Billionaire BS: How can Britain Stop Musk’s Disinformation?
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Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I'm Coco Card.
And I'm Nish Kumar, and we're back. What the hell was that?
My air horn sound.
It sounded like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Oh, look at you.
It sounded like da-da-da-da.
Look at you, da-da-da-da.
Isn't that a disco tune? I'm really showing my lack of cultural awareness.
Da-da-da-da.
Nish, it sounds like you've had a pretty eventful new year. Let me read you a headline from GB News. Nish Kumar sparks BBC hootenanny switch-off threats with unnecessary politics swipe. Hugely unfunny. What happened?
I don't really know what to say about these people anymore. I have no interest in engaging with them. There was just a section of the British press that enjoys soiling itself for attention.
OK, well, let me fill the audience in on what GB News was so upset by. So Jules Holland asked you if there was anything you wanted to look back on. And you said, well, the Conservative Party lost the election and I was rock hard for a week, Jules. And at 39, that's quite hard to come by.
Am I lying? I'm 39. My erections are not what they once were. Anyway, straight into politics. This week, Elon Musk has turned his BS rate up to 11 and aimed it squarely at Westminster. He spent his Christmas break making an escalating series of misleading claims against Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Labour government. But what else are you going to do over Christmas when none of your children will speak to you? The most incendiary of his claims is that members of grooming gangs who systematically raped girls were not prosecuted by Keir Starmer when he led the Crown Prosecution Service.
Now, like any good conspiracy theory, there is a kernel of truth in this. In 2009, the CPS dismissed some cases in Rotherham when CPS lawyers, in all their wisdom, decided that the victims would not be reliable or credible to a court.
But in the five years that Starmer was head of the CPS, he actually made significant changes that led to cases not being dismissed in the future. And the 2009 dismissal of cases was overturned.
Also, we should say this is not a news story. These abuse cases, they go back to 1997. There have been several inquiries across the country and there was a national inquiry led by Alexis Jay. The recommendations she made in 2022 were not implemented, however, by the Conservative government.
Here is Alexis Jay reacting to the Musk route on Radio 4's Today programme with Nick Robinson.
I've heard very little in the public discourse that's taken place in the last few days, if you could dignify it with that description, that have mentioned children and the appalling and lifelong effects that child sexual abuse can have on people.
So those who are whipping this up are not focusing on what matters, on the victims themselves?
Mainly that's the case in what I have heard of the debate.
I mean, that is the voice we need to hear more of. Actual experts on violence against women and girls, like committed champions of victims. Instead, all we get is men with their puffed out chests. They're just arguing like, no, I'm the protector of women and girls. No, I'm the protector of women and girls. Like women and girls are being let down across the board in this country and all across the world. It's just, it's really, really upset me. And she's absolutely right. We should be hearing the victims' voices much more in this.
One of the survivors of the grooming gangs in Telford, who has since worked with the council to transform their approach to child exploitation, said this. I feel like our voices, all of our hard work has been twisted and our experiences have have been exploited for who knows what reason. Is it for politics or radical racist reasons? I feel really proud of what we've done, but for the first time today, I sat down and cried about not feeling we have done enough.
I mean, how chilling is that? How horrendous is that? I mean, surviving what they went through, that was already enough. That was already monumental. And now to actually hear that a victim is saying, oh, did we not do enough? It's ingrained, it's endemic, the misogyny. And I would just say, because I've been thinking a lot about this,
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