When Donald Trump lands in the UK for his “unprecedented second state visit”, according to some authoritative reports, he will press Keir Starmer on the free speech crisis in Britain. Apparently, he “berated” Starmer on the issue when the pair hung out at the US president’s Turnberry golf course a few weeks ago.
In which case, the prime minister should whip out his smartphone and show him a clip of Elon Musk addressing the Unite the Kingdom rally via video link.
It’s hard to pick the juiciest bit of the seditious virtual address made by the famous billionaire. But there were some passages that, were roles reversed, the Trump administration wouldn’t appreciate being aired to a big, angry crowd in Washington DC, and would probably lead to Musk being approached by officers of ICE and sent back to South Africa, if not Guantanamo Bay.
In case you missed it, this is probably the most chilling and insidious line – a virtual invitation to violence. Musk told the 100,000-plus attendees: “My appeal is to British common sense, which is to look carefully around you and say: ‘If this continues, what world will you be living in?’
“This is a message to the reasonable centre, the people who ordinarily wouldn’t get involved in politics, who just want to live their lives. They don’t want that; they’re quiet, they just go about their business.
“My message is to them: if this continues, that violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice. You’re in a fundamental situation here. Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. That’s the truth, I think.”
There you go. The Metropolitan Police, it should be noted, did not turn the big screens off, and there is no suggestion that Tommy Robinson or anyone else will be prosecuted under our public order laws. Nor will there be any legal consequences for Musk banging on again about the “woke mind virus”, whatever that is; nor for his call for a “dissolution of parliament” and “revolutionary government change”, presumably forced by popular pressure.
He seems quite unaware that the House of Commons, freely and fairly elected a little over a year ago, can dissolve itself through a majority vote, and is not the prisoner of what he calls “some bureaucracy that doesn’t care”.
Starmer, then, should gently suggest to the US president that a country that allows for that level of stirring is not the European mirror image of North Korea. If he was being mischievous – and unwise – Starmer might also ask Trump if he raised the state of free speech in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea when he last visited Kim Jong Un.
This illustrates the biggest problem with Musk, which is that, for all his (albeit disputed) brilliance as a visionary entrepreneur, he doesn’t understand democratic politics, and he certainly doesn’t comprehend the nature of a pluralistic democracy.
This is not the first time that Musk has made some unhelpful and ignorant interventions into British democracy. During the Southport riots last year, his X (Twitter) platform failed to close down malicious and false rumours presented as fact that the murderer was a Muslim asylum seeker straight off a small boat. He thinks that Britain’s laws on public order and contempt of court are illegitimate – even though they were passed by parliament and upheld by an independent judiciary.
Incitement to racial hatred and to riot may not bother Musk, but he doesn’t live in Britain – and, frankly, it’s none of his damn business.
All he has done is to encourage fear and violence – “civil war is inevitable”, “Britain is going full Stalin”, “the people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state”. Oh, the irony.
The former Tory chair Chris Patten, a wise man, recently summed up Musk as an “awful man”, whose activities in the public sphere, like those of other tech oligarchs, are aimed at promoting their businesses.
This means constantly destabilising any regimes – such as the present British government with its Online Safety Act – and the European Commission, which seek to regulate them in the public interest. They’d prefer a more pliant alternative and are unashamed about boosting parties that would lay off AI and monopolies.
There’s some truth in that, but in Musk’s case, it is also driven by his own adolescent beliefs and attitudes.
This is a man, after all, who thinks Nigel Farage isn’t extreme enough, and was happy to give two Nazi- or Roman-style salutes at Trump’s victory rally. He is obsessed with the trans issue, not least because of the estrangement of his own trans daughter, and believes in the “white genocide” conspiracy in South Africa. His support for the German AfD party is, if anything, even more emphatic than his enthusiasm for Tommy Robinson, and just as disturbing, given that many believe the AfD is a genuinely neo-Nazi organisation.
In truth, there ain’t that much that democratic nations can do about Musk precisely because they actually do believe in free speech and the right of people, including Musk, to be heard. He should not be closed down and cancelled, even were it possible to do so.
Ideally, he should be ridiculed and dismissed, and he has recently become his own worst enemy in that regard; his extremism, catastrophising and clowning around undermine his own arguments, his credibility and sales of Tesla “swastikas”.
He may have gone down well with the Robinsonites, but the “moderate” British people he addressed have no use for his juvenile fever dreams about civil war. The best thing he could do, for his own sake as well, is just to butt out.
If he wants to do something helpful, he could pay for a massive fleet of portaloos for the next Unite the Kingdom march. The consequence of emptying more than 100,000 brimming bladders left Londoners pretty peed off, I can tell you.