by Stephen Tucker, spiked
The PM has a curiously selective approach to the threats facing women and girls.
After creeps began using X’s AI tool, Grok, to edit images of women and even children, undressing them and putting them in bikinis, UK prime minister Keir Starmer quickly went on the offensive. He attacked the social-media platform and its owner, Elon Musk, and called the images ‘disgraceful’ and ‘disgusting’. Starmer has even given his full backing to an Ofcom investigation that could lead to an effective ban on X’s operations in the UK. A new law against creating ‘non-consential intimate images’ is even set to be fast-tracked through parliament.
All this is being done, supposedly, in the name of protecting women and girls. Yet it’s not hard to suspect an ulterior motive. Starmer’s personal loathing of Musk is well known, as is the PM’s contempt for X’s relatively liberal speech policies.
More striking still, while Starmer has been quick to rage against Grok’s grim pixels, his response to far greater, real-world threats to women and girls has been found desperately wanting.
Take the grooming-gangs scandal. On that stain on modern Britain, he barely managed a whisper of condemnation until Musk himself thrust it back into public consciousness at the beginning of last year. Even then, Starmer was initially reluctant to say very much at all. At the time, he accused those calling for a national inquiry into the scandal of jumping on a ‘far-right bandwagon’.