DOUGLAS MURRAY
Tommy
Robinson is a British political activist and “citizen journalist” who came to
prominence in Britain almost a decade ago when he founded the English Defence
League. The EDL was a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could
probably best be summarized as “anti-Islamization.” It emerged in the town of
Luton after a group of local Islamists barracked the homecoming parade of a
local regiment returning from service in Afghanistan.
From
their earliest protests the EDL’s members sought to highlight issues including
sharia law, Islam’s attitudes toward minorities, and the phenomenon that would
become euphemistically known as “grooming gangs.” In reality these protests
often descended into hooliganism and low-level violence (naturally helped along
by self-described “anti-fascists”). The authorities did everything they could
to stop the EDL, and the media did everything possible to demonize them. In a
foretaste of things to come, very few people made any effort to understand
them. And nobody paid any price for (indeed many people benefited from)
claiming that the EDL was simply a fascist organization and that anybody who
even tried to understand them must be a fascist too. The usual prohibition
against sweeping generalizations doesn’t seem to apply if the generalization
tilts in that direction.
I interviewed Tommy Robinson five years ago, after he had
left the EDL (having by his own admission failed to keep extremists including
actual neo-Nazis away from the movement). As he said then, one of the problems
of everyone insisting that a particular movement is campaigning for the Fourth
Reich is that the few people who think that sounds like a great idea will show
up. Whatever his other faults, there is no evidence that Robinson thinks that
way. Indeed he was once charged with assault for head-butting a Nazi
sympathizer who wouldn’t leave an EDL protest. Not many people bothered with
those details. The assault got reported, but not the cause. So the fact that
Robinson had head-butted a Nazi became yet more evidence that he himself must
be some kind of Nazi.
Anyhow
— Robinson wised up slightly, and eventually began to plough his energies into
a type of citizen journalism/activism. Some of this has been remarkably brave,
some of it remarkably wrong (such as a video he made after last year’s
Manchester Arena attack, in which he seemed to furiously suggest that everyone
living around a particular mosque in the area must be some type of enemy
combatant), and some remarkably ill-advised — not least because it has allowed
him to be presented in the worst possible light.
For
example, a couple of months ago Robinson went to Italy. In May of last year an
Italian television crew reporting on migrants in Rome had been attacked by some
migrants near a local train station. The female presenter was assaulted, and
the whole thing became big news in Italy. But in the normal modern European
fashion, after much tut-tutting everybody went back to the safe semantic
discussions we like to have. Such as whether or not the term “no-go zone” is
exactly appropriate to describe an area where a female journalist cannot go
without being physically assaulted. So round and round we go.
Robinson
took another view and turned up a while later at the same spot with his own
camera crew to find that nothing had changed. The area was still dominated by
migrants, and a number swiftly demanded that he leave. One of them then got
into a tense stand-off with Robinson, and at one point, as Robinson turned his
back on him, this man raised his hands over Robinson and said something like “I
can kill you.” At which point Robinson promptly turned around and
punched the man in the face. As so often it was a gift to his critics. This
episode was reported in the Daily Mail Online under the headline
“Far-right thug Tommy Robinson punches a migrant in Rome while filming in an
apparent ‘no-go zone.’” The decision over where to put the scare quotes in that
headline (and where not to) tells its own story about modern European mores.
The
controversy around him continued. In March, Robinson was suspended from
Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site
(which merrily allows terrorist groups like Lashkar e-Taiba to keep accounts)
decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about
Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam
foundation. And it is on this matter that the latest episode in the Robinson
drama started — and has now drawn worldwide attention.
Ten
years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is
now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian
grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and
what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of
such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of
another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have
been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this
reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies
of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges
during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in
the country.
But
the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to
linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with
the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that
afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he
knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who
have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to
light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of
embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this.
Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of
“grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for
Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because
she accurately identified the phenomenon.
Which
brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds
Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly
careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting
restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and
appeared (from the full
livestream) to be filming the
accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to
exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.
But
clearly he did not exercise enough caution, a strange fact given that last year
Robinson had been found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside
another rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown
Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence, which was suspended for a
period of 18 months. Which meant he would be free so long as he did not repeat
the offense.
Although
Robinson appeared to be careful at Leeds Crown Court last Friday, to dance
along the line of exactly what he could or could not livestream outside an
ongoing trial with a suspended sentence hanging over his head was extraordinarily
unwise. What happened next went around the world: The police turned up in a van
and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson
had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried,
convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to
prison.
From
that moment it was not just Robinson but the U.K. that entered a minefield of
legal problems. In addition to the usual reporting restrictions on the ongoing
trial, a reporting ban was put on any mention of Robinson’s arrest, swift
trial, and conviction, meaning that for days people in the blogosphere and the
international media got free rein to claim that Tommy Robinson had been
arrested for no reason, that his arrest was a demonstration of a totalitarian
state cracking down on free speech, and even (and this one is remarkably
clueless as well as careless) that the recent appointment to the position of
home secretary of Sajid Javid — who was born to Muslim parents — is the direct
cause of Robinson’s recent arrest.
The
facts are both more prosaic and depressing. Robinson would not now be in jail
if he had not once again accosted defendants in an ongoing trial outside the
courthouse. He had been told by a judge last May not to do this and yet he did
this again. It isn’t the worst thing in the world (it isn’t child rape, for
instance), but it is an offense to which Robinson understandably pleaded
guilty. More important, the trial that was coming to a close last Friday is
just one part of a trial involving multiple other defendants. It is certainly
possible that Robinson’s breaking of reporting restrictions at the Leeds trial
could have prejudiced those trials. To have caused the collapse of such a trial
would have been more than a blunder; it would have been an additional blow to
victims who deserve justice.
Some
supporters of Robinson have been pointing out that there have been reporters
outside the trials of celebrities accused of child abuse (Rolf Harris, for
instance). But the comparison isn’t exact. It is exceptionally difficult to put
reporting restrictions on the trial of a household name, and difficult to
select jurors with no views on the defendants. The fact that this legal
complexity exists in some cases does not mean that an additional layer of
difficulty ought to be overlaid on the already-difficult-enough attempts to
bring to justice gangs of otherwise unknown men. In any case, accosting a
celebrity on their way into court would also be an offense
The
whole affair is in many ways maddening. Maddening that Robinson stepped over a
line that had been very clearly drawn for him. Maddening that he gave the
police and courts a legitimate reason to arrest him. And maddening because, as
he must have known (and as I have said a number of times over the years,
including during a speech at the Danish Parliament three years ago), it is by
now abundantly clear that every arm of the British state has been out to get
Tommy Robinson from the moment he emerged on the scene in Luton a decade ago.
The
problem — as I said in 2015 — is that any challenge Robinson presents is
all a secondary issue. The primary issue is that for years the British state
allowed gangs of men to rape thousands of young girls across Britain. For years
the police, politicians, Crown Prosecution Service, and every other arm of the
state ostensibly dedicated to protecting these girls failed them. As a number
of government inquires have concluded, they turned their face away from these
girls because they were terrified of the accusations of racism that would come
their way if they did address them. They decided it wasn’t worth the
aggravation.
By
contrast, Tommy Robinson thought it was worth the aggravation, even if that
meant having his whole life turned upside down. Some years ago, after crawling
over all of his personal affairs and the affairs of all his immediate family,
the police found an irregularity on a mortgage application, prosecuted Robinson,
convicted him, and sent him to prison on that charge. In prison he was
assaulted and almost killed by Muslim inmates.
What
can be said with absolute certainty is that Tommy Robinson has been treated
with greater suspicion and a greater presumption of guilt by the United Kingdom
than any Islamic extremist or mass rapist ever has been. That should be — yet
is not — a national scandal. If even one mullah or sheikh had been treated with
the presumption of guilt that Robinson has received, Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, and the rest of them would be all over the U.K.
authorities. But different standards apply to Robinson.
And
on it goes. On Sunday there was a protest in London in support of him. The
legal blogger “The Secret Barrister” might have spoken for a whole nose-holding
class when he dismissed this
protest as “a Nazi-themed march.” Look at the video he links to and you will
see a lot of people with their arms in the air chanting “Oh Tommy Robinson.” If
our eminent legal correspondent thinks this is Nazi-themed, he can never have
been to a football match or, come to that, a Jeremy Corbyn rally.
So
it will continue. Tommy Robinson will be in prison for another year. And all
those people happy with the status quo will breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank
goodness that troublemaker has gone away.” Yet their real problem has not gone
away. There is no chance of their real problem going away. Because they have no
plan for making it go away.
They
have a vague hope, of course, which is that at some point soon in the coming generations
this will all simmer down and the incoming communities will develop similar
views about the status of women as the rest of society. And perhaps we will get
there someday. But it is telling that the apparently tolerable roadkill en
route includes one young man from Luton — and thousands of raped girls.
