On 13 September 2025, Elon Musk appeared by video at a far-right rally in London organised by Tommy Robinson. Beamed onto a giant screen, the billionaire called for the dissolution of Parliament, insisting Britain “can’t have another four years” of the current government and warning that “you either fight back or you die” (The Guardian, 2025b). This was a deliberate intervention by the world’s richest man in Britain’s democratic life, and it carried the unmistakable language of extremism and conspiratorial thinking.
Musk is no longer the kingmaker he once imagined himself in Washington. His alliance with Donald Trump has frayed, his influence in U.S. politics stalled. Like the Russian oligarchs of the 1990s who, once out of favour in Moscow, found new power bases in London, Musk now looks to Britain as the stage for his next act. He brings with him not innovation or investment, but lies, disinformation, and a politics steeped in white nationalism and pseudo-Christian fascism.
In recent months, Musk has filled his platform, X, with hundreds of posts about “Muslim grooming gangs,” inflating figures, recycling myths, and accusing Keir Starmer of complicity in crimes that fact-checkers have shown he did not suppress (WIRED, 2025; Full Fact, 2025a; Reuters, 2025). He has smeared MPs like Jess Phillips as “rape genocide apologists” (WIRED, 2025), language so extreme it puts public figures in danger. And now, in aligning himself with Robinson and Britain’s far right, he openly urges an assault on our constitutional order.
What we are witnessing is not the eccentricity of a billionaire dabbling in another country’s politics. It is instead a calculated move: Musk has chosen Britain as the new theatre for his ambitions, and he is doing so by importing the language and tactics of the US far right. The question is not whether his interventions matter, but how much damage they can do, and how quickly they might take root.
Musk’s Fall from U.S. Politics and Pivot to the UK
For years Elon Musk cultivated an image as more than a billionaire entrepreneur. He wanted to be a political kingmaker. Through the resources that his vast wealth provides, and control of X, Musk positioned himself as the self-appointed custodian of ‘free speech’ in the United States, a role that often meant boosting conspiracy theories, amplifying the far right, silencing those who questioned or disagreed with him, and waging vendettas against his critics. His clout was such that Donald Trump welcomed him into the fold after the 2024 election, handing him a quasi-official role in the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in early 2025 (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2025).
But Musk’s attempt to translate online notoriety into institutional power quickly unravelled. His DOGE proposals - radical deregulation, dismantling of federal agencies, and public grandstanding about ‘ending the woke mind virus’ - alienated not just Democrats but senior Republicans. According to reports from inside Washington, Trump himself grew weary of Musk’s erratic interventions and his inability to operate within political structures (The Guardian, 2025a). What Musk imagined as influence at the heart of government soon became marginalisation.
By mid-2025 Musk was a diminished figure in Washington. His proximity to Trump could no longer guarantee power. Instead, he was being treated with caution, even embarrassment. He had overreached, believing his wealth and platform alone could bend political reality to his will. When that illusion collapsed, Musk did what many exiled powerbrokers have done before him: he looked for a new stage.
Germany was his first target. In late 2024 and early 2025, Musk openly signalled support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), amplifying their slogans and narratives on X, and portraying them as defenders of “European sovereignty” against Brussels (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2025). But AfD’s polling bump proved temporary, and Musk’s endorsement backfired: German voters were largely repelled by the idea of a U.S. billionaire meddling in their politics. A YouGov poll in January 2025 found that majorities in both Germany and the UK believed Musk’s interventions were unacceptable, with 62% of Germans and 58% of Britons saying they did not trust him to comment credibly on their politics (The Guardian, 2025a). Far from building influence, Musk’s brand had become toxic.
And so, his attention shifted across the Channel. London offers him several advantages: a globally visible political culture, a media addicted to spectacle, and a society already polarised by years of austerity and Brexit. In this sense, Musk’s trajectory recalls the Russian oligarchs of the 1990s who, once Putin made politics too dangerous at home, shifted their influence to London. The analogy is imperfect - Britain is not Russia, and Musk is not Abramovich - but the mirror holds. Both are examples of what happens when wealth and ego, frustrated at the centre of power, seek out new peripheries to manipulate.
Musk’s pivot to the UK is not accidental. It is a deliberate search for relevance after being sidelined in America and rebuffed in Germany. If Washington no longer provides him with the influence he craves, Westminster and Whitehall will do. And if mainstream politics proves resistant, Musk is more than willing to channel his energies into Britain’s populist right, where figures like Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage provide ready-made allies, and where his platform X can serve as both megaphone and weapon.
Musk’s Intentions in Britain
But why choose Britain? Musk has chosen London not out of love for parliamentary democracy but essentially because Britain is vulnerable. His move into our politics exploits a series of open wounds that successive governments have refused to treat.
Brexit remains the great unspoken crisis. Neither Conservatives nor Labour will confront it honestly. The Office for Budget Responsibility (2023) has shown that leaving the EU has permanently reduced UK trade intensity by around 15%, cutting GDP by 4% compared to remaining inside the bloc. Real wages are lower, inflationary shocks have been compounded, and Britain’s young people have lost opportunities their peers across Europe still enjoy. Yet in Westminster, Brexit is treated like an untouchable subject. This silence leaves a void; one filled by scapegoats and conspiracies.
That void is widened by the state of Britain in 2025. Near a generation of austerity has stripped the public realm bare. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (2023) reports that per capita day-to-day spending on public services remains below pre-2010 levels in real terms. The NHS is in perpetual crisis, with waiting lists for hospital treatment still high. Meanwhile, wage growth has stalled for a decade: Resolution Foundation analysis shows that the average UK worker is nearly £11,000 a year worse off than if pre-2008 trends had continued (Resolution Foundation, 2023). For households already battered by the cost-of-living crisis, Britain feels like a country permanently running on empty.
It is out of this despair that extremism finds fertile ground. The same voters who were told Brexit would solve Britain’s problems now hear that immigrants are to blame. Musk has seized on this narrative. On X, he amplifies stories of Muslim grooming gangs, repeats the fiction that the left is inherently racist, and paints elected politicians as complicit in cover-ups. These claims are as dangerous as they are false, deepening the climate of fear and division that already stalks British politics.
And yet, rather than directly challenging this rhetoric, Keir Starmer’s government has tiptoed around it. His belated U-turn in June 2025 to launch a statutory national inquiry into grooming gangs, after months of dismissing the demand as pandering to the far right, revealed the weakness of triangulation (The Guardian, 2025b). By refusing to confront Musk’s lies head-on, Labour risks ceding the battlefield of narrative to billionaires and street agitators.
Silence and pandering are not neutral. They create space for extremism to grow.
Musk has identified a country riddled with unresolved crises - Brexit, inequality, collapsing public services - and chosen to weaponise them. By redirecting anger away from wealth and power, and onto immigrants and minorities, Musk offers Britain not solutions, but poison.
Stripping Away the Lies
Elon Musk sells himself as a truth-teller. In reality, he deals in lies; dangerous, deliberate, and designed to inflame. The moment you hold his claims up to the light, they crumble.
The Grooming Gang Conspiracy
Lie 1: Keir Starmer blocked prosecutions to avoid accusations of Islamophobia.
This is Musk’s crown jewel of deceit. He has told his followers that Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, deliberately looked the other way to appease political correctness. It is a slander without evidence. Full Fact (2025a) confirms that many of the supposed orders date to 2004, when Starmer wasn’t even in post. Starmer himself has stated, with evidence, that he reopened closed cases and rewrote CPS guidance to strengthen prosecutions (Reuters, 2025).
Musk dresses up systemic failure as a grand conspiracy. The truth is more damning for him: it wasn’t Starmer covering up, it was decades of underfunded services and political cowardice - the very conditions Musk’s new allies in the far right now exploit.
Lie 2: Jess Phillips is a “rape genocide apologist.”
While she may be a divisive politician, Musk spat this bile at a woman who has spent her political life campaigning for survivors of sexual violence (Wired, 2025). The charge is grotesque, beneath contempt. It is also dangerous. As AP News (2025) noted, ministers warned that Musk’s language put Phillips at risk. That is the point: to turn an MP into a target, to invite the mob. Musk pretends to champion victims, while in practice he endangers them by poisoning public debate.
Lie 3: One million children were abused by grooming gangs.
Musk has parroted this figure, knowing full well it is fantasy. Full Fact (2025b) shows it is an extrapolation from Rotherham, cobbled together from flawed assumptions. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse concluded the scale cannot be quantified. Inflating the numbers doesn’t help victims; it turns their pain into clickbait, and Musk is directly trading in other people’s trauma like a currency.
The Inversion Trick
Lie 4: The left is inherently racist.
This is Musk at his most cynical. He points at anti-racists and shouts “racist!” while his allies incite hate. The data speaks for itself: police recorded 140,561 hate crimes in England and Wales last year, with sharp rises in offences targeting Muslims (Home Office, 2024; Ethnicity Facts and Figures, 2024). Those crimes were not carried out by left-wing students with pronouns in their bios. They were overwhelmingly driven by the far right Musk now courts. This is not truth-telling. It is inversion; a schoolyard trick, and a grubby one at that.
The Authoritarian Dream
Lie 5: Britain needs the dissolution of Parliament to restore democracy.
At Tommy Robinson’s London rally, Musk declared: “You either fight back or you die” before calling for Parliament to be dissolved (The Guardian, 2025b). Strip away the grandstanding, and the message is clear: democracy itself is illegitimate. Musk wasn’t proposing elections with this. He was peddling insurrection. For all his ‘free speech’ posturing, Musk sounds more like a would-be dictator who has mistaken Whitehall for a toy set.
The Platform That Pretends to Be Neutral
Lie 6: X is just a town square - neutral, open, democratic.
This is the biggest con of all. Amnesty International found that X’s algorithm played a central role in fuelling racist riots in England and Northern Ireland after the Southport stabbings, amplifying hate faster than it could be removed (Scottish Legal News, 2025). This is not neutrality. It is engineering chaos. Musk profits from the outrage while communities burn. When he calls X a “town square,” remember: it is one where the loudest shouters are racists, and the loudhailer belongs to him.
Musk’s lies are not slips of the tongue. They are a political strategy: to turn Britain’s crises into cudgels, to pit neighbour against neighbour, and to dress fascism up as common sense. And they are working because those in power - Starmer above all - refuse to confront them.
Musk’s Rhetoric as Imported Fascism
When Musk told Robinson’s crowd “you either fight back or you die” and warned of “traditional values under threat,” he wasn’t improvising. He was reading from a script already tested across the Atlantic. It is the rhetoric of Christian nationalism: a politics that casts society as decadent, the nation as imperilled, and enemies - Muslims, immigrants, the ‘woke’ - as traitors within.
We wrote in ‘The Shadow of Christian Nationalism’ that this ideology operates as “a potent political framework engineered to reinterpret and ultimately capture identity through a specific theological lens … demanding that laws and public identity be coerced into reflecting conservative Christian values” (Plague Island, 2025). Musk is not a priest of this movement, but he is its most powerful amplifier. His platform X does the work of a pulpit: sermons delivered not on Sundays but every second of every day, its algorithm pushing anger and paranoia into millions of feeds.
The pattern is always the same. ‘Values’ are said to be timeless yet somehow always under siege. Society is described as collapsing under the weight of ‘elites,’ ‘decadence,’ or ‘woke decay.’ Political opponents are not simply wrong; they are enemies of the nation. This is how Christian nationalism frames the world, and Musk has amplified that framing wholesale to Britain.
The UK examples are plain. When Tommy Robinson warns that our Christian heritage is being erased, Musk repeats him. When Nigel Farage claims that immigration is the root of every crisis, Musk boosts him. When grooming gangs are weaponised into a conspiracy, Musk inflates the numbers and pins the blame on Labour. This is the adoption of a moral panic designed to exclude, to other, to divide.
What makes this more corrosive still is that, as we have said, Britain’s leaders are failing to confront it. Starmer’s late U-turn on grooming gang inquiries, his reluctance to challenge Musk head-on, sends the message that the billionaire’s framing has already shaped the terms of debate. Silence, in the face of this rhetoric, is complicity.
Let’s call it what it is. Musk’s rhetoric is a soft landing for fascism, dressed up in hashtags and livestreams, packaged as common sense. He doesn’t need jackboots or banners. He only needs to keep telling Britain that its democracy is rotten, that its enemies are everywhere, and that salvation lies in strongmen, scapegoats, and a mythical return to values that never existed in the first place. If we do not resist, then Britain will learn - as America already has - how quickly words become violence.
Why It Matters for Britain
Britain has been here before. In the 1930s, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists paraded through East London, convinced that scapegoating Jews would revive a wounded nation. Ordinary people resisted in the streets at Cable Street, refusing to let fascism march unopposed. We tell ourselves it could never happen again. But listen closely to Musk in 2025, his conspiracies, his scapegoats, his call to dissolve Parliament, and the echo is unmistakable.
Musk is a new kind of oligarch (less yacht, more algorithm) but the threat is the same. Wealth buys the loudest microphone, and that microphone is pointed straight at our democracy. His platform X is not neutral. The Home Office recorded 140,561 hate crimes in England and Wales last year, with a 13% rise in offences against Muslims (Home Office, 2024). These are not abstract dangers. They are real-world consequences of the poison Musk amplifies.
And what of our political class? Starmer dithers with inquiries and triangulation, terrified of looking ‘soft,’ while Musk accuses him of covering up child abuse. The Conservatives, who long ago sold influence to the highest bidder, mutter about free speech as though it were a get-out-of-jail-free card for billionaires.
That is why this matters. Musk’s interventions are part of a project to radicalise British politics: to take a country battered by austerity, Brexit, and inequality, and convince its people that democracy itself is the problem. It is scapegoating dressed as salvation; division masquerading as truth.
Fascism does not creep; it arrives loudly, chauffeured into Westminster in a Tesla with the Union Jack painted on the bonnet. If Britain shrugs this off, we risk repeating the mistakes of the 1930s, assuming our institutions are stronger than they are, and leaving it to ordinary people to resist in the streets. We cannot afford to be complacent. Musk has found the cracks in our politics. It is up to us to seal them, before they split into fractures too wide to repair.
Conclusion - Resist
Fascism thrives on despair. It feeds on lies, scapegoats, and slowly erodes trust until people believe division is destiny and democracy is dead. That is what Elon Musk and his allies want for Britain: a country broken into factions, angry at phantoms, too exhausted to see who really profits from the chaos.
We reject it.
Those who clap as Musk smears, who see riots as victory, who mistake cruelty for patriotism - they will be remembered not as saviours but as saboteurs. History does not treat cheerleaders of hate kindly. The Blackshirts strutted through London in the 1930s, convinced they had history on their side. Instead, they met the barricades of Cable Street, where dockers, trade unionists, and Jewish families stood shoulder to shoulder and shouted: They shall not pass. That is Britain’s true inheritance; not Mosley’s fascism, but the ordinary courage that defeated it.
We must draw our strength from that tradition. Britain’s anti-fascist history is stronger than its fascist one. We resisted Mosley. We resisted the National Front in the 1970s. We resisted again through Rock Against Racism and countless acts of community solidarity. Every generation has faced those who wanted to pit neighbour against neighbour. Every generation has answered.
Resistance today will not come only from politicians or leaders, especially not when they dither or triangulate. It will come from the same places it always has: from teachers defending their pupils against hate, from nurses holding the NHS together against neglect, from fact-checkers and journalists dismantling lies, from neighbours who refuse to be turned against each other. These daily acts of solidarity are small rebellions, but together they form the barricade.
Fascism is never inevitable. It relies on people giving up, turning away, deciding the fight isn’t worth it. But there is hope in resistance, hope in clarity, hope in remembering that light scatters darkness faster than darkness consumes light.
The lamps of democracy may be dimmed. But they are waiting to be relit, if we can just have the courage to strike the match.
So, resist. Let the light in.
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References
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