Tommy Robinson is not a working class hero

Although we never met, I have a lot in common with Tommy Robinson. I was born just ten months after him, to an Irish mother like him. I grew up in Dunstable, the town that borders Tommy’s Luton, as part of the working class of Bedfordshire in the 1980s and 1990s. And like Tommy, I had a relatively inauspicious start in life. In fact, he shot past me and got an engineering degree at Luton Airport, while I left school at 16 with no qualifications or prospects.

Although I don’t think I ever met Tommy, I know his world and have met a number of his later associates. When I knew him, Paul “Ray” (real name Cinato) was a reformed criminal and self-styled youthful street preacher. Once, around the year 2000, he caught me and my mates with a stolen moped and we were given the choice of going to church with him or getting a beating (we chose the former). Paul later helped set up the English Defence League (EDL) with Robinson, whose ideas, it was speculated, appeared in the manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right mass murderer.

I’m happy to say that my path has since diverged from that of Tommy and his milieu, although he and I have both done well in very different ways. I have become an academic, specialising in the study of genocide and mass atrocities. Tommy Robinson, whose personal finances are now the subject of media attention, has meanwhile made himself rich and famous as the leading tribune of the English far-right camp. From the late 2000s until now, he has probably been the most important figure: the summer riots proved his ability to sow anti-Muslim, anti-migrant discord with a few clicks from his holiday lounger. He is no ordinary thug or activist. He inspires a large, cult-like following – his name is chanted alongside “no surrender to the IRA”, “ten German bombers” and good old “Ingerlund, Ingerlund” by the crowds that follow him.

Whatever his delinquent charisma, he has another special trick. With a delivery style that is often earnest and pleading, he has convinced large sections of the political right that he is the authentic voice of the English working class. To a flattering Jordan Peterson, he is a “working class leader” and a “real worker”. And his Luton background is an indisputable part of this image. As the conservative commentator Douglas Murray put it in an interview with Peterson: “If you grow up in Luton and… you’re white and working class… you can’t say anything, you can’t do anything, because if you do, you’re called a racist.” The effect is that Robinson’s fomenting of street violence is naturalised as a result of his background. Fundamental to his mainstream authority is Luton; specifically the Luton of the 2000s, which in his account is plagued by inter-ethnic conflict and hostile immigrant communities.

I have to say that I recognise parts of Robinson’s portrayal. As he said, “it’s a rough place”. For example, youth violence and antisocial behaviour were fairly common and serious problems. A particularly painful personal memory is the brutal murder of a close friend, a handsome 17-year-old boy called Adam Ganly, in February 2001. Adam was from the Lewsey Farm estate in Luton and the group of young boys who stabbed and kicked him to death, who were friends with me at secondary school, were from the Downside estate in Dunstable. As far as I can remember, the fight was over a borrowed chair.

Racism and prejudice were commonplace; the “p” word was so overused that it wasn’t really considered a bad word, although it was clearly impolite to use it in the company of people of South Asian descent. Ireland’s large Traveller community were also often viewed with hostility and suspicion. And drugs, as Robinson may recall from his time with the Luton Town MIG football hooligan firm, were everywhere. You grew up fast; pubs were easily accessible from the age of about 15. Binge drinking, fighting, football and the constant pursuit of sex were the main leisure activities of our generation.

But there is also much that is strange and odd in Robinson’s account, a distorted Luton that is too easily – perhaps as a result of well-intentioned class sensitivity – taken for objective. Let’s take a few examples. In his recent interview with Peterson, Robinson tells how the “Pakistani Muslim” children at his school sat together at lunchtime. This may or may not be true. I don’t know, I went to a different school. But when Peterson asks why this was so, and Robinson says it was because “the Muslims didn’t integrate or assimilate”, he fails to provide much context. Although it is now long forgotten (outside Luton anyway), in 1985, just a few years before Robinson trudged to the lunch table, Luton and Millwall fans rioted in Bury Park – the area of ​​the city where most of the immigrant population lived – smashing windows and scaring families and innocent people in their homes.

The violence was so bad that Luton Town were banned from hosting away fans for years to come. And this event is emblematic of the kind of prejudice and insecurity faced by the second (or even third) generation of youngsters, who, quite understandably, would have felt safer if they had stuck together. In the same discussion, Robinson also codes his prejudice by distinguishing between “English boys” and “Pakistani Muslims”. Let us remind ourselves that Robinson, like me, holds an Irish passport. What he really means is “white”, but what his language conveniently leaves out is that Luton has long been an immigrant town, and that before many came from the Caribbean, or India, or Bangladesh, they came from Ireland. Robinson forgets the prejudice faced by this wave of immigrants. They too stuck together, living largely in Bury Park. Their children were anything but “English”.

Robinson can point to some gruesome truths. For example, he often speaks of the Gambino drug gang, whose members are largely descended from Muslim South Asian immigrants. Criminal drug gangs are of course no good, but every town and village in the country has them. Their existence is not an indication of some fundamental incompatibility between Muslims and the rest of the community. And these drug gangs, nasty and undoubtedly violent, have not ruled Luton with an iron fist, as Robinson suggests. Indeed, when Robinson euphemistically tells Peterson that he was friends with the “football lads”, he is describing his own youthful activities in more innocent terms than they were. Tommy Robinson was a football hooligan. He was essentially a member of a criminally minded (or criminal per se) gang. With the group fighting in the streets with rival groups, he undoubtedly saw Luton as an ethnically defined battleground.

But this wasn’t all of Luton. I can speak a little from experience. When Robinson was in the stands, I spent most of my free time at Shamrock Boxing Club in High Town. Under the tutelage of legendary Luton boxing coach Jimmy Turner, I experienced the diversity of Luton in a very different way. Boys of all ethnic, racial and national backgrounds came together to fight. Often unable to afford the bus fare, the 90-minute walk from home took me straight through Bury Park, past numerous mosques, markets and fruit and vegetable shops owned by immigrant children. I can say that most people in Luton, from what I have experienced, lived peacefully side by side.

Political tensions have since arisen, for example around the controversial East Anglian Regiment homecoming parade in 2009, when predominantly Muslim crowds protested against British involvement in Iraq. It was these events that set Robinson on the path to founding the EDL. But they can also be read not as a disease of Luton’s communities, but as symptomatic of problems experienced by the UK as a whole. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were widely seen as illegitimate and engaged in deeply problematic late-colonial foreign policy (I say this as someone whose brother served twice in Afghanistan in the British Navy and committed suicide on his return). Events like these are not, as Robinson claims, evidence of a deep incompatibility between Luton’s Muslim residents and everyone else.

Although I haven’t been around or connected to Tommy Robinson for years, this is where his activities and my current work on political violence collide again. Britain still has robust institutional safeguards, and thanks to the police and law enforcement, the violence of this summer was contained. The rioters didn’t succeed in setting fire to hotels full of asylum seekers. But they tried, and to see images of that kind of ethno-sectarian violence in the UK was truly shocking. One of the things we know about severe identity-based violence, from Europe and elsewhere, is that it starts with words. It starts by creating intrinsically different “others”. It creates and reinforces powerful group identities, and then labels those others as incorrigible and existential threats. The increasingly toxic rhetoric against refugees, migrants and Muslims that preceded the riots didn’t just come from people like Tommy Robinson. The slogans of many more “mainstream” political actors were also echoed by crowds from Rotherham to Plymouth. Yet Robinson has played a significant role in the gradual development of a narrative of “failed multiculturalism” that attributes inherently “alien” and dangerous characteristics to these minority groups.

For years, Tommy Robinson has leaned on his upbringing to spread this kind of hatred. He is not the “authentic” voice of the “real working class.” We saw in the response to the pogroms that a majority of people reject his rhetoric. But we can dig his claims out of their roots by looking at the real Luton, not his dystopian account of a bear-baiting pit contested by mutually hostile ethnic groups. Take Luton Carnival, a huge annual celebration of the cultures that make the town so special. And it continues to attract new waves of immigrants, most recently from Eastern European countries. No one would argue that integration is easy, and I remember all too well the racism of my youth. But when faced with those who profit from fear and resentment, it is vital to remember that “ordinary” England is not Tommy Robinson’s.

(See also: England in Pieces)