As if the new Labour government doesn’t already have its work cut out trying to get a handle on riots breaking out across the UK, it is also engaged in an ongoing fight with Elon Musk. The US entrepreneur appears to have taken a rather lot of interest in Britain this week – and he’s not pulling any punches when it comes to Starmer’s army. Wading into the ‘two tier policing’ argument, Musk started tagging Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Twitter, blasting him as ‘#TwoTierKeir’ and suggesting that the UK government is overstepping in its criticism of those who incite violence online. ‘Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?’ he fumed about the news that the first person in the UK to be charged with stirring up racial hatred on Facebook will appear in court next week.
And now it appears Elon has turned his attention to lefty Labour backbenchers. On Thursday evening, it emerged that new Labour MP Lauren Edwards had made some rather controversial Twitter posts in the past – with a selection of online comments made between 2009 and 2011 dredged up. In one from June 2009, the now-MP for Rochester and Strood wrote: ‘I want these f***ing Estonian r*tards out of my flat now!’. In another from 2011 Edwards talked about giving a homeless man a ‘massive elbow to the ribs’ after he ‘deliberately barged’ her. The Labour MP took to social media to apologise for her past ramblings, telling her followers:
I have recently been made aware of a small number of tweets that I posted on Twitter from over a decade ago which I now deeply regret. They were a significant error of judgement on my part, and I apologise wholeheartedly. Since becoming a local councillor, and more recently an MP, I have seen firsthand the importance of bringing communities together and working with tolerance and respect for all in our society. I pledge to use my platform to continue that important work and dedicate myself to serving all residents of Rochester and Strood.
But Edwards’s apology didn’t quite manage to, er, calm the furore. If anything, her old tweets were amplified even more – not of course helped by the fact that Twitter’s owner reposted a damning screenshot to his 193 million followers. Mr S previously thought a tech billionaire may be too busy to target random Labour backbenchers – but it seems Musk’s war on Labour is only getting started…
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