Elon Musk says civil war is coming to the U.K. The British beg to differ.
“No one who has even a passing familiarity with the country would embarrass themselves by making such an absurd prediction,” one academic told NBC News.
LONDON — The world’s richest man, tech billionaire Elon Musk, has doubled down on comments that the U.K. in on the verge of "civil war" after more than a week of right-wing riots.
It is virtually impossible to find anyone in Great Britain who agrees with him.
Musk, who owns X and is known for picking fights online and retweeting far-right posts, was responding on his platform to a video allegedly showing rioters clashing with British police after days of far-right violence in several towns and cities across the country.
Tim Bale, a politics professor at England’s Queen Mary University of London, described such talk as “completely and utterly ridiculous,” in an email to NBC News on Tuesday.
“No one who has even a passing familiarity with the country would embarrass themselves by making such an absurd prediction,” he said.
Violence broke out in several towns and cities across the country after three young girls were killed in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in the seaside town of Southport in northwest England last week.
Amid false rumors that the suspect was a Muslim asylum-seeker, mobs have since attacked hotels housing asylum-seekers, as well as mosques, leading to hundreds of arrests. The suspect, Axel Rudakubana, 17, was born in the Welsh capital of Cardiff and lived for years in a village near Southport itself, police said.
Musk's remarks were quickly rebuffed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office, which said in a statement that such comments had “no justification.”
In a separate video message posted to X, Starmer said: “Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest. It is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities, so the full force of the law will be visited on all those who are identified as having taken part in these activities.”
Starmer didn't sway Musk, who responded: “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on *all* communities?” Directly tagging Starmer in a later post, he asked: “Why aren’t all communities protected in Britain?”
In recent years, Musk, whose daughter is transgender, has taken a hard-right turn into conservative politics and has been outspoken against policies designed to support that community. This month, he said he was pulling his businesses out of California to protest a new state law that bars schools from requiring that trans kids be outed to their parents.
The U.K. riots have become one of the first major challenges for Starmer, whose center-left Labour Party took power last month in a landslide election victory, ousting the Conservative Party, which after 14 years in government left office.
Starmer's government is facing a wide array of issues. While the U.K. is one of the richest nations in the world, its public health service is deeply troubled and faces a cost-of-living crisis. Damningly, the sixth-largest economy in the world has the highest levels of child poverty among richest countries, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.
The riots are an important reminder that a small minority of people are prepared to attack property and police in the name of “protecting our kids” from religious and ethnic minorities, Bale, the politics professor, said.
“They are, and I can’t stress this enough, a tiny minority of a population of 67 million,” he added. “In short, the riots may be no joke but civil war most definitely is.”
However ridiculous claims of civil war may be, Starmer and his government will have to grapple with claims propagated by the far-right that at the root of many of the U.K.’s problems are migrants and ethnic minorities.
Miles of column inches have also been devoted to the migrants illegally crossing the English Channel in inflatable boats in the U.K.'s right-wing press.
“This explosion of racist violence across the country is the result of years of far-right agitation,” anti-racism research group Hope Not Hate said in a statementabout Monday's unrest, adding that the riots are also the result of “a climate of anti-Muslim and anti-asylum-seeker hostility.”
Musk's comments were criticized by politicians on both the left and right.
Justice Minister Heidi Alexander told British broadcaster Sky News that “the language around civil war being inevitable is totally unjustified.”
And Neil Basu, the country’s former head of counterterrorism policing, called rioters who targeted a hotel housing asylum-seekers over the weekend “bullies and cowards.”
Rory Stewart, a former Conservative lawmaker who served as both environment and international development minister, also questioned the wisdom of Musk's comments.
“Since when have you claimed to understand British communities or British politics,” he wrote on X. “Exactly how many days have you spent with these communities? Does it ever occur to you that this might perhaps be the wrong time to sound off about a subject you know nothing about?”
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