British Prime Minister Keir Starmer fight back at Elon Musk on Monday after the world’s richest man repeatedly made a series of inflammatory accusations against the country’s leaders over his government’s record on the nation’s long-running child-grooming scandal.

Musk has accused the UK leader of being “complicit in the rape of Britain” on his X platform and has repeatedly raised claims without evidence that Starmer deliberately refused to prosecute a childminder while he was the country’s attorney general.

In the past 48 hours alone, Musk has called for Starmer to be jailed and posted a poll to his X followers asking if “America should free the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”

Although the British leader did not directly name Musk, he widely condemned what he said was the spread of false information.

“Those who spread lies and misinformation as far and wide as possible, they don’t care about the victims. They care about themselves,” Starmer told reporters at a press conference on Monday.

Musk’s claims point to a years-long scandal in Britain over the state’s response to child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, mainly made up of Pakistani men, who targeted vulnerable young girls in several towns across northern England.

A 2014 government-commissioned report found that around 1,400 vulnerable children were targeted and sexually abused in the city of Rotherham – the country’s largest single case of child grooming – between 1997 and 2013. The report detailed how children aged from the age of 11 were victims of human trafficking, rape and other forms of physical attack.

That report harshly criticized “collective failures of political and officer leadership” and stated that “the mounting evidence that child sexual exploitation is a serious problem in Rotherham” had been ignored and even suppressed by authorities.

Starmer was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, a role that effectively made him the country’s chief prosecutor when child grooming scandals came to light.

On Monday, Starmer vigorously defended his prosecution record.

“I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian groom gang in this particular case … it was the first of its kind. We changed, or I changed, the whole approach of the prosecution, because I wanted to challenge, and I did, the myths and stereotypes that prevented for those victims to be heard,” said the prime minister.

“When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases prosecuted,” Starmer added.

A 2013 British parliamentary report praised Starmer’s handling of child sexual exploitation and child grooming groups.

“Mr Starmer sought to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions … his response should provide a model for other agencies involved in tackling localized grooming,” the report said. .

Starmer, who took office after Labour’s landslide election victory last summer, has so far resisted pressure from critics to launch a new national review into such historic child sexual abuse, saying there have already been many national and local reviews on the issue.

Responding to those comments this morning, Musk posted on X that the “real reason” Starmer isn’t conducting a national audit is that it would “show how Starmer has repeatedly ignored the pleas of an overwhelming number of girls and their parents, in order to secure political support.”

Musk, a key adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, has been embroiled in a row with Starmer’s centre-left Labor government since far-right rioters caused chaos across the UK last summer.

Musk called Britain a “police state” at the time after Starmer’s government aggressively prosecuted those involved in the riots.

Over the past week, Musk has also pushed for the release of far-right activist Tommy Robinson, a central figure in shaping last summer’s violence.

Robinson — whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — is a long-time far-right agitator who led the English Defense League, a group that British police authorities have linked to the original violent protest that sparked nationwide riots in August.

Robinson is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.

The very public quarrel with the British government is only the latest in a series of interventions by Musk in the internal politics of key American allies in Europe.

In an op-ed for the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag published last month, Musk has publicly supported the far rightanti-immigrant the AfD party in the upcoming elections in the country in February.

“The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the last glimmer of hope for this country,” Musk wrote in his translated commentary.

European leaders have been vocal in their criticism of the tech billionaire’s meddling and have publicly expressed concern about Musk’s influence given his ownership of the X platform.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that Musk was directly interfering in German affairs.

Ten years ago, who could have imagined that we were told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and directly intervene in elections, including those in Germany, Macron said in a wide-ranging foreign policy speech.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere also said on Monday that Musk’s influence was worrying.

“I find it worrisome that a man with enormous access to social media and enormous economic resources is so directly interfering in the internal affairs of other countries,” Stoere told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, according to the Reuters news agency.

“This is not how things should be between democracies and allies,” Store reportedly said.

contributed to this report.