The Deep Fears Stoking British Fascism…

Musk aims to radicalise Reform’s base and degrade our democracy

I don’t usually do trigger warnings, but in this post I am going to be talking about gang rape, genocidal thought and fascism, and if you’re one of the many people justifiably freaked out by Elon Musk’s attack on British democracy, I apologise for adding to your anxiety. It first appeared as paid contact on my Substack Conflict & Democracy. Here goes…

“If someone cracks a whip across your mother’s face, would you say to him ‘Thank You! He is after all a human being’? One who does such a thing is not a man — he is a brute!”

Those are the words of the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, in his 1929 pamphlet Those Damned Nazis. He continues:

“How many worse things has the Jew inflicted upon our mother Germany and still inflicts upon her! He has debauched our race, sapped our energy, undermined our customs and broken our strength…The Jew is the graphic demon of decay.”

I found the quote in Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. It you can stomach it, here’s an English translation of the original pamphlet, hosted at Calvin University.

I’m starting with Goebbels — not with Musk, Farage and Robert Jenrick — because I want to make a point about how fascist ideology works. It’s a point that liberals and social democrats, today as in the 1930s, just can’t seem to get their heads around:

Fascism is an appeal to the subconscious, and thus has sex — and sexual violence — as its ever-present theme.

Anyone trying to fight it purely at the level of logic, reason and evidence is going to lose, warned Reich.

Anyone too squeamish to listen carefully to what fascists actually say — how they appeal subliminally and sub-textually to fantasies of rape, cuckoldry and ritual murder — will never understand the tsunami of hate they can unleash. (Again, if you can stomach it, here’s a summary of how that worked for Nazi anti-Semitism).

Fast forward to 2025, the assault on British democracy and the Labour government that Musk has instigated, and the collusion with it by the Tory leadership, and we are most definitely going to need “mass psychology” to fight back.

Musk’s crazed outbursts…

In the past 7 days Elon Musk, using his giant reach on the platform X, has:

• Claimed that Labour minister Jess Phillips is a “rape genocide apologist” and should be jailed
• Claimed the Keir Starmer deliberately organised a cover-up of “Pakistani rape gangs” while head of the CPS
• Claimed that former PM Gordon Brown “sold” the victims “for votes”
• Offered support and money to the Reform Party and intimating that it should ally with jailed fascist leader Tommy Robinson
• Called for Robinson to be freed from jail, where he is serving a term for the crime of contempt, to which he pleaded guilty
• Claimed the UK is about to experience a civil war
• Called on the King to dissolve parliament and annul the elected government — ie to stage an anti-democratic palace coup
• Reposted extreme Islamophobic and racist messaging from X accounts linked to the far right
• Called for Nigel Farage to be replaced as leader of Reform UK, after he refused a rapprochement with Robinson.

And he is not done with these gratuitous libels yet. Much of his output is delusional and factually wrong — and seems to be the product of Musk’s self-radicalisation and ignorance.

But it has initiated a pile on against Starmer by the right-wing press, which in turn has set the agenda of broadcasters and — most disgracefully — triggered a post by Robert Jenrick, the Tory shadow justice secretary, claiming that the grooming gang scandal is the direct result of immigration policy.

My #1 piece of advice to progressives who are rightly fearful of the outcomes — in terms of radicalisation, incitement and potential violence — is do not engage publicly with Musk or his supporters. There is a ton of research that shows nothing can be gained from doing so.

Neither facts nor logic are much use against the hard-core supporters of the far right. Fascism is a “political religion”, co-created in real time out of people’s fears and fantasies, and — as I outlined in How to Stop Fascism– impervious to reason.

But it is time for a public discussion among progressive parties and organisations about our strategy in the face of this attack — in particular because the Labour front bench, which is bound by the Nolan principles and by its duty to run law enforcement impartially, cannot effectively both govern and run a party-based fightback.

In the past48 hours Starmer has come out fighting, defending Phillips in robust terms, pointing out the damaging nature of Musk’s lies and correctly identifying the far right nature of the attack. There was more in the Sun today, while Gordon Brown has issued a strong, legally-worded refutation. And today Starmer eviscerated Tory leader Kemi Badenoch for her bandwagon jumping: showing that she had never raised the issue of grooming gangs in all her time in parliament.

But we, collectively, as a civil society, will have to do more than this. Because Musk, the US MAGA movement and their allies among the thousands of Brits who joined violent racist riots last summer, are not finished.

Why the grooming gang issue is back

The issue around which the far right has suddenly mobilised has been in the news for more than a decade: the grooming and rape of vulnerable girls and young women by gangs of men, leading to numerous high-profile trials.

It is without doubt that a substantial proportion — though by no means all — of these gangs were composed of South Asian men, often of Pakistani origin and therefore Muslim — and that in some cases both police and local authorities downplayed the ethnicity of the perpetrators for fear of stoking community tensions.

The crimes were horrific and large scale, and though for example in Rotherham the inquiry identified 1,400 potential victims, the court process necessarily failed to provide either an precise number — or to provide redress to all of them.

It is also without doubt that the majority of people convicted of child rape in Britain are white, and that the per capita prevalence of the offence is higher among white people than it is among Asian people.

However, much of the data cited in official reports is partial or out of date, especially when it comes to ethnicity. And some reports have been reluctant to draw a straight line between ethnicity and the “grooming gang” phenomenon, in one case preferring to state that the common denominator was involvement in the “night time economy” — ie taxi driving.

This has given impetus to the conspiracy theory that child rape offences by Pakistani/Muslim men are being under-reported, under-prosecuted and deliberately hidden — and that there may be, as Musk claimed, “hundreds of thousands” of victims of this kind of abuse alone. [There are, as Starmer stated today, possibly half a million children at risk of child sexual abuse, much of it committed by family members in the home].

Over the past decade grooming gangs have been the justified subject of press investigations — but if we look at the salience of the search term “grooming gangs” on Google Trends, it is barely present until 2016 and then spikes slightly with every trial, investigation or official report.

It spiked in April 2023, when Rish Sunak launched a grooming gang taskforce, and Home Secretary Suella Braverman made the claim that “the perpetrators are groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani”. It spiked again in August 2024, as a wave of Islamophobia swept Britain alongside the riots sparked by the Southport murders.

Today, according to Google Trends, it is 20x more salient than it has ever been (100% vs 5% for all previous insances). That is almost entirely due to Musk’s use of his own platform to drive the story into the British media, who have compliantly followed his agenda — including the BBC.

The trigger was the demand by Oldham Council –the site of one of the worst cases — for a national public inquiry into the gangs, and Phillips’ refusal to launch one.

Phillips — a high-profile campaigner on sexual and domestic violence against women and girls — pointed out that all previous inquiries had been organised by local government, and that numerous national investigations had taken place, most recently reporting in 2022.

After that, a deluge of disinformation and lies was pumped out by far-right media platforms and social media accounts, constructing the following narrative. I give it in its full, gory and subtextual detail:

• The rape gangs are part of a plan to eradicate white people in Britain (the Great Replacement/White Genocide theory, which Musk has repeatedly pushed)
• Police, the courts and councils covered up the phenomenon due to wokeness and collusion with the replacement project
• Keir Starmer as head of the CPS conspired to avoid charging the perpetrators
• Labour is avoiding a national public inquiry now because it would reveal (a) its own councillors’ complicity in the cover ups; (b) Starmer’s alleged role in them; © it would complete Labour’s political divorce from its Muslim voting base.
• Labour is stigmatising justifiably concerned people as “far right”.

Whatever the argument you think you’re facing, this is the real conspiracy theory we are up against.

It is just as virulent as the QAnon myth and the Pizzagate theory that preceded it. It has a life of its own and will lead to deadly consequences unless combated intelligently. And here’s why:

That some white working class girls were raped brutally by gangs of Muslim men speaks to the subconscious fear among far-right inclined people that all Muslim men want to rape all white girls — and that it’s part of a plan to “replace” white people in Europe

I do not need to spell out where this narrative will lead if it is not countered. It will lead where it led in the 1930s with Goebbels and the Jews.

But as with the Nazis, the perverse fact is that gang rape, and the celebration of male sexual violence against young, working-class and vulnerable women — are actually a core theme of the porn consumed legally online — porn which is celebrated and even produced by far right misogynists.

And as Hope Not Hate point out:

“There have been at least 20 [EDL] members and supporters convicted of child sexual exploitation offences. At least 10 of these were active in the EDL while Lennon was still leading it, and we are yet to find a single condemnation from Lennon.”

Until people in public life understand the morass of evil content that available to men online — with easy access to depictions of genocide, rape and torture, and their admixture into barely disguised narratives around race — we will always under-estimate the mobilising power of the sexual subtext. Not for nothing did Musk, for example, remove almost all barriers to porn distribution on his X platform this year.

The legitimate sources of grievance, and basis for future action should be that:

• a massive injustice was perpetrated against vulnerable women and girls;
• numerous local and national inquires held under the Conservative government failed to provide the victims with redress;
• we have no comprehensive account of why police and local councils systematically failed the female victims, only that they did so;
• there is no comprehensive historic data on the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

In light of this, Starmer is right to say there is little point in launching a new, national public inquiry, and that the best thing to do is get on with implementing the recommendations of the last one.

But the fears the far right are playing on will linger in the public consciousness until there is a decisive resolution on compensation and redress.

The shameful Tory response

Some high-profile liberal Conservatives have defended Starmer and Phillips, denounced Musk and defended their party’s own record in office — for example creating a task force that has, since 2023, arrested more than 100 perpetrators.

However, the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch issued a classic dog-whistle response:

“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.”

She refused to explain what “join the dots” might mean. But her colleague Robert Jenrick, however, was not so shy. He posted:

“For decades the most appalling crimes from predominantly British-Pakistani men were legalised and actively covered up to prevent disorder.”

“The rule of law was abandoned to sustain the myth that diversity is our strength, destroying the lives of thousands of vulnerable white working class girls in the process.”

“The scandal started with the onset of mass migration. Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here. And after 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we now have entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicide for some MPs to confront this. This scandal shows why we must end it.”

This text deserves serious analysis because it is a clear departure from all previous Conservative politics on migration, and by implication on Islam, to date.

First, let’s note that neither Badenoch nor Jenrick mentions Muslims — but I can tell you from experience that when right-wing Conservatives discuss this matter in private, the word Islam is all they use. “Alien cultures with medieval attitudes to women” means, in Tory-speak, Islam.

Jenrick claims that the brutal gang rape of children “was legalised”. By whom — since his party was in power since 2010?He claims that the rule of law “was abandoned” in order to promote diversity. Again by whom? He dates the “experiment” of mass immigration back 30 years — which bizarrely takes us to 1994. Why then?

Pakistani immigration to Britain began for economic reasons in the 1950s, peaked in the 1960s and has since then consisted largely of family reunification (marriages to people from Pakistan). Jenrick could, of course, be referring to arrival of Muslim refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Kosovo and the Middle East — but this was not a policy “experiment” but a mandatory outcome of our signature on the Refugee Convention.

So what he’s close to implying is that the existence of 3.9 million Muslim British people is the problem.

Jenrick’s response is, in one way, a much bigger problem than Musk’s intervention. It speaks to the Islamophobia that has emerged among a wing of the Tory right, which insists “Islam does not integrate”, and has begun looking for ways both to limit specifically Muslim immigration and to deport British Muslims (the Shamima Begum case, though atypical, is seen as a potential precedent for deporting others born here).

I have little doubt that the Tories have crossed this line because of the sudden change in voting behaviour among British Muslims during the Gaza war; Muslims voted for religious sectarian independents, pro-Corbyn leftists and the Green Party in large numbers in 2024.

In the past, the strategy across all parties was to prosecute terrorists, isolate radical Islamists and build strong bonds with mainstream voices in the Muslim community. I sense the willingness to do this has now vanished among Tory leadership circles.

The bigger the wedge they can drive between all Muslim voters and mainstream parties, and the greater the climate of fear they create among non-Muslims, the more they gain electorally. But it is a dangerous departure.

How Musk’s narrative maps to fascism

In How to Stop Fascism I showed how the modern “fascist thought architecture” consists of five linked proposals:

1. Non-white immigration is a planned “invasion” designed to eradicate the white Christian peoples of Europe, North America and Australiasia;
2. Its collaborators are human rights lawyers, liberals, feminists and gays (who suppress the white birth rate);
3. The plot originated in the turn of Marxism from class to identity in the 1960s (the Cultural Marxism myth), and is thus intimately connected with the vogue for “wokeness” among young people and in academia;
4. The immediate task is to “prepare”: spread the myth of the Great Replacement, make lists of those to be targeted for “remigration” or in the case of liberals repression, and to use violence symbolically, rather than in the insurrectionary way Hitler and Mussolini used it.
5. Day X: The whole crisis will end with a global ethnic civil war, from which racially pure rival empires will emerge, run according to Carl Schmitt’s famous principle that “large spaces need single governments” and that only monocultures work.

I argued that, during the past 15 years, both Conservatism and right wing populism have abandoned their organic and instinctive forms of racism (“we don’t like the smell of their food, they don’t integrate” etc) and remoulded their arguments around the above, coherent, fascist logic.

Like all surges of fascist propaganda, the Musk-driven furore about grooming gangs has been constructed around this familiar logical core.

Musk, for example, called the grooming gangs “genocidal”. That speaks to point #1. Targeting Phillips (a feminist) and Starmer (a human rights lawyer) speaks to point #2. Blaming wokeness — in the police force, the courts, and Jenrick’s unnamed “they” (which logically has to be Cameron, May, Johnson and Sunak) — speaks to point #3. Musk’s prediction of civil war speaks, of course, to the Day X myth. So it is all there.

And when the inevitable spike in Islamophobic attacks happens, or violence against MPs targeted by alt-right media, it will — no matter how serious — also be symbolic: just as with the anti-refugee riots over the summer, it will be designed to signal to the Muslim and wider south Asian community — “this is what is coming to you on Day X”.

Where the right-wing populists and fascist differ is, of course, their attitude to violence, the rule of law and democracy. The public disagreements between Farage on the one hand, and Musk, Robinson and the online accounts Musk amplifies, amounts to whether they glorify civil war or not, and whether they seek, for now, to operate within the rules of parliamentary democracy.

How can we deradicalize the conversation?

The right wing media has jumped on the clash between Musk and the Starmer administration because (a) it sells papers and (b) they believe it can be used to fuel wider destabilisation of Starmer’s government, attendant on stagnating growth, discontent over Budget measures and the usual slew of lurid rumours that newsrooms thrive on.

But the potential of this issue to radicalise large numbers of people — and incite violence — is real.

First, because the criminal justice and care systems did fail thousands of women and girls. Because of the nature of the crimes — where individual men convince vulnerable girls that they are their boyfriend, before passing them around networks to be raped — police culture saw some of the women as sex workers, or willing victims, and their families as irreparable law breakers.

Second, because even after numerous inquries, many victims have not had redress. Third, because there is no guarantee that it is not still happening.

So to remove the heat from the situation, and to protect the communities now being targeted, it falls to government, the police, the courts, the media and political parties to take action beyond what they’ve done already.

The IICSA report, published in 2022, considered the grooming gangs issue as one among ten sub-categories of child sexual abuse. Its findings were pretty comprehensive but its recommendations have largely remained unimplemented. Rectifying that is the first step.

But if you read IICSA through far right eyes, here is its weakness. After cataloguing the failure to collect statistics on the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators it states:

“The result of this lack of accurate and reliable data from police forces and local authorities, compounded by the lack of consistency about the definitions of ‘child sexual exploitation’ and ‘networks’ … is that the government and other organisations cannot know the current scale of child sexual exploitation by networks, or who is involved in these groups” (my emphasis).

That is the vacuum into which the far right conspiracy theory networks have jumped, both feet first.

Whatever happens to fill that vacuum has to happen swiftly. That probably means something less than a full public inquiry but something more than what has already been done.

So I think Labour should seek cross-party agreement to launch a new and urgent police and intelligence-led inquiry into current status of the organised grooming and rape of young girls.

It should be asked to look for patterns of ethnicity, employment, culture and class among both perpetrators and victims.

If the data is not good enough to provided quantitative answers, the inquiry could be qualitative, using case studies and recent trials to estimate the likely number of perpetrators, victims and the extent of harm.

Since there was clearly a systemic failure, and it took place under both Labour and Tory governments, there should be a high-profile compensation scheme launched, offering financial redress to the victims, many of whom have not and could not have their day in court.

We need those victims who want to be listened to, and who are not content with justice and redress so far, to be heard loud and clear.

On top of this we need political parties to stand with the vast majority of law abiding Muslim Brits who are just as appalled as everyone else is at the crimes perpetrated. The far right’s targeting of their community is one of the most blatant and dangerous witch-hunts I have ever witnessed, and is being conducted through the same subterranean messaging, dog-whistles and code words that inspired the August 2024 riots.

At some point the hard core of British fascism will decide the jails are too full, the police too busy, and the political elite to fractured to cope with a repeat of last August.

Once again: it’s time for a militant democracy

More broadly, we need to get very serious about fighting fascism. The manic levels of anger flying around the internet are probably nothing compared to those flying around in the pubs and bars of the real world.

In How To Stop Fascism I outlined three basic tasks of an anti-fascist movement:

• uniting the centre and the left in defence of democracy;
• using the state to repress the far right and defend the rule of law — including applying media regulations and laws on incitement forcefully; and
• promoting an anti-fascist ethos.

At present those in the the progressive space — liberalism, social democracy the green and nationalist parties and the left — are so locked in political rivalry that they won’t even talk to each other.

Meanwhile parts of the far left have adopted the bizarre approach of attacking Starmer rather than defending him against Musk, some even rushing onto far right news channels to denounce Phillips.

Maybe we will at some point get to the position the French Communist Party arrived at in 1934, when it stopped attacking the socialists and liberals as the main enemy and decided to unite with them as the only way to save democracy? Or maybe that’s too much to ask from the Leninist re-enactment groups.

At the same time Starmer’s government needs to demonstrate that it knows how to deal with extra-parliamentary incitement designed to undermine our democracy, whether it comes from far-right trolls in their bedrooms, or the richest man on earth.

Immediate implementation of the Online Safety Act, strengthening electoral law against foreign interference and summary use of the National Security Act 2023’s provisions against foreign disinformation would be a start.

In December, Ofcom — surely the most sluggish and myopic media regulator ever created — finally published its guidance on “illegal harms”. By my reckoning this makes X.com liable to carry out an annual risk assessment, nominate an individual legally responsible, provide a written risk assessment, show evidence of internal monitoring and assessment, adequately police monetisation schemes and demonstrate a content moderation policy that can swiftly take down illegal or harmful content.

I predict Musk will defy this guidance, as he tried to with similar laws in Brazil. Indeed, it is likely that some of Musk’s own content would fall foul of Ofcom’s rules, should the regulator ever get serious about implementing them.

But there is one more provision I think we urgently need to consider.

At present, the Elections and Elected Bodies Bill going through the Welsh Senedd has, against the wishes of the Labour majority, been amended to allow candidates to be disbarred if convicted of the offence of “deception” — ie deliberately publishing information they know to be untrue.

Creating a criminal offence of disinformation and barring candidates who commit such an offence would be a major addition to the defences of our democracy in an era when the big lie has, once again, become the fascist’s weapon of choice.

Thank you for reading. Please share and if you find it useful. The original post (£) is here if you want to support my writing.