Keir Starmer: soft on grooming gangs, tough on Grok

After creeps began using X’s AI tool, Grok, to edit images of women and even children, undressing them and putting them in bikinis, UK prime minister Keir Starmer quickly went on the offensive. He attacked the social-media platform and its owner, Elon Musk, and called the images ‘disgraceful’ and ‘disgusting’. Starmer has even given his full backing to an Ofcom investigation that could lead to an effective ban on X’s operations in the UK. A new law against creating ‘non-consential intimate images’ is even set to be fast-tracked through parliament.

All this is being done, supposedly, in the name of protecting women and girls. Yet it’s not hard to suspect an ulterior motive. Starmer’s personal loathing of Musk is well known, as is the PM’s contempt for X’s relatively liberal speech policies.

More striking still, while Starmer has been quick to rage against Grok’s grim pixels, his response to far greater, real-world threats to women and girls has been found desperately wanting.

Take the grooming-gangs scandal. On that stain on modern Britain, he barely managed a whisper of condemnation until Musk himself thrust it back into public consciousness at the beginning of last year. Even then, Starmer was initially reluctant to say very much at all. At the time, he accused those calling for a national inquiry into the scandal of jumping on a ‘far-right bandwagon’.

For decades, thousands of vulnerable working-class girls had been systematically abused by groups of largely Pakistani Muslim men in towns and cities across the UK. Their plight was ignored and worse by social services, the police and local councils. Many are still waiting for proper justice to this day. Yet Starmer had the temerity to accuse those drawing attention to it of playing to a far-right choir.

Since then, his government has launched a national inquiry into the scandal. But to say it’s not going well is an understatement. Finding someone to chair it has proved painful. And in October, several grooming-gang victims on the liaison panel, charged with advising the fledgling inquiry, resigned over fears the inquiry’s remit was being diluted to the point of meaninglessness. The government’s whole approach to the grooming-gangs scandal has been characterised by delays, dodgy dismissals and zero urgency.

And how did Starmer’s government respond to public concerns over so-called migrant hotels? These came to the boil last summer in Epping, when protesters gathered outside the Bell Hotel after one of its residents, Ethiopian asylum-seeker Hadush Kebatu, was arrested for sexually assaulting a woman and a 14-year-old girl. Incredibly, although Labour’s officially stated policy is that all migrant hotels should be closed, the Home Office nevertheless fought tooth and nail, using every legal power at its disposal, to keep the Bell Hotel open.

What’s more, on Labour’s watch, illegal migration has soared. Scores of unvetted men have flowed into the country, often with disastrous results for women and girls in particular. Yet Starmer has shown no urgency in responding to the migrant crime wave.

In light of all this, the PM’s impassioned attack on Musk’s X for its admittedly vile deepfakes rings more than a little hollow. He is happy to blast Musk and X for AI bikini pics, but was desperate to turn a blind eye to the industrial scale of abuse of vulnerable working-class girls. When Starmer says his crusade against X is just about protecting women and girls, there can’t be a single soul in the country who believes him.

Stephen Tucker is a spiked intern.