Tribuni Plebis

The People’s Tribunes are often not good men

The problem, of course, is that Elon Musk has anointed Tommy Robinson Britain’s tribunus plebis, and this is what’s really exercising people’s minds.

It’s not that the UK’s grooming gangs haven’t been extensively covered (they have, including by the BBC). It’s not that a bunch of Pakistani Muslim gangsters and sex traffickers operating all over the country weren’t (eventually) prosecuted and banged up. They were.

Rather, it’s that grooming gangs were never allowed to become the Current Thing in the same way as, say, the two scandals they most resemble: Infected Blood and Post Office/Horizon. This allowed the grooming behaviour to persist in a number of localities, as campaigners are currently pointing out.

They are doing so because Britain’s grooming gangs have now become the Current Thing, and are so because Elon Musk laid his hands on a set of Current Thing levers and is showing no signs of letting go. It used to be lefties who “made the weather” when it came to what issues were surfaced (or not) for public debate: think George Floyd and Black Lives Matter or the Hunter Biden laptop. Twitter was a major part of facilitating this process.

In buying Twitter and making it X, Musk purchased a significant part of the site’s ability to “make the weather” in current affairs terms. In other words, “the Current Thing” is now a right-leaning dynamic, and will be for the foreseeable future. In a UK context, this puts Labour in a position it has never had to deal with in government, and is probably incapable of dealing with now. Across the pond, it is provoking existential crisis among Democrats. This large effect on the politics of two developed countries probably makes it worth the 44 billion bucks Elon paid for it.

A little reminder of how grooming gangs were prevented from becoming The Current Thing is preserved, ironically enough, on Musk’s now free-speechified TwitterX.

One of two journalists who covered the grooming gangs scandal in great depth (the other was Andrew Norfolk), Peter McLoughlin was suspended from Twitter in 2017 for tweeting about it and promoting his book on the subject, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gangs Scandal. His account is still there, complete with 2017 comments and observations: Elon Musk appears to have sprung him from Twitter gaol this morning, Sunday 5th January 2025.

Bizarrely, Easy Meat has been banned from Amazon but is available from that apogee of British establishment bookshops, Blackwell’s in Oxford. This is, I suppose, what Americans mean when they talk about “vibe shifts”.

Relatedly, Britons complaining about Americans involving themselves in local political issues may wish to apologise for their repeated attempts to involve themselves in American local political issues, tell Americans how to vote, and even send UK political operatives to the US to help one side rather than the other.

This is one of those two-way streets your primary school teachers told you about.

Of course, the British scandals exercising lefties (as well as righties, of course) were not somehow lesser. Pretty much every terrible thing you read about Infected Blood or the Post Office/Horizon scandals is likely to be true. When Britain has scandals borne of state incompetence and malfeasance, it does them big style. However, those scandals also had more sympathetic avatars: hard-working and honest sub-postmasters; haemophiliacs and young mums.

The grooming gangs scandal, by contrast, now has Tommy Robinson as tribunus plebis, and that is indeed very discomforting precisely because he isn’t a good man, and isn’t one of the victims. Of course, many of the historic tribunis plebis weren’t good men either, which is rather the point. Even Tiberius Gracchus, the best of them, tried to run again (unconstitutional), overrode the Senate on foreign policy (unconstitutional), and got a rival tribune sacked and physically chucked out of a parliamentary sitting (unconstitutional).

It is notable that the land reforms Tiberius and his brother Gaius introduced were left largely undisturbed, even though both men were assassinated in the white heat of intense political conflict—the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Read what the Gracchi brothers did and their fate and one is reminded not only (and probably inevitably) of the Kennedy family—but also of land distribution and how it is a perennial problem in South America, and for the same reasons: insecure title leading to smallholders forced off their properties.

Whether Tommy Robinson is as bad a tribune of the plebs as the man one of my Latin tutors used to call “the Odious Clodius” remains to be seen, but like Publius Clodius Pulcher and the Gracchi brothers before him, Robinson has identified real problems. He’s drawing on real injustices and miscarriages of justice, and has probably been living for the moment when he is able to make his case to the electorate unimpeded for more than a decade.

You can argue until the cows come home over whether his prominence is deserved or whether his (lengthy) criminal record is disqualifying or whether victims/survivors (a number are present on TwitterX and Instagram) should preferably take the lead on this issue. Park all those—perfectly reasonable—objections.

Elon Musk has given us Robinson, and he does indeed have something to say. Perhaps one way for the British state to get out of what is very much a morass of its own making is to listen to him.