This is CBS, I on the world. I'm John Batchelor. I welcome Joseph Sternberg, member of the

editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. He's in London. He writes political economics.

And his column turns to a subject that is at once very upsetting and, to my knowledge, hard to understand all this time later and distance later.

It's called in Britain the grooming scandal.

You might have seen some mention of it in recent reference to Elon Musk, the very famous high-profile advisor to President-elect Trump, at the same time

the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and other enterprises, a very well-to-do man.

However, at the same time, most recently, there's reason to believe he's wandered into British

politics in an especially sensitive topic,

the grooming scandal.

It involves the Prime Minister, Sir Kirste Starrmer, who in a previous life was the Crown Prosecutor,

which is a responsible position for moving to trial and being successful at trial under a different polity.

National crimes, and the grooming scandal qualifies.

I'll stop there.

Joe, a very good evening to you.

The grooming scandal, as you presented, and Kier Starmour, Elon Musk has been critical of the

prime minister, and I'm not quite sure how that connects to the grooming scandal.

Good evening to you.

Hey, John, unfortunately, we're going to have to peel back the onion here and go through a couple different layers on the story to understand what's going on.

So I think that sort of the core of this onion is the grooming scandal itself.

So this is something that has been simmering in the public consciousness for almost 15 years now, actually, which are these allegations that gangs of men predominantly of Pakistani Muslim origin, you know, in towns across the north of England,

would engage in sort of sexual grooming or abusive behavior toward girls and women in the

neighborhood.

...