Who is Humza to accuse Musk of ‘inflaming racial tensions’?

Former Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf has had a pop at Elon Musk’s interventions into British politics. Yesterday, he accused the billionaire tech entrepreneur and owner of X of ‘inflaming racial tensions’.

This comes after Musk, fresh from dragging Britain’s grooming-gangs scandal back into the international spotlight, responded to a tweet drawing attention to the racist murder of schoolboy Kriss Donald 20 years ago – ‘First time I’ve heard of this’, tweeted Musk. The case in question occurred in March 2004, when 15-year-old Donald was abducted and killed by an Asian gang led by Imran Shahid in the Glasgow areas of Pollokshields – a part of the city that Yousaf represented as an MSP.

After Musk highlighted the murder, Yousaf accused him of focussing on ‘cases that involve only people of colour or Muslims’. Yousaf claimed that Musk’s motivation for doing so ‘is not compassion for the victims, but only to propagate far-right conspiracy’.

There is no doubt that Musk is an erratic and impulsive figure. He has certainly made countless inflammatory comments recently, such as claiming that civil war in Britain is ‘inevitable’ after this summer’s riots. This month he has even called for Americans to ‘liberate’ the British from their ‘tyrannical government’. But people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Yousaf himself has made plenty of public interventions that have undermined racial cohesion and inflamed community tensions.

Examples of Yousaf’s penchant for divisive identitarian rhetoric abound. During the BLM-mania in the summer of 2020, he delivered a speech in Holyrood complaining about the lack of people of colour in the Scottish parliament and government – even though at the time, he himself was Scotland’s justice secretary. Yousaf reeled off a list of the most senior positions in Scottish public life, barking ‘white’ after each one. He concluded that Scotland is ruled almost exclusively ‘by people who are white’. Which is hardly a surprise in a country that is 95 per cent white. But this seemed to have passed Yousaf by, so determined was he to stir up a sense of racial grievance.

Yousaf could have used his rise to the very top of Scottish politics to tell a positive story of social mobility and integration in Scotland. Only in an open and tolerant society could the son of first-generation Pakistani immigrants become first minister. But instead, he has frequently chosen to caricature British politics as a hotbed of anti-Muslim prejudice. In the past year alone, he has attacked the alleged Islamophobia and ‘toxicity’ of British public life. And he has complained how anti-Muslim prejudice has ‘poisoned’ politics in both the UK and throughout Europe. All this despite a report last year from the Institute for the Impact of Faith in Life (IIFL) confirming what many people already know – that the overwhelming majority (86 per cent) of British Muslims believe that Britain is a good place to live providing everyone with opportunities to progress and thrive.

Throughout his political career, Yousaf has done his utmost to sow fear and division in public life. He has relentlessly cast the majority of Brits racist and Islamophobic, while presenting himself as a victim. Yousaf may enjoy accusing the likes of Musk of ‘inflaming racial tensions’. But he should really remove the plank in his own eye before pointing to the speck in others.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.