When billionaires go rogue, it’s time to organise

Elon Musk is going to war with the UK Labour Party. Over the last several weeks, he has used his massive platform to draw attention to the child sexual exploitation scandal exposed in Rotherham more than a decade ago. Musk has accused Starmer of facilitating the crimes, stating that the Prime Minister has been “complicit in the rape of Britain”. 

Musk has latched on to Rotherham because it has become a wedge issue for the far right. Rightwingers blame the scandal – which involved perpetrators who were mainly British-Pakistani and victims who were mainly white looked-after children – on “political correctness” among the police and the council. Successive reports have shown that the issue was at least as much sexist and classist attitudes in these institutions, as well as the parlous state of children’s social care.

But this more nuanced view doesn’t fit into the narrative pushed by far-right figures like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. They claim that decades of inward migration have torn British society apart, driving up crime and making it harder for ordinary Britons to find jobs and access decent housing. Political elites, they argue, have ignored these issues – just as they ignored the crimes in Rotherham – for fear of being called “racist”.  

It’s an extremely powerful narrative – simple, compelling, and enraging. It is, of course, also wrong. The UK has been governed by successive migrant-bashing governments that have actively sought to exacerbate the culture wars for electoral gain. And the hardship that people up and down the country are facing as a result of a broken economy and collapsing public services can be blamed entirely on economic policies designed to enrich those at the top at the expense of everyone else.  

Billionaires like Musk have a vested interest in exacerbating the culture wars. If people like Musk want to retain the corporate welfare, tax breaks and permissive regulation provided to them by rightwing governments, they need to ensure people continue to elect rightwing governments. But economic policies that fuel inequality do not win elections. A much better way for the right wing to win elections is to start culture wars. 

For Musk, the stakes of ensuring the ongoing dominance of the right in the context of economic decline are particularly high. Musk is one of the world’s most notorious union bashers. He needs to ensure that the kind of anti-union policies pursued by neoliberal governments all over the world for the last several decades remain in vogue. 

But, as inequality has increased, these kinds of policies have become deeply unpopular with the electorate. Culture war politics provides a kind of Trojan horse for billionaires like Musk, ensuring the election of rightwing governments that can sneak in inequality-enhancing economic policies through the back door. 

The problem is that such policies are favoured by mainstream parties of both left and right. The difference between the centre-left and the centre-right is that the former tend to combine neoliberal economics with more liberal approaches to social policy, making these parties ideal targets for the new far-right. 

The only politicians that would really pose a threat to the kind of politics advocated by Musk and his ilk are those who attempt to push political debate on to issues of class and inequality – politicians like the Belgian Workers’ Party. 

But in the US and the UK, the politicians who advocated these policies have been decisively defeated by liberals within their own parties. How, then, can ordinary people hope fight back against the astonishing power wielded by people like Elon Musk? How can we hope to defeat the far right as it continues to embed itself in working class communities around the rich world? 

The only way to do this is to build movements that help people to find new ways of making sense of a broken economy. We can come together to support refugees, protest about the climate crisis or take legal action that holds power to account. The strongest candidate – and that most feared by the far right – is the labour movement. 

Across both the US and the UK, unions are some of the last progressive institutions operating in communities torn apart by poverty, inequality, and despair. They work with members who have a variety of different views on social policy, but who share the same fundamental interest in building a fairer economy. 

But working-class power is being built beyond the labour movement too, like the village in North Wales where local people have came together to found a network of social enterprises that provide jobs, food, and energy – not to mention hope – to the community. Or like organisers at the renters’ union ACORN, who are doing incredible work in some of the poorest communities in the country, directly engaging with working-class people to help them challenge the appalling conditions they face in the private and social rented sectors. 

And many other groups are working to change politics for the better. Organisations like Migrant Voice are empowering migrants to resolve their collective challenges and build political power. Activists at groups like Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action are putting their bodies on the line to challenge a political consensus that is proving deadly for people and planet. And campaigners at groups like Every Doctor and Keep Our NHS Public are fighting the stealth privatisation of the NHS to support the interests of doctors, nurses and patients. 

When we take collective action – of whatever sort – and organise to find a way forward, our views start to shift. It’s not as though we become progressive overnight, but we can start to see through the tactics of billionaires like Musk to the economic interests that drive his politics. We also start to see through the opportunism of upper-class far-right politicians like Nigel Farage, who offer nothing to working-class communities other than division.