Elon Musk, Free Speech, and the UK’s Pakistani Grooming Gangs

​The United Kingdom, birthplace of free speech, is still showing a disturbing trend towards censorship. Look no further than the heated debate over the UK’s grooming gangs, cabals of vile criminals that exploit young women. Though it has become unfashionable to voice basic facts in Britain, the truth is that 83 percent of defendants prosecuted for group-based child sexual exploitation had Muslim names.
 
That’s unfortunate, but true. And we need to be able to talk about it.
 
The Public Order Act of 1986 made it a statutory offense to use threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behavior, or to display any writing, sign, or other visible representation that is threatening, abusive, or insulting. In 2019, then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ushered in the adoption of a form of such threatening speech – “Islamophobia,” which is “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”
 
How far did the law go? In 2006, an Oxford man put that law to the test when he was arrested for calling a police horse “gay.” The absurdity of this and similar cases led to Parliament removing “insult” as a crime. But you can still be arrested in Britain for saying “the wrong thing” – or the right thing if you are factual. As Sadanand Dhume points out in the Wall Street Journal, even talking about Islamic men committing crimes is considered jumping on the “far-right bandwagon,” and is thus threatened as forbidden speech.
 
This is nonsense on stilts, designed to shut down discussion of any community with a minority of adults who are creating a problem. We cannot address the reality of, say, America’s Klu Klux Klan without implicating the minority of white men who join that organization. We should not pretend that immigrant- or ethnic-based criminal organizations, whether La Cosa Nostra or the Russian mob, don’t have an ethnic basis. And it is a fact that more than 1,400 girls in the town of Rotherham in Northern England were sexually exploited by a group of British men who were mostly of Pakistani descent.
 
Speaking about this should not be a crime. Yet one father of an abused girl was arrested by the police when he tried to persuade his daughter to leave a brothel. Another was forcefully told by local law enforcement to quiet down about his daughter’s abuse, or else he might cause the community to “erupt.”
 
At the red-hot center of controversy is Elon Musk, who used X to criticize Prime Minister Kier Starmer in harsh terms for his purported failure to fully investigate and prosecute these crimes when he served as the UK’s director of public prosecutions. This prompted UK Justice Minister Heidi Alexander to talk about strengthening sanctions against “misleading and inflammatory statements” in the Online Safety Act, which goes fully into effect this year.
 
Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Reform movement, said Musk had used "very tough terms” about Prime Minister Starmer, but that: “In public life, tough things get said. They get said by both sides of the debate.” Farage said he believed in free speech:
 
“… even if what people say is offensive, if you find it offensive, if most people find it offensive. This man [Musk] happens to be the richest man in the world, but equally, the fact that he’s bought Twitter now actually gives us a place where we can have a proper open debate about many things … We may find it offensive, but it's a good thing, not a bad thing.”
 
In the United States Mark Zuckerberg has recently ended fact-checking by Facebook’s resident arbiters of “truth.” But in London, Prime Minister Starmer seems poised to go for more linguistic crackdowns. One outsider’s perspective in the New Indian Times accurately described the situation:
 
“Many social media videos show British police arresting people holding anti-Hamas placards while violent protestors calling for the death of Jews march free on the roads. British woke culture has a lot to answer for.” 
 
Perhaps Labourites need to break out their Milton. The poet declared: “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

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