Wes Streeting: Elon Musk’s attacks are a ‘disgraceful smear’
Elon Musk has spent this week calling for the release of the far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson, and launching attacks at British politicians over a failure to prosecute gangs who groomed and raped young girls over a number of years in the north of England. Musk said Keir Starmer, who was director of public prosecutions when the scandal first came to light, was ‘complicit in the rape of Britain’, and also said safeguarding minister Jess Phillips should be in jail. On the BBC this morning, Health Secretary Wes Streeting told Laura Kuenssberg that Elon Musk and other social media bosses could do more to protect women on their platforms. Streeting claimed Musk’s criticism was ‘ill-judged and ill-founded’, and said that Starmer and Phillips had done more than most others in their professional careers to lock up sexual predators.
Nigel Farage: ‘I believe in free speech, even if what people say is offensive’
Kuenssberg also spoke to Reform leader Nigel Farage. Elon Musk has publicly declared support for Reform, who claim to have surpassed the Conservatives in membership numbers. Kuenssberg asked Farage if it was acceptable for someone with Musk’s platform to say such ‘provocative’ claims against British politicians. Farage claimed that ‘those on the left’ had thrown similar insults at the right ‘for many decades’, and said that if it was found Starmer had chosen not to prosecute the case against grooming gangs ‘for fear of what it would do to community relations’, then he is open to be criticised. Kuenssberg pointed out that Starmer had put in place specialist prosecutors to deal with the problem. Farage suggested that there had been ‘no big, full, national public inquiry’, and did not explicitly distance himself from Musk’s comments, saying ‘real friends… agree to agree, and sometimes they agree to disagree’.
Chris Philp: ‘Labour controlled local authorities’ to blame for grooming gangs cover-up
On Sky News, Trevor Phillips asked Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp about the words of Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, who claimed that ‘to sustain order in multicultural Britain, the state… actively covered up’ crimes by ‘predominantly British-Pakistani men’. Philp suggested it wasn’t the Tory government who covered up the scandal, but Labour local authorities. Philp referenced former Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who has claimed that senior Labour figures told him not to mention ‘the ethnicity or religious bias of those perpetrators’. Philp argued that a ‘national, comprehensive’ inquiry is needed to expose ‘the awful truth about this scandal’. Phillips asked Philp if he agreed with the tone of Jenrick’s language, who spoke of the country ‘importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures who possess medieval attitudes towards women’. Philp said: ‘he will choose his words, I’ll choose mine’.
Samuel Kasumu: ‘Robert Jenrick has the potential to be the most divisive person in our political history’
Sitting on Laura Kuenssberg’s panel, former Conservative advisor Samuel Kasumu suggested that Robert Jenrick was ‘more ‘dangerous’ than Elon Musk or Nigel Farage. Kasumu claimed that Jenrick’s rhetoric ‘may result in some people… dying’ because of his ability to ‘incite hatred’, and said that Nigel Farage does not ‘cross the line’ in the way that Jenrick does. Kasumu added that Jenrick’s recent comments were ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unjustifiable’, and that they could lead to a ‘really terrible 2025 in this country’.
Wes Streeting: ‘You can’t just turn around 14 years of failure in six months’
Streeting was also asked about the government’s progress with the NHS. Kuenssberg pointed out that there was huge pressure on the NHS right now, with three times the normal number of patients in hospital with flu. Streeting said it was important to break the cycle of winter pressures becoming ‘annual winter crises’. He said improvements would take time, but pointed out that there had been no strikes this year for the first time in three years. The health secretary called again for NHS reform, and pleaded to viewers: ‘don’t always drag us to the short-term’, arguing for a national consensus to ‘stop social care being a party political football’.
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