Tommy Robinson, England’s class clown

There is a paradox at the core of the English far-Right: namely, its quaintly un-English preoccupation with race. It’s the reason why, over the past 30 years or so, Tommy Robinson and his ilk have been so marginal to our national life. Take a gander across the Channel or the pond, and see for yourself. By any yardstick — membership; public sympathy; damage to society — there is no pound-shop equivalent to the National Rally, Alternative for Germany, Proud Boys, or QAnon.

The reality is that, excepting a few enclaves, crackpot identity politics is as alien to this sceptred isle as chlorinated chicken. We’ve never had much use of such foreign imports to be rude to our compatriots. For we have our own very English system of discrimination, and it is called the class system — at times, subtly registered through the policing of accents; at others, less subtly so, as when Thatcher brought out the blowtorches to discipline the miners.

Seen in the longue durée, there was only a brief mid-century blip — Enoch Powell’s Britain — when many abandoned class-thinking and became race-mad, in no small part on account of the identity crisis provoked by the shrinking of the British Empire into the British nation. This had damaging consequences: two generations without black and brown representation in the Commons (not a single person of colour was elected between 1929 and 1987); scores of race riots and hate crimes; and a general aura of unpleasantness and violence, captured with brio in This is England.

Yet there have undeniably been some stabs at course correction in the new millennium. Race is mostly passé. Class is back. It’s a point that Tommy Robinson’s near-namesake Tomiwa Owolade made in a compelling polemic published last year, the gist of which is conveyed by its title: This is not America. These days, there isn’t much of a racial gap to speak of. In Britain, blacks earn 6% less an hour than whites (in the US, 22% less), even outliving the latter (in the US, they die four years earlier on average). The wage gap increases to 13% between Caribbean and white men, and to 42% between Bangladeshi and white men; yet Indian men make 13% more than white men. Class more convincingly accounts for these disparities than race, Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities being overwhelmingly working class. Indian and Nigerian migration, by contrast, tends to be more middle-class.

Therein lies the rub for the hammered herberts who howl “Ingerland” at far-Right rallies in SW1, appealing to a misplaced sense of racial solidarity. For no such thing exists. Their white bourgeois brethren, in fact, see them as an atavistic bunch of yahoos and yobs, primitives from another planet. Ironically, the only people likely to sympathise with their lot are their dark-skinned working-class neighbours, the very migrants they detest.

All of this Tommy Robinson learned in a hard school earlier this month, when, from his Cypriot resort, he exhorted his million followers on X to “show your support” for the “real” England, after the stabbing of three children at a dance class in Southport by an embittered Taylor Swift critic apparently called “Ali al-Shakati”, supposedly a former small-boat passenger. As it was, that the attacker was born in Cardiff to Rwandan immigrants didn’t deter the dregs that drool at the dicta of Robinson from rampaging through the Midlands and the North, torching mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. The extent of public support for the Robinsonistas was duly revealed a week later, when racist protestors were vastly outnumbered by antiracist counter-protestors across the country. Robinson was shown his station.

Despite their numerical insignificance, though, there’s no denying that the Robinsonistas represent a Powellite neuralgia that hasn’t entirely died out in Britain. Most Brits have moved on, seeing race as a non-issue, as relevant to the business of friendship and marriage as handedness. Yet a tiny section has clung to its empty certitudes. Suffice to say it pays to inquire into this milieu, its penchants and thought-world, which is why I laboured through Robinson’s literary productions, a dud triptych of semi-literate reflections on race relations.

The facts of his life are well-established, and covered in extenso in his first memoir, Enemy of the State, which appeared in 2016. Né Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a name that conjured up images of bespectacled hippiedom, our antihero very early on took up a rougher nom de guerre for much the same reasons, it seems, that Herr Schicklgruber preferred not to go by that handle. The original Tommy Robinson was a Luton lout, a football hooligan of some prominence in such circles. The one born in 1982 qualified as an aircraft engineer, but then derailed his career for the faux pas of kicking a police officer — intervening to prevent Robinson from attacking his missus — in the head. “For that one kick, I spent five months in jail.”

Thereafter, Robinson set up as a plumber, moonlighting as a football hooligan boss. He turned to politics in 2004, joining the BNP in response to British Muslims allegedly celebrating 9/11. Still, he first became aware of “racial trouble” at a much younger age. Aged 13, he had discerned a “growing gang mentality among the Muslim kids”. In Enemy, he paints a tenebrous picture of Luton — drugs; knives; rapes — as something of a Caracas on the Lea. This he pins exclusively down to the character of Islam, much as one would, I suppose, blame Catholicism for the curse of the Colombian drug cartels.

But he misses the elephant in the room. As the Luton-born, working-class academic Thomas Peak has recently pointed out, if Robinson’s Muslim classmates in Eighties Luton appeared less “integrated”, it was at least partly because they sought safety in numbers after hooligans destroyed their neighbourhood following a football match; the 1985 Luton riot was one of the most egregious of that decade. Despite that episode, Peak recalls a fairly post-racial youth, kids of all colours having a laugh together at the local boxing club and Luton Carnival.

Slow on the uptake, Robinson left the BNP after belatedly discovering that it was a racist outfit. His black friends — who seem to exist only to point to his own reserves of tolerance — were made to wait at the door, since membership was reserved for whites. Five years later, he established a tanning salon and the English Defence League, the latter after having recoiled in horror at Muslim protestors holding up such heretical messages as “butchers of Basra”, as if one had to be a rabid Islamist to oppose Blair’s war, which pointlessly dispatched countless Brits and Iraqi civilians to a premature grave.

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For brawling, then breaching bail conditions, Robinson was sent to prison in 2011. HMP Bedford was full of surprises. “A problem more and more these days,” he incredulously writes, “is that you just don’t know who the Muslims are. Everyone’s dressed the same, and it isn’t just Asians who are Muslims. So blacks, whites, mixed race… anyone and everyone can be a Muslim.” The converts riled him up. “This white geezer McDonald said, ‘I’m fucking Muslim bruv’. And the way he said it, well, that was it. We ended up fighting across the servery and I battered him.” Later, Robinson went on a hunger strike because — so he claims — he was being fed halal meat.

In 2013, our recidivist found himself behind bars again, this time for using a friend’s passport to circumvent a travel ban in order to attend an Islamophobic symposium in the US. Once again, in another telenovela-ish turn, he recanted, making a big show of leaving the EDL and breaking naan with Mo Ansar, the disgraced Lloyds Bank employee turned soi-disant voice of British Islam (one of those dodgy “community leaders”, whatever they are) who helped “reform” Robinson. Profiled in the Telegraph, Ansar was described thus:

“He speaks the language of tolerance and moderation, yet he refuses to condemn the chopping off of hands for theft in Islamic states or homophobia… He has creatively, and quite dramatically, sexed up his professional experience, including falsely claiming to be a lawyer… He runs a sock-puppet Twitter account which he uses to defend himself and attack perceived rivals.”

Incredibly, Robinson warmed to him — “if every Muslim was like you there would be no problem” — even if later in his memoirs, he struck a less charitable note: “Mo was very much a cartoon character, a muppet Muslim.” At all events, it seems that the clincher for leaving the EDL was an £8,000 cheque paid by the think-tank Quilliam, which in return took credit for Robinson’s deradicalisation. But the good character shtick didn’t last long. Yet another prison sentence came hard on the heels of When Tommy Met Mo — the documentary about the encounter — and Tommy wound up in jail once again, this time for mortgage fraud.

Some of the stuff in Enemy of the State is admittedly rather tame. In his criticisms of the niqab, for instance, he appears to have the making of a clubbable French Lefty: “at least the French had the courage to ban the face veil.” But time and again, his racial idée fixe rears its ugly head: the “ethnic cleansing” of Luton by brown Muslims, who apparently have an innate fondness for “grooming gangs”. The facts, of course, tell a different story. As the Home Office concluded in 2020, “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white”. Across Britain, race appears tells us little. But then again, nor does economic deprivation, there being wide variation in similar councils. Sometimes statistics can be illuminating, and sometimes they aren’t. This is a case of the latter.

The most crippling defect in Robinson’s oeuvre is unquestionably his ethnicisation of class, as if the “white” in “white working class” means anything, as if him and Helena Bonham Carter might just have more in common than he does with some thick-necked Muslim bruiser he once shared a cell with. There are passages where he almost gets it, as when he wryly observes that the working classes, irrespective of hue, are typically appreciated only when they dig trenches and die en masse “on the orders of the snooty and superior upper classes”. But then he veers off on a tangent, whingeing about the white working class being “racially victimised” in Britain. Even so, he’s sanguine about the prospects of a cross-class white coalition. His job, he thinks, is to convince “middle-class Englishmen and women to say enough’s enough”. But there are some real howlers in his understanding of class markers — “middle-class tweedies” are apparently “too busy catching up on the latest Sky Atlantic box set” — which makes one suspect whether he’s the right messenger for his audience.

Yet one can see why Robinson might be squeamish about using the c-word, or even “working class” for that matter, without qualifying adjectives. This is because, economically speaking, he has seceded from it. Soon after Enemy came a lucrative gig with the Canadian website Rebel Media. Practically a sinecure, he was paid £8,000 a month for his canny ability to materialise, mirage-like, camera in hand, at the opportune moment when Islamists struck Britain. All the same, he scarcely lasted a year in that job, because he was raking in far greater sums through donations to justify having a boss. These days, he’s toying with the idea of taking up Spanish residency to evade an HMRC investigation; along with two cronies — his ex-wife Jenna Vowles and Man Friday Adam Geary — Robinson owes the state something like £800,000 in unpaid taxes.

It was perhaps only natural, then, in the time-honoured tradition of the gentleman amateur, for the newly minted man of independent means to aspire to the scholarly vocation. Accordingly, Robinson donned his skull cap and set to work on his second opuscule. A departure from his autobiographical obsessions, Mohammed’s Koran, co-authored with the grooming-gang obsessive Peter McLoughlin in 2017 and bearing the lurid subtitle “Why Muslims Kill for Islam”, is a work of Koranic exegesis. But it is not a tome intended for Muslims, we are told at the outset: “If you are a Muslim, please put this book down. We do not wish you to become a killer because this book leads you to understand the doctrines and history of Islam more thoroughly.”

Pitched as a corrective to the thought-world of the “educated” elite, Mohammed’s Koran tells us that peaceful Muslims exist, to be sure, but they’ve got it all wrong. They’ve misunderstood their faith. The rest of the book is taken up with the reordering of chapters of the Koran. The game here is that old parlour game of the Muslim clerical classes: naskh, or the doctrine of abrogation, allowing for the repeal of Koranic verses contradicted by later passages to iron out inconsistencies. By rearranging the text like a clerical DJ, Robinson is able to place all the peaceful bits in the book fairly early on, and so “abrogate” them in favour of the later, violent bits. There you have it: a most vile, violent faith. It’s desperate, puerile stuff.

The exegetical turn proved short-lived. Within weeks, Robinson was back on his laptop, counselling the terrorist Darren Osborne, who went on to drive a van into a Muslim crowd in Finsbury Park, killing one and injuring 11. “I’m not justifying it,” Robinson later wrote on Twitter, adding with a touch of apophasis that “the mosque where the attack happened tonight has a long history of creating terrorists”. Two years later, in 2019, our jailbird did time yet again, for contempt of court, after which he appealed for asylum in the US on InfoWars, a website that vends conspiracy theories and dietary supplements: “I beg Donald Trump, I beg the American government, to look at my case,” he said on air. Sadly for him, this cut no ice with his ochre overlord. He had to stay content in his country pile in Greater Manchester, complete with a hot tub in the garden and a TV set above his bathtub.

A fool and his money are soon parted, however, and Robinson had to pay £100,000, plus legal costs to the tune of £1.5 million, for libelling 15-year-old refugee Jamal Hijazi, who was assaulted by far-Right thugs and forced to relocate after Robinson falsely accused him of attacking “young English girls”. Even Robinson was forced to concede that he had cancelled the kid on the strength of faulty intel: “I have been completely had, how embarrassing man.” He declared bankruptcy soon after, busying himself by stalking an Indy journalist and her partner for which he received a five-year stalking protection order, and swearing at a taxi driver in Bologna: “little paki who drives a car… I’m going to punch you in the head, kick you in the face, because I am the king of the whole Islam race (sic).”

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Like a dog that returns to its vomit, Robinson returned to the Hijazi affair in his third book, Silenced, a tedious reprisal of who said what to whom about who. Telegraphically put, a précis could read thus: “I was right. The courts were wrong.”

For all his energetic antics and massive platform – Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, the Today programme, Oxford Union, BBC, a Channel 4 documentary, all supplied by a guilt-ridden bien-pensant commentariat questing for earthy authenticity — it is cheering to note that only a miniscule minority of souls have fallen for Tommy Robinson’s grift. In 2019, he polled a mere 2.2% when he ran for MEP. When Gerard Batten brought him into the Brezhnevite bureaucracy of Ukip as “grooming gang advisor”, Farage and seven other MEPs promptly resigned, fearing reputational damage. These are, after all, rather different traditions: Ukip’s origins lie in a fairly conventional postwar Euroscepticism, whereas Robinson’s roots are in the interwar fascism of Oswald Mosley’s kind, now beyond the pale.

Robinson, in short, is an anachronism. There is no existential struggle between white and coloured Britain. Rather, what we have on our hands is an existential struggle between white and Muslim fundamentalists, both sides as thick as mince, and, after a fashion, two sides of the same coin. It is no accident, then, that Robinson has recently praised Muslim conservatives for being “strong in principle” and joined them in opposing the teaching of tolerance to sexual minorities in schools. “Homosexuality is a heinous horrible thing,” a conservative Muslim told the press; “it’s not acceptable in Islam.” Robinson’s response: “I stand with the Muslim parents.” A plague o’ both your houses.

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