How it feels when the world’s richest man starts tweeting about your town
Community leaders in Oldham are reluctant to discuss Elon Musk’s sudden interest in the area. But one told Hyphen local Muslims now feel targeted
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“He probably doesn’t even know where Oldham is.” That’s the view of independent councillor Shoab Akhtar, who has lived in the town for four decades, on Elon Musk’s “bizarre” sudden interest in his local area.
Musk, the billionaire US entrepreneur and owner of X, turned a shameful episode in Oldham’s recent history into transatlantic news at the start of January, when he publicly criticised the British government’s failure to launch a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town.
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips had rejected calls for such an inquiry from Oldham council itself, despite an earlier local review that found authorities had failed to protect victims over a period of several years.
In a series of tweets posted over four days, Musk called Phillips’s conduct “shameful” and tweeted: “Throw her out.” Responding to another user’s post about “Pakistani-ancestry grooming gangs” in the UK, Musk replied that “government officials responsible … need to [be] fired in shame over this”. He then accused prime minister Keir Starmer of being “complicit” in failing to protect victims and prosecute abusers while director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013. He also repeatedly called for a general election.
His words dragged Oldham onto the front pages of nearly every British newspaper. Akhtar was one of few local figures willing to speak to Hyphen about Musk’s intervention; another was Nasim Ashraf, the founder of Ukeff, a homeless charity in Oldham.
Ashraf believes Musk’s tweets fuelled existing deep-rooted tension on the ground. “We’re feeling like we have a target painted on our backs,” said Ashraf. “That undercurrent was always there, but now it’s been heightened by this one tweet by a very wealthy man.”
Few in Oldham have forgotten the last time racial tensions boiled over during riots in 2001 that devastated community relations. Violence between groups of young white and Asian people lasted three days, with cars torched and clashes with police. In response to the riots, Ashraf, a witness to the events that summer, decided to start Ukeff to forge better relationships between different groups within Oldham.
Local bonds have become more resilient since then: when racist riots again swept the UK in summer 2024, Oldham was spared, thanks partly to a visible united stance from locals and councillors who gathered to defend the offices of an immigration law firm. But local leaders are evidently still nervous: Hyphen understands town hall chiefs urged councillors not to talk directly to the media about Musk’s tweets, an unusual instruction to elected politicians.
Work to address the ongoing concern about child sexual exploitation, though, has been taking place behind the scenes. In recent weeks, Ashraf has been involved in strategic meetings with local leaders and members of the public. One suggestion is to utilise mosques, churches and community centres as safe spaces where children can report any sort of abuse they may have witnessed or experienced. Another is to establish a dedicated local helpline for young people to request confidential help. But these aren’t enough on their own, he said.
“Social services, local authorities, and councils like Manchester city council have systems in place that are supposed to pick up the warning signs, respond to disclosures, and act,” he said. “Yet they haven’t done so. The cases in Rotherham and Rochdale are examples — social services knew what was happening but didn’t act.”
Ashraf described a community grappling with fear and frustration. He also criticised what he sees as double standards in narratives about criminal justice.
“If a white person commits a crime, it’s mental health issues or the loner narrative,” he said. “But if a Pakistani or Muslim person commits the same crime, it’s linked to their religion or heritage. This is one of the things that we’re constantly fighting against.”
Akhtar shared similar frustrations. “The Pakistani community has hugely contributed to the economic wellbeing of Great Britain and have been law-abiding citizens for decades,” he said. “But now, because of a few criminals, the whole community is being tarnished.”
His ward of Werneth has one of the town’s largest Pakistani communities, with 76% of residents identifying as Muslim. Overall, roughly a quarter of Oldham’s 242,100 residents are Muslim and Asian, according to the 2021 census.
Once an industrial textile powerhouse, Oldham has become one of the most deprived areas in the UK, with some of the highest child poverty rates. While employment opportunities drew tens of thousands of Pakistanis to northern England in the 1950s and 1960s, many have faced unemployment and economic hardship in more recent decades.
In the mid-2000s, police operations in Oldham found dozens of children were being sexually exploited in the town, and there were six convictions before the operations were wound up. Later, nine members of a child abuse gang in nearby Rochdale, with some members in Oldham, were jailed for child sexual abuse.
“The situation has been turned into a political football,” said Akhtar. “There needs to be a national inquiry into all these instances, whether it’s in Oldham, Rotherham, Cardiff, London or elsewhere. Criminals should be dealt with as criminals. What’s their ethnicity or religion got to do with it?”
Both leaders also pointed to the unimplemented recommendations from the 2022 Jay Report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, which outlined ways to protect vulnerable children better. Home secretary Yvette Cooper this month announced plans to make it illegal not to report child sexual abuse, and to establish grooming as an aggravating factor in sentencing. But other key recommendations, such as establishing a national redress scheme and creating a Child Protection Authority, remain untouched.
“This is a national problem. This is a national pandemic. But the government hasn’t taken any action. No money has been allocated to put those recommendations in place,” Ashraf said.
Despite claims from the far right and the likes of former Tory home secretary Suella Braverman in 2023 that “almost all” child grooming gangs were British Pakistani, Home Office research published in 2020 found that “group-based offenders are most commonly white”. Earlier this month, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) released figures showing that in cases where ethnicity was recorded in 2024, 85% of group-based child abusers were white, while 3.9% were Pakistani.
“Bad news sells, and good news doesn’t,” said Akhtar. “There’s so much positive work happening in Oldham, but that’s not what gets attention.”
Since Phillips rejected its call for a government-led inquiry, Oldham council has instead been working on setting up its own independent probe, speaking to survivors of abuse in the town and representatives of Telford council in Shropshire, which conducted a similar inquiry.
Akhtar emphasised the importance of resilience. “Oldham has faced challenges before, and I’m confident we will come out of this stronger,” he said. “But we need to ensure that the narrative is fair and that the good work happening here isn’t overshadowed.”
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