UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokeswoman said the Labor leader would “disagree completely” with comments made online by Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage and backed by Elon Musk, Bloomberg reports.
This is the second time in 8 days that the prime minister’s office has pushed back against remarks by the billionaire.
Over the weekend, Musk used the social media platform X, which he owns, to describe as “messed up” the arrests in Britain relating to riots sparked by a July 29 attack on a children’s dance class that left three young girls dead. He also responded “yes” to a post that suggested Starmer was putting people in prison “who commit thought crimes on @X” and responded “true” to a post by Farage calling the prime minister “the biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history.”
Starmer’s spokeswoman refused to comment on Musk’s other posts, telling reporters on Monday that she wouldn’t get into a back-and-forth on individual comments.
Downing Street has sought to avoid a war of words with the world’s richest man over his posts on X, and Starmer himself has steered clear of responding directly to Musk’s posts. Instead, he’s used his spokespersons to respond, with a spokesman saying a week ago that “there’s no justification” for Musk’s verdict on X that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK.
The riots were triggered by false claims that a Muslim asylum-seeker was responsible for the brutal murder of the three girls in Southport, northwest England. This led to widespread disorder as far-right activists attacked mosques, the police and facilities related to immigration.
As arrests and prosecutions mount, and Starmer’s administration threatens potentially tougher action on the spread of online misinformation, Musk has responded by comparing the UK to the Soviet Union and accusing Britain of “two-tier policing.” The billionaire has also amplified misinformation, including sharing a post by the co-leader of Britain First, a far-right party, that showed a falsified news article about the UK considering building “detainment camps” in the Falkland Islands for those arrested in the riots.
The government is now considering steps to harden the regulation of platforms like X owned by Musk, including whether to re-introduce a previously removed clause in the Online Safety Act to define and regulate “legal but harmful” content.
