American oligarch Elon Musk made another concerted effort this week to boost the far-right in the UK, demanding the release from prison of Britain’s most prominent fascist, Tommy Robinson. He called for the electorate to back Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party demand for the imprisonment of Labour government MPs.

Musk has been fanning the flames of an online lynch mob exploiting cases of gang-organised child sexual abuse—in Rochdale and most prominently Rotherham—to fuel their anti-migrant, white supremacist agenda.

Musk first posted on the subject on the morning of January 1 on the X platform he owns. Since then, he has made posts or reposts on the issue at least 70 times, receiving over a billion views between them. Among them are direct reposts of Tommy Robinson—the former leader of the fascist English Defence League—and Farage.

Musk repeatedly endorsed a Reform government (the party received 14 percent of the vote on a national turnout of less than 60 percent in the July General Election) and demanded Robinson be released from his 18-month prison sentence.

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In Robinson’s place, Musk insisted Labour’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” for arguing it is Oldham council’s responsibility to decide whether to hold an inquiry into the Rochdale abuses, not the national government.

Posts he has endorsed include comments arguing “people should have hung for Rotherham”; threatening “consequences” if Robinson is not freed; claiming “a quarter million little girls were—still are—being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain”; referring to “genocidal rape”; and calling for the King to dissolve Parliament “and order a General Election to be called for the sake and security of the country”.

Musk, Robinson and their acolytes’ claims to be acting out of concern for the wellbeing of young victims of sexual abuse is revolting.

The Rotherham abuses, taking place between the late 1980s and 2013, have so far seen 61 people convicted, with the majority of Pakistani descent. In Rochdale, where abuse also took place over a number of years, 42 men have been convicted, also largely of Pakistani heritage. The trials have been made a focus of far-right agitation for years.

A 2015 report by Professor Alexis Jay commissioned in response to the scandal noted that, overall in the UK, “group-based CSE [Child Sexual Exploitation] offenders are most commonly White” and that when it comes to identifying any disproportionalities, “the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending”—not least that those who carry out such acts are a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of any ethnic group.

Naturally this did not stop the likes of the EDL, Britain First and all the fascist filth they have since spawned using Rotherham and Rochdale—and suggestions that local authorities had not acted for fear of being branded racist—as a pretext to scream that the UK is overrun by criminal migrants, and Muslims in particular, who are incapable of “integrating” and living in British society.

In reality, the main factor in the abuses in Rotherham and Rochdale—as in the vast majority of such cases—was the poverty of the victims, the gutting of local social care and community infrastructure and the class contempt shown by local political leaders and police: handing the girls’ abusers opportunity and, for years, impunity. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote on Rotherham at the time:

If the children’s exploiters were able to treat them as “white trash,” it is because such a view was shared by a number of people meant to be responsible for their care. Where the children or their parents sought help from the authorities, there was little forthcoming. The report describes how, among police chiefs, council leaders and department heads, the attitude was that children at risk had brought it upon themselves.

What accounts for such a degree of callousness? The mantra of the Conservatives and Labour alike is that there exists an “underclass,” undeserving and “feral.” While the last two decades have seen a record growth in social inequality, working class children are routinely demonised as worthless and little more than potential criminals and deviants.

To repeat, the abuses could be carried out again and again because the victims were poor—thanks to the plundering of society by the super-rich—and because state services had been slashed, as the $400 billionaire Musk plans to do in the US through his Department of Government Efficiency.

As for Musk’s attempts to paint Tommy Robinson as a truth teller and political martyr, Robinson is actually in prison for contempt of court after repeating lies about a child which have led to him and his family receiving death threats.

In 2018, a video of young Syrian boy Jamal Hijazi being attacked in a school in the UK by another pupil prompted widespread outrage. Robinson responded with a video falsely claiming Hijazi was a violent thug; He was eventually required to pay £100,000 for defamation and banned from telling the lie again. Robinson broke this order, producing a film which has been viewed tens of millions of times and shown at a protest in Trafalgar Square.

Musk, intimately familiar with the far-right cesspit he has cultivated on his platform, knows exactly what he is doing. His posts tap into and advance anti-migrant and Islamophobic conspiracy theories about an “invasion” of “white countries” by violent migrants, designed to scapegoat social discontent away from the super-rich. They are entirely of a piece with Trump’s rants about “criminals” and “rapists” flooding the American border.

These tropes are increasingly being harnessed by Musk to the task of strengthening selected far-right parties and individuals around the world: Trump in the US, the AfD in Germany and now Reform, Farage and Robinson in the UK.

Last August, Musk posted “Civil war is inevitable” in response to a video of the UK’s summer far-right riots, during which fascists attempted to set fire to buildings housing asylum seekers. The video had originally been posted by Robinson. He also labelled Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer “two-tier Keir”—a far-right slogan falsely suggesting that right-wingers are treated more harshly by the police than left-wingers.

Shortly before Christmas, it was reported that Musk is looking at donating up to $100 million to Farage and Reform. The last few days show how much he can do even without direct funding, with the oligarch’s X/Twitter screed prominently reported across the UK’s media—gleefully by the most right-wing in GB News, Daily Mail, Express and Daily Telegraph.

Farage leapt at the opportunity, telling ITV Musk is an “an absolute hero figure, particularly to people in this country” and that he “very strongly” agrees with some of his opinions while being “reticent” about others—i.e., his open support for Robinson, from whom Farage keeps a tactical distance. At a Reform event in Leicester Friday evening, Farage referred to the “mass rape abomination” that is “back in the news” and declared, “Our job is to replace [the Conservatives] as the opposition party in British politics.”

The Tory Party is doing its best to compete for Musk’s patronage. Last month, shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith told the Express, “What I would say to Elon is… there’s only one real official opposition party in the UK. There’s only one party that’s daily taking the fight to this socialist government, and that’s the Conservatives.”

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch used a speech in Washington the same month to fawn, “I am excited about DOGE and what President-Elect Trump and Elon Musk will do on government efficiency.”

She sought to curry favour again this week by posting, “The time is long overdue for a full national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal. Trials have taken place all over the country in recent years but no one in authority has joined the dots. 2025 must be the year that the victims start to get justice.” This reverses the position—identical to that of Labour and Phillips today—held by the Tory Party during its time in government.

The grovelling before Musk and his ability to poison the political climate and set news agendas testify to the total collapse of democracy under the weight of social inequality and the super-rich—and to the lurch to the right among all capitalist parties. Though the Labour government is the target of Musk’s campaign, it is no more innocent of this shift than the Tory Party.

Starmer has made his anti-migrant agenda central to the Labour government. He is waging, for all its difficulties, a charm offensive with the Trump administration. And he is determined to maintain cordial relations with Farage, about whom he has had barely a bad word to say. These efforts were combined in newly appointed ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson’s indication that he would be eager to work with Farage in the role.

The most that senior Labour cabinet minister Wes Streeting would say of Musk’s actions was that “some” of the criticisms were “misjudged” and “misinformed.”

He continued, “But we’re willing to work with Elon Musk who I think has got a big role to play with his social media platform to help us and other countries tackle these serious issues. If he wants to work with us and roll his sleeves up, we’d welcome that.”