How Should Labour Respond to Elon Musk?
It is relatively easy to dismiss Elon Musk’s increasingly bizarre and frenetic tweeting as the work of one ill-informed and ignorant individual, with a bit too much free time. Afterall, that is what X is now mostly for – the spreading of half-witted nonsense by lazy, credulous, and conspiracy-minded simpletons.
Yet Musk is not some tin-foil hatted loon in a bedroom ranting about the ‘Great Reset’, globalists, and the World Economic Forum (WEF). No, he’s ranting about these things from one of his multiple mansions to 210 million followers, with an instantaneous reverberation across the world’s media. His recent pronouncements on the British legal system, constitution, and state of our politics have reached billions of people across the world.
He’s dragged His Majesty the King into his orbit of nonsense, and defamed several Ministers of the Crown. Musk has also called for the overthrow of the British Government, which got even Ed Davey riled. Davey’s suggestion, that the US Ambassador to the Court of St James be hauled in for a dressing down, is a perfectly sound response to an incoming official of a foreign government calling for an insurrection in another country.
Musk’s public falling out with Nigel Farage over whether Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, AKA Tommy Robinson, is some kind of Nelson Mandela figure incarcerated for his political views, and not a petty criminal grifter, has led news bulletins. The billionaire and the Brexiteer looked like a match made in heaven; now they’re heading for the divorce court. For once though, Farage is right. He knows that “Robinson” is political kryptonite, even on the political right, whereas Man-baby Musk yet again is displaying his ignorance about British politics.
Tempting though it is to just sit back and break out the popcorn as the hard right implodes, Musk’s interference and meddling has an impact on more than who gets to run the limited company also known as ‘The Reform Party’. Musk is a disrupter, and what he wants to disrupt is representative democracies, here and around the world. He is richer than over 140 nations on earth, and more powerful. He wants to colonise Mars, starting next year. His colony (“Musk-ville”? “Muskeria”? “Muskow”?) would not be a representative democracy, but a kind of lawless, libertarian dystopia. Can we guess who will be interplanetary emperor?
So, the challenge is not just to dismiss the next King of Mars, or to laugh at his half-baked online antics. The challenge for nation states, their leaders, and their peoples is to respond in ways that shore up our democratic values and our shared rejection of oligarchs and emperors. Keir Starmer was right this week to call out Musk’s libels against our Ministers, and denounce the lies and smears. We need collectively to be far more robust.
As well as calling his nonsense out, we need to shore up our democratic cultures and processes, so that people are not susceptible to the swirling conspiracy theories and anti-democratic tropes. The answer to attacks on democracy is more democracy. That’s why ministers need to be actively considering how to teach democracy in schools as part of the national curriculum, how to empower citizens within the public services with real choice and voice, how to modernise voting (the IPPR published an interesting report on this over the break), and how to make western democracy a more attractive prospect than Life on Mars.
In the late 1930s, the Fabian Leonard Woolf wrote a book called The Barbarians at the Gate, warning of what was to come. The fact is that democracy is new, still in its infancy, still an experiment. It isn’t permanent, nor very robust. Right now, across the world, democratic norms are under threat from military strongmen, dictators and despots, disrupters and populists. Musk is one man, but part of a global challenge to western values. Probably he will have fallen out of favour with President Trump within a few months and be sacked from the US administration. Possibly he will get bored baiting Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. But no matter. The big picture is that democracy is in peril, and we better step up in its defence. The barbarians are at the gate.
If you enjoyed this piece, click the link here to read another recent piece on Elon Musk.
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