'He Has No Idea': Minister Calls Out Elon Musk After He Claimed UK Is 'A Police State'

A minister has slammed Elon Musk after the world’s richest man criticised the UK government’s new social media ban for under-16s.

The CEO of X, formerly Twitter, renewed his fiery online attacks against Labour on Monday after prime minister Keir Starmer announced plans to introduce online restrictions for children to protect them from harmful and illegal content.

Labour is hoping to stop anyone under 16 accessing platforms like X from spring 2027.

Musk, who has regularly hit out at the government over hot topic issues like child grooming gangs and once even claimed “civil war is inevitable” in the UK, repeatedly tore into the proposed legislation on X.

He wrote: “This censorship law is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The real goal is to enable the UK government to track everyone.”

A later post alleged: “They always use defensible excuses for the indefensible.”

But UK minister for online safety Kanishka Narayan hit back at Musk on BBC Newsnight.

“I say to him he has no idea about what the law is here,” the Labour MP said.

“One, the government is not censoring anything at all.

“Unlike many other countries, in some aspects the United States, the UK does not have any laws that permit the secretary of state or politicians to intervene on specific pieces of content.

“That is an independent regulator, because free speech is important.

“And two, in the context of age checks, that’s a very important privacy-preserving way of checking ages so that young people are kept from child abuse and the worse harms of social media.”

Musk was condemned just last week for also trying to “whip up unrest” in the UK following the Belfast knife attack as he shared lists of where protests could take place.

Labour chair Anna Turley told LBC at the time: “I think it’s appalling. Anyone that is seeking to drive and exploit a situation like this to drive their own political agenda is grievously wrong and doing damage.

“He’s not someone who’s having to live in a community where the consequences of this, of the anger that is whipped up.

“You know, we’ve seen children, families having to flee their homes on the streets of Belfast last night, we do not want to see this kind of disruption, damage, thuggery, violence on our streets, and anyone that is seeking to whip that up should be condemned.”

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