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Billionaire Elon Musk took a flamethrower to the UK government, accusing it of committing “treason against its own people,” after it won an appeal against a decision preventing the housing of migrants in hotels.
At the Court of Appeal on Friday, Lord Justice Bean, Lady Justice Nicola Davies and Lord Justice Cobb ruled in favour of the government and Somani Hotels Ltd., which runs the Bell Hotel in Epping, where protests against the government’s policy of housing migrants in hotels began.
Epping Council leaders had won a temporary injunction to close the hotel, but the Court of Appeal overturned it.
Home Office lawyers argued that migrants’ rights to be housed in the hotels were more important than the rights of local residents.
A huge social-media backlash followed the announcement of the decision, and Twitter owner Musk, who has voiced sharp criticisms of the UK government in the past, went on a tear of his own, taking the UK government to task and accusing it of betraying the British people.
In one Tweet he wrote, “A nation with a government against its people shall perish from the earth!”
In another, he said, “The government is committing treason against the people.”
“The nightmare happening to Epping and hundreds of other towns in Britain and Ireland will come to your town too, unless it is stopped by the people,” he warned.
He retweeted and commented on posts by activist Tommy Robinson, Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe and a number of patriotic British accounts.
He also drew users’ attention again to the scale of the grooming-gang scandal, labelling it “unconscionable.”
Protests spread across the UK at the beginning of the month as anger at the government’s migrant policies boiled over, following the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by an Ethiopian man.
Demonstrations have now spread to London and to other major cities like Newcastle and Manchester, and are ongoing.
In London, protests took place outside the upmarket Thistle City Barbican hotel, with hundreds gathering and police charging the crowd to make arrests.
In response to the ongoing protests, the UK government has created a new taskforce to monitor anti-migration sentiment online, as official fears grow of another summer of unrest like last year’s.
According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the UK Home Office has formed a group called National Internet Intelligence Investigations to “maximise social media intelligence” about anti-migration sentiment in the UK.
The group will work from the National Police Coordination Centre, which was used to monitor and enforce the social restrictions during the pandemic.
The government has vowed to come down hard on protesters if there is a repeat of last year’s unrest, which began with the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport by Axel Rudakubana, the son of a Rwandan migrant.
“While the public have a right to protest against the current situation, we will never tolerate unlawful or violent behaviour,” a government spokesman told The Independent.
“Working closely with the police, we have thorough and well-tested contingency plans in place to deal with any public disorder, which have been strengthened since last year’s shameful scenes.”
Footage of the current protests has been blocked on X for British users after the country’s controversial new “Online Safety Act” came into effect recently.
The Act, passed by the previous Conservative government, was intended to prevent children from being exposed to pornography and graphic content on the internet, but it already appears to be being used for a very different purpose.
Before the introduction of the Online Safety Act, X stated that it would use various methods, including “email-based estimation” to assess whether a user is likely to be an adult or not.
The Online Safety Act mandates fines of £18 million or up to 10% of a company’s turnover if a company violates the Act.
