On 29 July, the day of the assault on a gaggle of younger ladies in Southport, far-right influencer Tommy Robinson repeated on X the false hearsay {that a} Muslim asylum seeker who’d arrived on a Channel boat was the offender. On the positioning, the place he has practically a million followers, he repeatedly linked the stabbings to the Muslim group, and mentioned that the Authorities was “gaslighting” the general public concerning the occasions. Within the days after the assault, his X posts acquired a median of round 54 million day by day views.
Robinson has change into the figurehead for Britain’s de-centralised, or “post-organisational” far-right: quite than attempting to run a political occasion, he builds help by spreading his beliefs on-line. His concepts clearly resonate with many Britons. A number of thousand supporters marched in his “patriotic rally” in London on Saturday 27 July, the biggest far-right demonstration for the reason that collapse of the EDL. And he attracts vocal help and funding from the US, the place he has change into a darling of the Trumpian and libertarian Proper.
Who’s Tommy Robinson?
The 41-year-old’s actual identify is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He grew up in Luton, in Bedfordshire, a city with a big Muslim minority. He was an apprentice plane engineer at Luton Airport, however in 2005 he assaulted an off-duty police officer throughout a drunken row, which resulted in a 12-month sentence. In 2004, he had joined the far-right British Nationwide Social gathering. By that point, he’d had an extended affiliation with soccer gangs linked to Luton City FC (his nom de guerre was supposedly taken from a infamous Luton City hooligan). In early 2009, the Islamist extremist group al-Muhajiroun protested noisily in Luton towards a parade by members of the Royal Anglian Regiment, who have been coming back from service in Afghanistan. In response, Robinson and others linked to soccer gangs shaped the English Defence League (EDL), which held anti-Islam demonstrations throughout England.
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What occurred to the EDL?
In its first few years, it grew quick, holding protests in areas with massive Muslim populations, typically hundreds sturdy, at which there have been frequent violent clashes. Then within the early 2010s, the EDL declined amid inner divisions, and after it was revealed that members had hyperlinks to the Norwegian white supremacist mass assassin Anders Behring Breivik. Robinson was convicted for assaulting a fellow member in 2011, and acquired a suspended sentence. In 2013, he underwent an surprising political conversion and left the EDL, citing the “risks of far-right extremism”, supported by the anti-extremist think-tank Quilliam. This proved short-lived: Robinson reverted to far-right politics, with an try to arrange a UK department of the European counter-jihadist organisation Pegida.
What has Robinson performed since?
He has set himself up as a journalist and on-line influencer. From 2017, he was a correspondent for Insurgent Information, a Canadian far-right web site, and made movies concerning the “grooming gangs” run by Asian males in Northern cities and cities. Whereas reporting he has twice been convicted of contempt of court docket for making prejudicial public claims about grooming instances. In 2019, he ran as an impartial candidate for North West England in European elections, receiving solely 2.2% of the vote. Since then, he has turned away from electoral politics.
What does he imagine in?
The 2 foremost themes of his pondering are opposition to immigration and to Islam. As he put it in a latest interview: “We’re shedding our tradition. We’re shedding our identification. We’re being changed. We’re turning into minorities in most main cities. We’re being pushed out of our personal nation, our personal cities.” In 2016, he mentioned: “I am not far-right, I am simply against Islam. I imagine it is backward and it is fascist.” He made this argument intimately in “Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam”, a 2017 e book he co-wrote. His social media feeds return regularly to immigrant – and notably Muslim – criminality.
Robinson additionally believes that Western elites have plotted towards peculiar individuals to permit this immigration to happen. He additionally typically states that Britain has a “two-tier police drive” that comes down “like a ton of bricks” on white miscreants, however is smooth on migrant criminals. Robinson believes that the mainstream media has connived on this by failing to report on these points pretty.
Ought his views to be censored?
Usually, Robinson stops wanting immediately inciting violence, and has by no means been prosecuted for that. However his affect has lengthy been linked to far-right violence. The spouse of Darren Osborne, who carried out the assault on Finsbury Park mosque in 2017, said that Osborne had “been watching a whole lot of Tommy Robinson stuff on the web”, and had been “brainwashed”. Robinson was banned from Fb and Instagram in 2019, for “posting materials that makes use of dehumanising language and requires violence focused at Muslims”. In 2018, he was banned from Twitter for violating its guidelines on “hateful conduct”: he had, to take just one instance, appreciated a put up calling on individuals to “make struggle” on Muslims. However, following Elon Musk’s buy of the positioning, Robinson’s account was reinstated late final 12 months.
Police are allegedly investigating his function within the riots. He may very well be weak underneath the brand new On-line Security Act, which makes it an offence to convey false data seemingly “to trigger non-trivial psychological or bodily hurt”.
What about Robinson’s authorized woes?
On prime of his two assault convictions, in 2013 Robinson was jailed for ten months for travelling to the US on one other man’s passport. The next 12 months, he was sentenced to 18 months for mortgage fraud. In 2017, he was convicted of contempt of court docket: he had recorded a report exterior a trial in Canterbury Crown Court docket, by which he described the defendants – earlier than the decision was reached – as “Muslim youngster rapists”. He was given a suspended sentence, which turned a nine-month jail sentence after he reported stay exterior Leeds Crown Court docket throughout an analogous trial; he not solely as soon as once more broadcast prejudicial feedback, but additionally confronted the defendants, risking the trial’s collapse.
In July 2021, Robinson was ordered to pay £100,000 in damages for libelling Jamal Hijazi, a 15-year-old Syrian refugee who had been badly bullied at his faculty in Huddersfield; Robinson had claimed, baselessly, that the boy “violently assaults” English ladies. He then repeated these claims in his movie, “Silenced”, which portrays him as a free-speech martyr. Robinson was due within the Excessive Court docket in late July, as a result of he had damaged an injunction stopping him from releasing the movie. As a substitute, he left the UK for Cyprus; he has but to return. Robinson’s tax affairs are additionally reportedly underneath investigation.
