Dear Ms Kuenssberg,
I hear from BBC TV and Radio News that you will this morning be giving a platform to Nigel Farage to defend attacks on the UK by Elon Musk. "Free speech is back," he says.
Yesterday Mr Farage told us he does not support Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (stage name Tommy Robinson), but Elon Musk's public and financial support for the contempt of court which has landed Yaxley-Lennon in prison is apparently laudable as "free speech".
The latest example of this "free speech" is Musk's ill-informed attack on Jess Phillips, who has devoted her professional life before and since election to the protection of abused women and girls. Musk has joined the call for a national public inquiry into child sex abuse gangs in Oldham and elsewhere, unaware of or ignoring the fact that there has already been one. It reported in 2022.
The Conservative government at the time ignored its recommendations, according to Nazir Afzal, the chief prosecutor of the Rochdale grooming gang, and refused calls for a specific inquiry into the Oldham case. I can only hope you'll ask shadow minister Chris Philp to explain these decisions.
In British law, free speech is not absolute. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon has been reminded of this several times and is now serving another prison sentence for contempt of court in spreading lies, which Elon Musk is amplifying and supporting financially through his social media platform.
Your interview with Farage is prerecorded, so nothing your viewers say can influence your questions to him. We have to assume that his backing of Musk includes support for Yaxley-Lennon - who he supposedly renounced yesterday - and support for his attack on Jess Phillips, who is already subject to a huge number of threats of violence which the police find "credible".
I'm in two minds about watching your programme this morning, or ever in the future. The trails for it on BBC news programmes suggest you will not be testing Farage's positive view of Musk's intervention in British politics adequately, and I have little confidence that you will face Philp with the Conservative party's hypocrisy on the subject of inquiries.
Yours sincerely,
Ed Wilson
