24.10.2024

Nine lives of Manifesto man

From drunken apprentice to EDL street fighting, from apology tour to Cypriot exile. Paul Demarty charts the career of Tommy Robinson and warns that the main danger comes not from this celebrity far-right influencer, but the increasingly reactionary Lab-Con elite

About 15 years ago, many of us on the left started to hear a lot about a rising star of the British far right. His name was Tommy Robinson - well, not really, as the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight discovered in 2010. And, seemingly out of nowhere, he had a small army of football casuals at his disposal. His fortunes have waxed and waned, but he has never since been far from the scene for long.

His current notoriety has to do with his role in kicking off anti-migrant protests, which rapidly became violent urban disorder over the summer. He repeated and amplified rumours that the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings was a Muslim asylum-seeker - rumours that rapidly turned out to be wholly false, but by that point his loyal fans had their blood up. This weekend, Stand Up to Racism, the Socialist Workers Party’s anti-racist front, has called a national demonstration to “stop Tommy Robinson, stop the far right”. So it seems a good idea to look over his career.

New names

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, as it says on the passport that got him to his current hidey-hole in Cyprus, hailed from modest beginnings in Luton. He managed to get himself an aerospace engineering apprenticeship as a young man, which might have given us a heart-warming ‘working class boy made good’ storyline. Alas, he got into a drunken fistfight with an off-duty copper, which landed him in jail, and lost him his job.

Around that time he started showing up in far-right circles. That naturally led him to the British National Party, which was approaching the zenith of its influence at that time. In origin a straightforward neo-fascist outfit, the BNP had come under the sway of a faction of reformers who wanted to remodel it along the lines of what was then the Front National in France, Alleanza Nazionale in Italy, and others. Under leader Nick Griffin - a man with a history in some truly bizarre corners of the neo-fascist scene, who scrubbed himself up to take the BNP mainstream - it did so with considerable success, garnering dozens of councillors and, later, a member of the London Assembly and two seats in the European parliament (one for Griffin himself).

Robinson did not last long in the BNP, however, and made his big-time debut in 2009, when he founded, along with his cousin, Kevin Carroll, the English Defence League - an anti-Muslim street organisation heavily based on the football casual milieu he knew well (the name, ‘Tommy Robinson’, originally belonged to a particularly fearsome member of the Luton Town ‘firm’). It spread from Robinson’s south-eastern hunting grounds rapidly to the north-west and north-east of England especially, which were not coincidentally areas where the BNP found a lot of success.

The EDL played some role in the downfall of the BNP. Its more confrontational, bovver-boots-on-the-street style proved attractive to many of its members, who were growing impatient with the BNP’s fruitless attempts to become more respectable. Griffin banned his members from joining, declaring it a Zionist psy-op, but that did not do him much good - especially after his disastrous Question time appearance, as well as subsequent financial disasters and splits.

The EDL had similar problems, however. Despite its habit of physical confrontation, there was one respect in which it wanted to present a sanitised image - precisely that it was English. The trouble with the BNP was that every time you turned over a rock you found a Hitlerite in there, and Hitlerism is diametrically opposed to the national myth - fighting them on the beaches, our finest hour, the spirit of the blitz, and all of that. Ructions produced a loose fascistic offshoot, called Infidel.

By 2013, Robinson had had enough, and decamped from the EDL, loudly denouncing its takeover by “extremists”. He embarked on a strange apology tour in the company of the Quilliam foundation - a now defunct think tank run by ex-members of the Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, to deradicalise fellow Muslims, and reconcile them to the great British pleasures of warm beer and suburban complacency. The chance to deradicalise Robinson, of all people, at a moment when frankly we had all more or less forgotten Quilliam existed, could not be passed up. Robinson later claimed that Quilliam had paid him a £2,000 monthly stipend for the right to claim credit for his conversion experience, though Quilliam denied it.

Old tricks

Whatever the case may be, it was not long before he was back up to his old tricks, attempting to form a British chapter of the German anti-Muslim outfit, Pegida, in 2015, hurling himself into the controversy over grooming gangs, and along the way finding himself repeatedly on the wrong side of the law - less for violent offences than contempt of court and harassment of the people he covered in his new self-image as a “campaigning journalist”. He was briefly an advisor to Gerard Batten, who took over leadership of Ukip after Nigel Farage decamped and took it into more conventional far-right, sectarian territory. Wherever there is a Muslim to be blamed for something, however implausibly, there is Tommy.

His Cypriot exile is in relation to breach of a court order not to screen a film he had made, which had already led him to charges of contempt of court. The film concerns a bizarre beef he has with a teenage Syrian refugee, whom he baselessly accused of sexually assaulting two girls. The increasingly libidinal turn of his anti-Islam ravings has led him, inevitably, to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, the subject of his latest book, Manifesto, with its wide-eyed obsession with birth rates and underlying fear of an impotent west being overwhelmed by ruthless, yet sensual orientals - a tale as old as time.

Griffin and Robinson are alike in many ways - the last two major leaders to be produced by the disreputable, violent end of the British far right. They are both distinctly peripatetic - Griffin had variously been a Strasserite, a Hitlerite, a Third-Positionist, an esotericist, and a ferocious anti-Semite before he stabbed John Tyndall in the back to lead the ‘reformists’ in the BNP to their greatest successes and farcical collapse. The baton passed by default to Robinson, whose adventures we have already described.

Yet these two men’s biographies also encompass a change in the overall picture of the far right. From the 1950s antics of the League of Empire Loyalists, to the 1970s heyday of the National Front, where a teenage Griffin cut his teeth, to the substantial EDL demonstrations of 2009-12, there was a clear political cycle taking place, following the political cycle in mainstream politics. During Labour governments, neo-fascist groups (and far-right elements of the Tories) would gather strength. This strength would be, precisely, expressed in the groups - rising membership, stronger election returns, and the subjection of ordinary non-white citizens to low-level terrorism. They would make inroads into conventional subcultures - most famously skinheads, but also punks and metalheads later on. When Tory governments replaced Labour, they often did so by adopting parts of the far-right message, which ate away at the fascist groups’ support; meanwhile, the reality of Tory rule tended to push alienated working class men back in the direction of Labour.

The EDL, in retrospect, was the last of the street-level fascist sects to achieve any kind of breakthrough. Others have appeared, like Britain First and National Action, but have not had much impact. Robinson’s subsequent career consists of failed attempts to start some kind of new outfit, but on the contrary successful attempts to set himself up as a niche celebrity figure. At this point, he arguably has more in common with Katie Hopkins than John Tyndall. His last political venture, Hearts of Oak, was co-sponsored by Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad (probably not a Luton football casual), another of these internet influencers.

Such people have followers rather than comrades. Their reach can be troublingly broad, but it is oddly shallow. That is not to say they cannot do any damage - it would be reductive to blame Robinson wholesale for the carnage of the summer, when the ground had for so long been prepared by the Westminster parties and the mainstream rightwing media, but he and his ilk certainly lit the match, and if he ever returns to Britain, one expects he will find yet more criminal charges waiting for him. But the point remains that any one of these figures, unless they end up as a serious contender for power in the manner of Donald Trump, is not themself a unique and dangerous threat.

Same ground

The trouble is precisely that the ground was so well prepared for the fake rumour mill of the summer. The old situation of insurrectionary far-right groups at least on first appearance gave some kind of sense to anti-fascist campaigns that targeted those groups - violently or peacefully, as the case may be. They deliberately set themselves apart from official politics, in an often pseudo-revolutionary fashion.

The contemporary ecosystem of far-right celebrities may employ such rhetoric of overturning the old elite, but the border with official politics is markedly more porous. We have only just had a Tory government that happily contained anti-Muslim, ultra-reactionary rabble-rousers quite as outré as Robinson. Parliamentary and extra-parliamentary reactionaries happily mingle in the same media outlets, and at the same events like the NatCon conferences. So long as the parliamentary Conservative Party only contained a handful of open racists organised in cranky caucuses like the Monday Club, it was possible to sustain the illusion (though it was always an illusion) that these politics are characteristic specifically of fascism. When Robert Jenrick - who may well be leader of the opposition by the end of the month - responds to the riots by claiming that they were over-policed, it is clear that the cordon sanitaire no longer holds, if it ever did.

It is clear, from recent events, that anti-racists have a lot of work before them. We need to start talking seriously about forcible self-defence in the case of further disturbances, which in much of the country the police were either unwilling or unable to seriously control. (It is unclear how prepared we are for such work, but you go to war with the army you have.) The political battle, however, is only incidentally to be fought against Tommy Robinson and friends: the real threat is the Tories (and, indeed, as they try to show how tough they are, Labour … ) and the far-right media. It is they who really have the power to spread racist poison.

To draw the poison, we need a principled political alternative to an increasingly reactionary bourgeois elite.