By Isle of Wight Observer
Elon Musk tweets up to 150 times a day on his X platform. His pronouncements are widely shared, in part because he tells his tech team to boost his controversial thoughts into everyone else’s feed.
In my radio phone-in days, I soon learned nothing sells like controversy. To get our phones ringing off the hook, we would say something like “let’s ban all over-55s from driving”. Actually, that’s a bad example; we were definitely on to something there!
Billionaire Musk believes that when we want news, we shouldn’t rely on boring old-fashioned sources but instead switch to his Twitter. Whenever I’ve looked, Twitter or X is full of absolute tosh, the worst kind of echo chamber. Those with a certain perspective only ever follow others with similar views. There are billions of tweets, but I’d doubt a single mind is ever changed. Newspapers and radio do change minds with reasoned argument; tweets cannot.
The only useful advice I ever received before hosting a radio phone in was, “never discuss hunting”. My advisor had learned the hard way, that the subject always encouraged rage, and the presenter couldn’t win. Those with the strongest views always held you personally responsible for whatever they heard. Should they hear anything they passionately disagreed with, they might potentially track you down and harm you. People still remind me of those old radio shows, so I’m glad I took the hunting advice.
Last week, Elon Musk tweeted his belief that “Tommy Robinson is a political prisoner”. He said he wants him freed, possibly to lead the Reform Party. That must’ve come as a bit of a shock to Nigel Farage, who says he’s still on ‘very good terms’ with the billionaire Twitter boss.
Tommy Robinson is factually in jail for contempt of court, not his views on British Muslims. We’ve relatively few Muslims on the Island, and those I’ve met seem very decent people. I assume they found the behaviour of Pakistani origin grooming gangs as abhorrent as the rest of us. Musk’s call for a national enquiry soon became a bandwagon and, naturally, the Tories couldn’t resist hopping on. They’re far from alone: Labour’s Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, thinks it a good idea too.
It’s been 27 months since the Jay Inquiry into grooming gangs concluded, and nothing in it has been acted upon. Who’s surprised? It published 19 reports based on 2.8 million pages of evidence. Over seven years it saw 725 witnesses over 325 days, 7,300 victims and survivors engaged with it and 6,200 people came forward to tell their stories. It concluded that child exploitation takes many forms, including “vile and painful acts”. It said that “children were degraded by multiple perpetrators and those responsible for protecting them didn’t do enough.” It found some of those responsible for protecting children thought that they were lying or blamed them for their own abuse. Many seemed more concerned with protecting their own reputation than the kids.
Public enquiries always kick the can down the road. Politicians understand that, by the time a “no stone unturned investigation” is finished, the guilty will be long gone. Those responsible for wrongdoing are often retired or have moved on to other things. Some may be dead. Public enquiries give those in public life a shield of protection and dispiritingly, the “lessons learned” rhetoric is always the same. Yesterday the Labour government caved into the pressure – what a waste of time and money.
This time, the big questions should be why did the police and social services fail so badly? How could so many men of Pakistani heritage believe their disgusting behaviour was acceptable? What flaw in their perception of young white British women and girls made the abuse possible? Are Labour still trying to protect their support from working class Muslim communities?
Without answering those questions – and of course it won’t – a public enquiry is pointless.