Will Labour ban X?
A backbench MP has mooted blocking British users from accessing Elon Musk’s platform.

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The British Labour government’s fury with Elon Musk has reached boiling point. Last week, UK prime minister Keir Starmer hit out at the X owner, accusing Musk of ‘crossing a line’ with his relentless tweets about Britain’s grooming-gangs scandal. Now, a Labour MP has gone even further, suggesting that the UK could ban X entirely should Musk keep up his attacks on the British government.
Speaking on PoliticsJOE on Friday, Darlington MP Lola McEvoy claimed that Musk’s comments on grooming gangs had been ‘dangerous’ to Britain’s ‘parliamentary democracy’. When asked what the government could do about this, she suggested that social-media companies should be banned outright in the UK if they are found to have fallen foul of the Online Safety Act. ‘If these big platforms that have huge users don’t comply… then they have no right to be accessed in this country’, she argued.
🚨LABOUR MP THREATENS TO BAN 𝕏 / Twitter 🚨
"If these big platforms that have huge users don't comply with the online safety act then they have no right to be accessed in this country" – Lola McEvoy MP
The Labour party are the new fascists.
They must be stopped. pic.twitter.com/6BqB9AXlBO— Basil the Great (@Basil_TGMD) January 10, 2025
Needless to say, banning X would put the UK in some truly pitiful company. Britain would join the likes of North Korea, Iran and Russia. The only democracy to have banned X is Brazil, although access was restored after several months.
It would be easy to dismiss McEvoy’s comments as the kneejerk response of a lowly backbench MP, with little sway over the government. But she is hardly alone in Labour in suffering from Musk Derangement Syndrome. Last week, the Daily Mirror reported that a counter-extremism unit within the Home Office would step up its surveillance of Musk’s tweets, as officials consider him to pose one of the ‘highest harm risks’ to national security. At the weekend, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock branded Musk ‘an enemy of the UK’. The belief that something must be done about Musk clearly extends to the highest levels in Labour.
Whatever one thinks about Elon Musk’s intemperate interventions into British politics, a ban on X would be an astonishingly authoritarian over-reaction. Labour’s loathing of Musk has brought its tyrannical instincts to the fore.
Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.
Picture by: Getty.
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