disseminator of this “information”. He would tell listeners “reputable” newspapers like Britain’s Daily Telegraph are reporting this or that about Paula Jones or Whitewater or the death of Vince Foster and then ask, Why aren’t America’s liberal newspapers reporting it?

What Limbaugh did not tell listeners is that with funding from Richard Mellon Scaife, an early model of the evil right-wing billionaire which has become a defining feature of our times, the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was able to basically move to Arkansas for weeks at a time turning over rocks to find scandal. In the end none of it stuck but it was a serious distraction for the new administration and Clinton’s reputation never really recovered — and, of course, by the end of his term he had trashed that reputation by his own actions.

Over the decades, the close coordination between the US-UK right-wing groups in the information sphere has deepened. American money still funds much of it. Ethno-nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment is at its core. Brexit was one tangible manifestion of this. But a normalizing of general xenophobia is another, along with a not too well-hidden sense that democracy has somehow been corrupted by liberal attitudes and is now suspect.

In the present case the situation is reversed from the Clinton example, with American-based media destabilizing a British government. For example Rupert Murdoch-owned Times piling on Starmer over the weekend. (Murdoch is American now and The Times will always dance to his tune).

It seems unlikely that Trump gives Starmer a second-thought, much less is sighted in on him but the headline is arresting.

However, The Times is no longer an agenda setter. For that matter The New York Times is no longer an agenda setter. Twitter is where the news agenda is set for those two outlets. When Musk starts posting about an event from more than a decade ago suddenly it’s all anybody wants to talk about. Daily Telegraph columns generate debate — or what passes for it on Musk’s platform — the Daily Mail re-inflates the hype about a case that was dealt with more than a decade ago.

Does this story have legs? No. By this time next week there will be some new outrage generated out of Musk’s head leading for him to call for fresh British elections. I doubt it will be worth writing about. I am pointing this out to you now because it is an updated example of how the ultimate goal of today’s right on either side of the Atlantic is to make it impossible for freely elected governments of the left to actually govern.

Revolution through distraction in pursuit of the ultimate goal — a one-party state:

Theirs.

As Musk’s colleague from the Paypal days is happy to remind you.