Brown: No foundation to Musk child grooming claims

Gordon Brown has said allegations made by Elon Musk about how he dealt with child grooming gangs while prime minister are "a complete fabrication".

Musk shared online claims that the former Labour PM issued a circular to UK police forces effectively telling them not to prosecute rape gangs.

The multi-billionaire owner of X also claimed current Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was "deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes".

A spokesperson for Gordon Brown said there was "no basis" for the allegations made against him.

Musk started posting excerpts from official documents and shocking court transcripts from grooming gang trials after UK Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips denied Oldham Council's request for the Home Office to lead a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town.

He accused Starmer of being "complicit in the rape of Britain" during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) between 2008 and 2013, for failing to tackle the gangs of mostly Pakistani men who raped girls.

On Monday Musk, the world's richest man, then accused Brown of committing "an unforgivable crime against the British people" and said he "sold those little girls for votes" over his handling of grooming gangs while in office.

It was claimed that while Brown was prime minister, police officers were told not to intervene because child victims of the gangs had made a "lifestyle choice".

A spokesman for Brown - who served as MP for Dunfermline East then Kirkarldy and and Cowdenbeath from 1983 to 2015 - said it was a "complete fabrication" to suggest Brown was responsible.

"There is no basis for such allegations at all," he said.

"There is no foundation whatsoever for alleging that Mr Brown sent, approved or was in any way involved with issuing a circular or statement to the police because it did not happen.

"The original source of this allegations has expressly accepted Mr Brown was not involved at all," he added, referring to Nazir Afzal, the former chief prosecutor who brought the first convictions of a gang in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2011.

"Moreover, there is no evidence that such words or actions now attributed to him by Elon Musk have ever been used by Mr Brown, because he neither said nor did them.

"When it comes to the exploitation and abuse of children and young women by sex grooming gangs, the priority for all people in public life should be to secure justice for the survivors, punishment for the perpetrators, and action at local and national level to ensure that these kind of horrific crimes can never be allowed to happen again.

"But that collective endeavour is undermined when some individuals and media outlets instead propagate outright lies about the reasons that these crimes happened in the past."

Afzal, who went on to prosecute hundreds of men from child sex abuse gangs, said some police officers had wrongly interpreted Home Office guidance "to mean that lifestyle choice was a factor in whether or not victims were safeguarded".

On Monday Sir Keir defended his own record on tackling grooming gangs, saying he had dealt with the problem "head-on" as director of public prosecutions.

He said: "I reopened cases that had been closed and supposedly finished, I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang - in the particular case it was in Rochdale, but it was the first of its kind, there were many that then followed that format.

"We changed, or I changed, the whole prosecution approach, because I wanted to challenge and did challenge the myths and stereotypes that were stopping those victims being heard."

Alongside Musk's comments, senior Conservatives and Reform UK MPs have also spent the week calling for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called for a "full national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal" and defended shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick after he tweeted that "importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women" had led to the scandal.

In a post on X responding to criticism of Jenrick, Badenoch said: "We MUST be free to have tough conversations, no matter how difficult that may be to hear."