The case for Elon Musk meddling in British politics

Tweeting of Merrie Olde England

America, to state the obvious, has its issues with immigrants. Since its founding the US has suffered periodic spasms of nativism (not least from the actually Native Americans), targets variously including the Irish, Italians, Asians and Catholics. But despite all this it remains a destination for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and other such pabulum. The American Dream continues even while Bad Orange Man prepares to enter the Oval Office for the second time.

Atop the country’s curiously inconsistent approach to migration is the fact that had Donald Trump been born outside America to two non-US parents, he would not be eligible for the presidency. This is even while the likes of Boris Johnson, born in New York where his father was studying, technically was eligible, until he gave up his citizenship for tax reasons. These are the kinds of rules you get when you let lawyers set up their own country.

No doubt Elon Musk, who doesn’t strike me as a fan of lawyers, is unhappy this is the case. As a naturalised US citizen, Musk has the same rights as everybody else, including the right to become a Congressman, bar the ability to become president. For a man who wants to go to Mars, the constraints of legal geography surely keep him up into the small hours.

Not that he’d be asleep anyway. Outside of his day jobs drilling holes in things and catching rockets as they fall from space, Musk has been carving a career out as the hottest new pundit in British politics. For the past week or so, he’s been publicly exploring his newfound interest in the child grooming scandal, in which men largely of Pakistani heritage sexually abused teenage girls. Appropriately for a scandal where discussion was dampened over fears of racism, the main response has been to ask – like an 18th century Yank – what this foreigner is doing involving himself in our politics. Who does he think he is: George Soros?

There are many ways in which people dislike Musk. His pugnacious style, described by commentator Louise Perry as giving off aspergic vibes, is off-putting to many, especially when paired with his affinity for what you might call ‘bro’ politics that play well on podcast’s like Joe Rogan’s. Then there is Musk’s Solomon-esque wealth and recent allegiance to Trump, which has tied this all up in a nice package – even if it seems inevitable that the presidential bromance will implode within the year.

(In passing I’d also note – with respect to my old school’s PE department – that Musk is a white South African, the kind of demographic that makes right-thinking people a little nervous, in the same way you’d wonder about a German man who was of fighting age in 1939.)

Despite all this, to my eye Musk’s claim to legitimate interest in British politics is not bad. He can claim citizenship of two Commonwealth countries, namely his birthplace and Canada, where he obtained citizenship via his mother’s birthright in order to attend university. Better still, his grandmother is from Liverpool, meaning that he would qualify for a UK ancestry visa, frequently used as a path to long-term residence and even British citizenship. Public remarks suggest he was genuinely close to his British gran. His ex-wife Talulah Riley is also English. He’s therefore not short of familial connections to the old country. That’s all added to the fact that Twitter and Tesla operate in the UK.

All of this I suspect will not impress the haters, who will merely counter with the fact that Musk doesn’t live here. But I think this underestimates the sense among some in the Anglo diaspora that Britain is a kind of home to them. I once worked with a journalist who grew up in a former British colony in Africa. He described his home life as culturally very English, his parents having assembled as many of the accoutrements of life back home as possible. When this journalist eventually did migrate to the UK, to him it was essentially a homecoming.

That was an extreme case, but British influence in its former settler colonies is generally not zero. It is not a coincidence that many of our greatest cultural exports – Harry Potter, Downton Abbey etc – tap into the Anglo disapora’s latent sense of a fossilised past. As with Joe Biden’s sense of his Irishness, to some extent this is a relic of a place that no longer exists.

There are many reasons all this is underplayed. One is that Anglo cultural influence is so pervasive worldwide that it often goes unnoticed. Nobody points out that the leaders of China dress in English attire, because it would seem notable if they didn’t. English is the international language of business, a fact which annoys the French but is accepted with a shrug elsewhere. And because America is essentially a spin off country from Britain, much of its hegemonic influence also has a distinctly but subliminal British character.

For those reasons, much of the world can claim a legitimate interest in British affairs, and America more than most. We are also, despite the engrained culture of naysaying, the sixth largest economy in the world and a nuclear power. We may not be globally dominant, but we are a regional player in Europe. These are all reasons to take some interest in British affairs, much as Europeans with no Asian connections might take an interest in Japan.

Of course, Musk is unhinged. As part of the American government he should not be threatening to invade allies on Twitter. Frankly, he should not be on Twitter at all when the alternatives available to him literally include rocket science. But he is as free to complain about Britain as my countrymen are to lambast America. And if his intervention struck a chord, it’s because this country is deeply unhappy with how the ruling class has managed migration – which is rather more important than the insomniac shitposting of a tech billionaire.