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Tommy Robinson, England’s class clown His books reveal the paradox of the far-Right

Robinson is arrested during a protest in 2023 (JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

Robinson is arrested during a protest in 2023 (JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)


August 28, 2024   10 mins

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.

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.

“The most crippling defect in Robinson’s oeuvre is unquestionably his ethnicisation of class.”

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].”

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.


Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
3 months ago

I will be rightly cursed for commenting and not reading the whole article. I’m sure the author makes a clear and compelling case that Tommy Robinson’s political voices is an unhelpful one.
However, I found the opening dozen paragraphs rather snooty; the language is flippant and dismissive.
I don’t like the far-right nor the Muslim fundamentalists who are “thick as mince” but find myself worried by this sort of language. People come to their views usually for reasons we might not see. For example, a woman might have a simplistic dislike of men because she had been sexually assaulted; I don’t think she should dismiss all men but I understand. A Muslim whose relatives had been killed by western forces acting in the Middle East has understandable mistrust of us. A young lad who sees people celebrating death and destruction has cause for mistrusting those who do it.
It’s one thing to argue with views, it’s another to dismiss other people whose views we dislike.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 months ago

Good summary.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 months ago

There is nothing “UnHerd” about simplistic, intolerant and uninformative character assassinations like this one.

Claire D
Claire D
3 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

My comment criticising it, politely, has disappeared.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 months ago
Reply to  Claire D

This article requires me to click on a link to enable me to see the comments. Hopefully your issue is a symptom of something being broken as opposed to you being censored.

Claire D
Claire D
3 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

It’s reappeared.

General Store
General Store
3 months ago
Reply to  Claire D

They told me they queue some comments (presumably potentially controversial ones) for approval. This happened to my comment on Kathleen Stock’s article last week

Jos Haynes
Jos Haynes
2 months ago
Reply to  General Store

So you PAY to be censored? What sort of masochistic site is this?

David Brown
David Brown
3 months ago
Reply to  Claire D

welcome to nineteen eighty, sorry, 2024

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
3 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

Indeed. It’s simply confirmed my view of how the Oxbridge high table types have no idea what’s going on in the real world.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
3 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

The guy teaches at Orksford, doncha know. They’re all the same.

Jacqueline Walker
Jacqueline Walker
3 months ago

I did persevere all the way through it and my first impression was classist snobbery, which was one of the author’s own points about Robinson but which he contributed to, especially in his tone. Robinson’s career, as apparently described in his own works, demonstrates how accident prone he is let’s put it that way. But to use that to gloss over valid issues the white working class might have about their standard of living, opportunities, and the changes in their towns seems a bit much.

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
3 months ago

It is not just the white working class who have these valid issues, the number of non white and non working class people who attended his rally on 27th Jul both in person and online clearly demonstrates that.

david mangan
david mangan
3 months ago
Reply to  Adrian Smith

Very good point, in Ireland our middle class Wokista consistently prove that they literally have no actual minority friends by assuming that every non white race is extremely happy with societal developments

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
3 months ago

This article tells us as much about Pratinav Anil as it does about Tommy Robinson.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
3 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

And not to Anil’s credit.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

His parents knew what he was from birth and named him accordingly.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
3 months ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

I would add to my comment that by exhibiting such a superficial and unbalanced approach to Tommy Robinson he undermines any prospect that his academic historical work will not be approached with grave scepticism regarding its accuracy and impartiality. I assume his work is more polemical than serious so perhaps it doesn’t matter to him that so many readers are unimpressed by his article.

Sayantani G
Sayantani G
3 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

This author has a literary flair, but bringing it to ideological renditions of history as he is prone to do ends in severe distortions.
As a Rankean who deals with matters of the Indian subcontinent one has often found his depictions of my neck of the woods unnecessarily a- historical and a selective cherry- picking of facts.
I don’t know much about Tommy Robinson but it appears to me that Anil is being snobbish and one-sided in his analysis.
A historian’s craft at one time used to rest on seeing as far as possible objectively the ” facts as they are”.
I for one find Anil to be a creative literary theorist but certainly no ” historian”. Get a suspicious feeling this present piece is no exception.

Tony Coren
Tony Coren
3 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Even more so I’d say
Prattling Pratinav’s self-esteem stands in marked contrast to the hatchet job he’s done to the subject of his article

Rob Pinchbeck
Rob Pinchbeck
1 month ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Certainly. In denigrating TR’s documentary (‘Silenced!’) Anil glosses swiftly over the central truth it very convincingly demonstrates: that Jamal was the aggressor in the playground and that TR’s so-called libel was no such thing.

AC Harper
AC Harper
3 months ago

I thought it an ad hominem piece.

rchrd 3007
rchrd 3007
3 months ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Plenty of that going around these days

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Reply to  rchrd 3007

Yes, typical of LIberals. They can’t argue based on the issues so they resort to character assassination.

david mangan
david mangan
3 months ago
Reply to  AC Harper

I don’t know what that means

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
3 months ago

This article is pure snobbery, coupled with politically motivated ignorance and Unherd should be ashamed to have published it without significant fact checking, given how many untruths circulate about this man in the MSM. Chief among these are that he is a fascist / Nazi / racist, when the truth is he has repeatedly stood against fascists, racists and nazis to the point of burning a nazi flag.
Yes he is working class, yes he is not well educated, yes he has a dubious past, yes the way he says things are not always the best way to advance his cause. However there is no denying that he was 100% right and proven to be so about grooming gangs and he has been frighteningly prophetic in what he has said about the rise of Islamism and the impact it is having on our country.
The other key fact the article tries to deny is just how many people agree with his broad thesis, just not every word he says. 44M people around the world have seen his silenced video now. The more the establishment tries to discredit and silence him the more his message will spread and his popularity will grow. If he is sent to jail again in Oct for showing his video, which seems highly likely, the credibility og our judicial system will be shot to pieces in the eyes of many more millions around the globe.

General Store
General Store
3 months ago

.

Vesselina Zaitzeva
Vesselina Zaitzeva
3 months ago

Patience not being among my (many) virtues, I have saved precious 9 minutes 32 seconds of my life giving up on reading this “article” after the first couple of paragraphs.
They were so condescending and outright nasty that I just could not stand the idea of continuing reading.
Your comments (as well as many comments below) prove that snap judgements sometimes could be right.
It is really sad that the number of articles on UnHerd that I so unpleasant and unrewarding to read seems to be growing.
[sigh]

Jos Haynes
Jos Haynes
2 months ago

See my comment above – some way above. Why pay money to be insulted and have your time wasted? Different points of view are useful, but not one-sided disdainful diatribes

General Store
General Store
3 months ago

Dear Unherd commissioning editor. Take a gander at all these comments. ‘hit piece’..’ad hominem’…’unworthy of unherd’. You seem to be making a habit of this kind of erroneous faux attempt at balance and both-sides-ism. It rather defeats your niche. We can read this stuff in the Guardian/BBC 24/7

AC Harper
AC Harper
3 months ago
Reply to  General Store

Working-class Man Bad, Orange Man Bad. Rhetorical fallacies that try to avoid debate.

Rob J
Rob J
3 months ago
Reply to  General Store

You absolutely can’t read this kind of thing in the Guardian. The author’s first two central points — that there’s little serious action on the far right in Britain; and that a big reason for that is the relative racial harmony (esp. compared to contexts like US and France) — are anathema to Guardian writers and probably most Guardian readers.
It’s a shame if those two (in my view largely valid) points get lost in people’s irritation at the tone of the article which was undeniably smug and patronising. I’m very much not a fan of Robinson or his acolytes and so I don’t get all that upset when he is on the receiving end of such treatment, but I’d acknowledge that the sneering tone here hardly helps the situation.

General Store
General Store
3 months ago
Reply to  Rob J

He’s NOT ‘far right’ . The first two points are correct. But there is no reason why the uK wouldn’t develop a far right – a genuine far right – ethno-national, state, socialist……RObinson is not that. And this article is just a snobbish smear

Stephen Griffiths
Stephen Griffiths
3 months ago
Reply to  General Store

Exactly, this is lazy herd mentality journalism not worthy of Unherd. Try as I did, I found the sneering, superior tone, inaccurate references and erroneous inferences utterly unreadable.

Alexei A
Alexei A
3 months ago
Reply to  General Store

Has UnHerd been turned?

david mangan
david mangan
3 months ago
Reply to  General Store

Almost every reply is slaughtering the piece and most replies are far more intelligent than the target. Genuinely interested why you think it should not be put up here to be shot at?

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
3 months ago

“makes a clear and compelling case that Tommy Robinson’s political voices is an unhelpful one.”
I once got banned from a forum where there was a thread on horrible Tommy Robinson for merely persistently, politely asking for examples where he was supposedly racist.

When someone like Tommy Robinson gets worked up over people from a certain religion from 3rd world countries coming here, benefitting from welfare and the perks of a developed country who are so ungrateful that they indulge in terror acts, hostility towards the country’s soldiers and culture, or do mass “grooming” – it’s “unhelpful” or “far right”.

On the other hand, girls being blown at a concert in Manchester, thousands of teenage girls being savagely assaulted, or muslims refusing to integrate ace ss the country, is all justified by something at Luton in 1985.

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
3 months ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

Not being able to face reading the article, I thought I ought to try to guess at the best case the author might bring.

Arthur King
Arthur King
3 months ago

I concluded that Islamic values are incompatable with Western values by reading their theology. It is supremacist imperialistic and inherently violent.

General Store
General Store
3 months ago

My email to the commissioning editors at Unherd:
Dear Friends, 
I have loved Unherd – and gifted subscriptions to my sisters and a couple of friends. However, I’m a little skeptical of many of the recent articles. This is ok in itself. But in general I’m not sure there is much to be gained in terms of ‘breaking out of bubbles’ and ‘echo-chambers’ – by simply handing a platform to voices/viewpoints that are completely ascendent in the MSM. Much better would be to invite these people to be interviewed/interrogated by people with ‘unherd’ and anti-orthodox perspectives. 

I fear that Unherd is drifting into something approaching an orthodoxy itself. I know that I’m not alone. May I suggest that the editorial team meet and consider in detail the 89 comments to the recent article by Pratinav Anil on Tommy Robinson. The unitary character of the response was quite remarkable. The very least you could do is provide Tommy Robinson the opportunity to response. Like him or loathe him, he’s surely one of the least-heard and most suppressed political voices, and perhaps one of the most important right now. 

Sincerely

David L
David L
3 months ago

Is it because upper middle class males tend to soil themselves, if a working class male makes eye contact with them? It that why you Guardian types hate us so much?

You’re terrified of us.

Dr E C
Dr E C
3 months ago

This hit piece makes me ashamed to be an Oxford University alumnus.
Like any real academic, I form my opinion of Tommy Robinson based on what he’s actually said and written, as in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YQ94jFg_4A&t=12s, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKj5nQomFC4 and, most recently, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv0TW2LF_dE&t=3738s In this last, TR refutes (and gives evidence against) every one of the accusations levelled at him in this poor excuse for an essay. I recommend watching it before youtube takes it down.
I also challenge anyone to find a racist word in any of these lengthy speeches by TR. Unless, of course you buy into the fiction that Islam is a ‘race’ and violent Islamist extremism should go unchallenged because Islamist fundamentalists who destroyed Iran in 1979 coined the term ‘Islamophobic’. (While they carried out the mass imprisonment, torture and execution of anyone opposing the new regime.)
TR’s ‘political voice’ was one of the first and loudest to expose the decades-long (and ongoing) systematic gang-rape and abuse of white, English, working-class children – easily the most vulnerable segment of our society thanks to their class, sex, age, race and non-Muslim status. Frankly, anyone not joining him at this point to call out this industrial-scale scandal, and ensuing coverup, needs to either do a lot more research or take a good hard look in the mirror.

David McKee
David McKee
3 months ago

Dr. Anil has enjoyed himself, pointing out the absurdities of Robinson. The subtext here is that there’s nothing to worry about: Robinson and his handful of followers are living in their little fantasy world. One might think Dr. Anil is trying a little too hard to be totally convincing.

For example, Dr. Anil quotes that Home Office study on grooming gangs: “most commonly white.” See? Nothing to see here, move along please. He does not mention the report also says that data on grooming gang ethnicity is scanty and poor quality. This does not prove Robinson right, but it suggests that comfortable Britain has a tendency not to look in dark places, in case it finds something nasty.

This piece is best read in conjunction with Alex Storey’s powerful reminisce of Wakefield, fifteen years ago. It was published yesterday, on The Critic website.

Sue Sims
Sue Sims
3 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

The link to Alex Storey’s piece (which is indeed powerful and very disturbing) is https://thecritic.co.uk/shattered-illusions/
Perhaps Champagne Socialist would care to read that and sneer at it?

Lynwen Brown
Lynwen Brown
3 months ago
Reply to  Sue Sims

Thanks for posting this. I reposted it above. The ignorance around the evil being perpetrated in our towns and cities is chilling. And to have articles like this one published in UnHerd denying its existence makes me question why I’m paying good money to fund such bs

Jos Haynes
Jos Haynes
2 months ago
Reply to  Lynwen Brown

Yup. I am out already – so was surprised I was allowed to read and comment here. But I ain’t gonna pay for the drivel that often appears in articles here.

Brian Hunt
Brian Hunt
3 months ago
Reply to  Sue Sims

I’ve just read that shocking article, but the facts of it are not in the common memory of the public or even believed. Those poor white girls remain ‘easy meat’ in the words of Jack Straw and are ignored by Starmer

Hazel Gazit
Hazel Gazit
3 months ago
Reply to  Sue Sims

Thanks for the link. Horrifying reading

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago

Oh dear, the Unherd crowds aren’t going to like this! They worship bigots like Robinson and Powell!
Go ahead Unherd, prove me right again!

N Forster
N Forster
3 months ago

Nonce.

Bill Bailey
Bill Bailey
3 months ago

So far the few members of the far-right haven’t launched a jihad against Taylor Swift’s young female followers, or Ariane Grande’s young female fans. So tell us Charlie, do you support such people in the hope of getting 70 virgins once you pass on?

Dylan Blackhurst
Dylan Blackhurst
3 months ago

And with a wave of the authors hand the ‘white working class’ cease to exist as group.

Rubbish. They exist alright.

The best description of this group has been outlined by Orwell Prize winner Michael Collins.

https://youtu.be/G1CdBIDI8Io?si=ru1DiG-N0ZFTeBPo

Graham Ward
Graham Ward
3 months ago
Claire D
Claire D
3 months ago

I have not read any of Tommy Robinson’s books so I have no idea how accurate Pratinav Anil’s interpretation of them as vitriolic tracts is.
What I find striking about Mr Anil’s article though is how like a vitriolic tract it is itself. Rather too full of anger, fear and hatred itself to be taken seriously in my opinion.

I would prefer a more cool-headed, balanced and reasoned examination of the facts please.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
3 months ago
Reply to  Claire D

Well, I have read ‘Enemy of the State’ and vitriolic is not how I’d describe it. The book is full of indignation and ‘righteous anger’ about the British state – the police and justice system – which, it appears, has persecuted him.

Kathleen Burnett
Kathleen Burnett
3 months ago

The author makes the case that it’s all about class. He is the perfect example!

Rob N
Rob N
3 months ago

This shallow hit job is beneath Unherd. Sure TR has history but, for example, when Muslims make up 6% of the country it would be surprising if they were the largest ethnic group in a crime category. However they clearly are the most criminal in many categories which is why, despite the clear 2 tier policing and judicial system in the UK, they constitute 17% of the prison population. And even when not the largest criminal ethnic group they are frequently the largest per capita.

On top of this they are starting to really try to dominate our entire culture. Police and politicians genuflecting to them, Islamists praying in streets to demonstrate their power.

It is time for Britain to wake up and reassert itself.

Archbishop Jerome Lloyd OSJV
Archbishop Jerome Lloyd OSJV
3 months ago
Reply to  Rob N

Absolutely! I was surprised to see it on UnHerd. While Prof. Matt Goodwin may express a similar perspective in a more polished manner, he is essentially conveying the same ideas that TR grapples with, meaning, they are worthy of consideration.

Arthur King
Arthur King
3 months ago
Reply to  Rob N

This sort of bs article is why I’m not renewing my subscription.

E Wyatt
E Wyatt
1 month ago
Reply to  Arthur King

Same here. I’ve been wondering whether to cancel and this article has helped me make my mind up. I’ll spend my subscription money on something worth reading.

Tim Smith
Tim Smith
3 months ago

Watching Douglas Murray debate Malcolm Glad well highlighted to me how much the left use ad-hominem attacks which for me are a sure fire way of losing an argument.

I stopped reading the article at this point:
“The original Tommy Robinson was a Luton lout, a football hooligan of some prominence in such circles. “

Ian Johnston
Ian Johnston
3 months ago
Reply to  Tim Smith

I didn’t even reach that far.

Utter dreck, from start to finish.

Why Unherd commissioned this piece is beyond me.

Aphrodite Rises
Aphrodite Rises
1 month ago
Reply to  Ian Johnston

The title was enough for me. I went straight to the comments to check my assumption. Douglas Murray admits he and Tommy Robinson have very similar views but completely different backgrounds which explains the completely different way they are treated.

James Collett
James Collett
3 months ago
Reply to  Tim Smith

You did well to push through as far as you did in this pompous, transparent fait accompli hit piece.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
3 months ago

A lazy essay, marinated in snobbery. D-

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 months ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

I would be looking for a refund if I was student provided with low quality content like this.

Paul Caswell
Paul Caswell
3 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

Thirty years ago if this ‘piece’ had been served up as an undergrad essay it would have been returned as ‘unmarkable’. Now such tosh is published as the work of a senior academic. What HAS gone wrong with academia?

Emma Davies
Emma Davies
3 months ago

The writer’s glossing over of the grooming gang scandal seriously undermines his argument here. One positive for TR is the work he has undertaken to expose this scandal – which is widespread and ongoing – therefore any assessment of his failings should seriously take this into account, otherwise it is nothing but a hit piece. Class is mentioned multiple times throughout and after reading it is hard not to think the author is struggling to hide his own class snobbery. Robinson is one of the few politically outspoken working class people in the UK and he is largely vilified by the media – often rightly so, he doesn’t have a shining record, but I do question whether he gets a fair crack of the whip.

Carlton Jex
Carlton Jex
3 months ago
Reply to  Emma Davies

Indeed. Via the link the author provided, you can read the report for yourself (one the government tried to suppress). The report is a clear case of attempting to fit the data to the approved narrative. And then attempting to cover it up anyway.

Civil service impartiality? My belief that this was still a force died when I read the report.

Yes, as the author states, the report summary does say that grooming gang offenders are primarily white, and in doing so it flatly contradicts the rest of the report, which states that ethnic data on offenders is of such poor quality that no conclusions about ethnicity can be made… except in the one case where it grudgingly admits that circumstantial evidence points to Pakistani heritage men being overrepresented.

So is there a problem in which vast numbers of white working class schoolgirls are the sexual prey of Pakistani heritage men? Or is this a racist dog whistle fantasy whipped up by the Daily Mail to stir up hate within the gammon? What does the report actually say?

It says, ‘yes.’

For those who wear ideological blinkers on the matter of race, the report confirms their point of view, whatever that view might be.

For the rest of us, it only confirms that decades into this serious racial flashpoint, the governing classes continue to suppress the matter. Are Pakistani grooming gangs real or myth? Those with power close ranks, turn their heads and steadfastly refuse to even ask the question, leaving millions of us to invent our own truth.

Just as the author of this article has done.

Emma Davies
Emma Davies
3 months ago
Reply to  Carlton Jex

Thank you Carlton. I have not read the report but I have my own experience of being targeted by Muslim men when living in the Middle East as a child. I have heard many testimonies and read countless articles about the phenomenon here in the UK. Regardless of whether it is white or brown ethnicities at the heart of sexual exploitation and human trafficking in the UK and Europe, our institutions have a duty to take the allegations from victims and activists like Robinson seriously. However, the opposite occurs and we – as you have coherently pointed out – are left to join the dots ourselves. This is not helpful for the working class communities ravaged by the grooming gangs or the Muslim communities who are failing to adequately address the problem.

andrew joyner
andrew joyner
3 months ago
Reply to  Emma Davies

Yeah he uses the lazy argument that ‘white people do it as well’. It is pretty dismissive.
He doesn’t take into account that for the size of their population in the UK the Pakistani community were way over represented in grooming gangs.

Ddwieland
Ddwieland
3 months ago
Reply to  Emma Davies

I don’t see any excuse for vilifying a person short of persistent abuse of others. Decrying the damage, including outright criminal behaviour, from members of an identifiable group who show disdain for the society they entered is not racism.

Rocky Martiano
Rocky Martiano
3 months ago
Reply to  Emma Davies

“…hard not to think the author is struggling to hide his own class snobbery.”
I don’t think he’s struggling to hide anything. Oxbridge academic pens hit-job from his ivory tower on working-class hero who dares to express views 80% of the UK population agree with but don’t have the cojones to admit it.
I live five miles from Luton. I doubt if Prat whatever his name is could even find it on a map.

Cameron Riddle
Cameron Riddle
3 months ago
Reply to  Emma Davies

The fact that the writer approvingly references that Home Office report is utterly shameful. The report was a whitewash. Maggie Oliver is a former detective who resigned over the grooming gangs cover-up. If you read her book Survivors, and watch interviews with her, you can see she’s very clear about this issue: Pakistani Muslim men have an undeniable over-representation in grooming gangs. To deny this is at best irresponsible and at worst evil.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
3 months ago

This is an overwrought hit piece on Tommy Robinson.

While I have never been sufficiently interested in him to read any of his books, unlike the author of this article, as Tommy Robinson is undoubtedly a roughneck and no deep thinker. However, I did listen to a less biased interview of Robinson by Jordan Peterson and his wife on YouTube which certainly suggested, if the facts related were half true, that the official and MSM desire to present Muslim immigrants in as positive a light as possible had resulted in effective conspiracies to suppress wider knowledge of unsavoury behaviour by Muslims and active suppression of Tommy Robinson disrupting the official narrative by publicising alternative facts. I would be more interested in any unbiased analysis of that interview and the facts presented there than I was in this piece.

It is notable that those who would depreciate the use of the “deadnames” of transgender individuals invariably are eager to highlight Tommy Robinson’s more elaborate birth name. As he explained in his interview he originally used Tommy Robinson as his name as an activist as he didn’t wish his controversial activities to affect his separate business activities. Clearly he is now better known as Tommy Robinson so there is no need to snidely refer to his official name.

Bruce Luffman
Bruce Luffman
3 months ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

I watched the interview with Jordon Peterson and found myself agreeing with Tommy Robinson’s honesty and I certainly felt sympathetic to his points about the grooming gangs and his bad upbringing. This author has no such sympathy, only seeming contempt. A poor piece which I found quite offensive.

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
3 months ago

This is poor, and badly written to boot: the author is just seeking “likes” from his friends.
As a starting point for understanding the impact made by large-scale immigration from the Caribbean after the War (probably the jumping off point for “race” as a political issue in the UK), I recommend the Colin Macinnes Trilogy: “Mr Love and Justice”, “City of Spades” and of course “Absolute Beginners”.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
3 months ago

This article is so Left – a paean of worship for an authentic working class that never existed expressed with towering snobbery and haughty disdain for the real thing. Where does Unheard find these people.

James Jenkin
James Jenkin
3 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Hugh, do you mind if I steal what you wrote, I love it

Kiddo Cook
Kiddo Cook
3 months ago

More nonsense. It seems this author too can only daub the ‘far right’ label to silence and defame. Sure people say silly things and maybe believe them but none of what she says in the article l make these things in any way ‘far right.’ There is no far right in the U.K. and this is only an epithet that’s a worn out cry of the lazy and disinterested. She’s in fact part of the machine that wants to limit free speech and any dissent from those who know they’re being deceived. This knowledge is also not the preserve of ‘white working class’ a phrase that’s also used with mockery and contempt, that somehow wants to corral the perfectly obvious in to a hackneyed trope. The vast majority of the country that I know shares the feelings of distrust and deception except they feel no reason to be violent but we all know we’ve been betrayed….. Lib, Lab, Con (and we have been) makes no odds and as soon as anyone treats the populace with respect and intelligence, adopts an attitude of truth, honesty and national self-interest we can expect more of this mealy mouthed ignorance.

Ray Ward
Ray Ward
3 months ago
Reply to  Kiddo Cook

I assumed, like, apparently, all others, that Anil was male until I saw this, and this does indeed seem to be so. So why “she”?

Ben Hopkins
Ben Hopkins
3 months ago

The writer’s ‘educated class’ prejudice is clear to see here. While ethnicity is of little/no importance among university educated folk, who have largely dropped their traditions and religions, it is still hugely relevant for working class people.

I would dare to suggest that a Pakistani surgeon and a white English surgeon have much more in common than a Pakistani cab driver and a white English cab driver, even if they all grew up in the UK.

It’s perhaps reasonable to say that the ‘white-English educated class’ is an irrelevant category, but the ‘white-English working class’ certainly exists.

Hilton Holloway
Hilton Holloway
3 months ago

Awful, terrible. Maggie took a blow torch to the Miners?

Sue Sims
Sue Sims
3 months ago

Of course, because Maggie was a bloated capitalist aristocrat who hated the working class and deliberately murdered the miners, despite the mines all making enormous profits. Didn’t you realise? /s

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
3 months ago
Reply to  Sue Sims

Yes sadly it appears Anil is no reliable historian merely a conformist polemicist.

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
3 months ago

Neil Kinnock has said that Thatcher was a pragmatist who would have been prepared to negotiate with the miners if Scargill hadn’t wanted ‘total victory’ instead.
Did the Unions take a ‘blow torch’ to Heath’s government? Torches were certainly needed in the power cuts.

Richard Abbot
Richard Abbot
3 months ago

There is nothing ‘unherd’ about this. This is the standard left-liberal view that we hear everywhere.

Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
3 months ago

All true enough I suppose…. but this Sceptred Isle has managed a very strong Far-Left showing hasn’t it…..like its entire civil service and institutional establishment for instance. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing

Kiddo Cook
Kiddo Cook
3 months ago

Nice article that on sub stack, thanks. Great to see that the excellent ‘All Must Have Prizes from Melanie Phillips is quoted, a wonderful work. Her book quotes Anti-Racism , An Assault on Education and Value by Frank Palmer with noteworthy contributions from Ray Honeyford and Roger Scrutton. Essential reading.

Wilfred Davis
Wilfred Davis
3 months ago

This snobby, lazy, ill-argued piece is unworthy of UnHerd.

It tells us nothing about the ‘far-right’ (no authors ever seem to define it, assuming it actually exists outside their imagination), but plenty about Pratinav Anil.

Lesley Keay
Lesley Keay
3 months ago

Sorry, the author lost me when he described the support for Enoch Powell was due to people becoming race mad and being concerned about the loss of Empire. The working classes were only to aware of the impact that the Race Relations Act would have on their jobs. That is why they supported Powell. Most people did not have the rose-tinted view of the Empire that the author like to think they had.

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
3 months ago
Reply to  Lesley Keay

‘Loss of Empire’ is an obsession that the educated class have themselves. The most annoying thing about the British Empire is that it no longer exists for this educated caste to dismantle to prove their rectitude. So as a substitute they like to imagine it impels those who object to immigration.
Their own blindness is revealed in their complete lack of concern about how the communities and their leaders are negotiated with by representatives of the British state; a method of rule that occurred in the days of Empire.

N Forster
N Forster
3 months ago

Badly written bitchy hit piece, and the author seems very keen to downplay the Muslim grooming gang scandal.
Unherd – Could do better.

James Collett
James Collett
3 months ago
Reply to  N Forster

Unherd – Should do better.

Paul MacDonnell
Paul MacDonnell
3 months ago

There is a species of left-wing scholar who, fluent in the language of transcendental disdain for the lower orders, and with a strong suit in post-colonial studies, can pick his way through an entire issue while completely and, let’s be frank, deliberately failing to grasp what is in the minds of those whom he is discussing. Strip away the pompous overwriting and it is easy to see a series of tautologies that amount to the argument that “Robinson is bad because the courts and respectible opinion have said so”.
For example, Robinson has challenged the courts and the judicial system with both strong circumstantial and witnesses’ evidence that the child at the centre of his libel case was not as presented during the court hearing and in the media. In essence, Robinson has built a compelling case that there is systemic anti-white working class bias within Britain’s institutions. If he were the only source upon which to base such a charge then skepticism of his claims would be reasonable, at least initially. But it is so manifestly the case that only a particulary clever and articulate man like Dr. Anil could deny it. Anil’s response,in essence, is that he was convicted so there’s nothing more to discuss.
Very telling is Anil’s statement “The most crippling defect in Robinson’s oeuvre is unquestionably his ethnicisation of class, as if the “white” in “white working class” means anything..” Well Dr. Anil, how about you ask some of your colleagues in Oxford? I believe Dr. Anil is Indian and one can only suspect that he is signalling his caste to his colleagues at the university. It feels rather as if I, having got a job at an Indian university, wrote about the “lower-caste dregs” of Indian society and their “unacceptable views”. Just so my colleagues knew that I was the right sort. I can’t help thinking this is how Anil’s mind works. It’s all just a tad odious.
Anil begins his essay with “There is a paradox at the core of the English far-Right: namely, its quaintly un-English preoccupation with race…” This is surely gaslighting of the highest degree. Look around you Dr. Anil. Your fellow scholars in the humanities are the people who have stuffed ‘race’ down the throats of Britain’s institutions for going on 25 years now. Robinson and others are the consequence.
Anil goes on to say “crackpot identity politics is as alien to this sceptred isle as chlorinated chicken”. Again look around you — in the mirror even.
Anil says that race is no longer an issue and that “class is back” and then proceeds to a rather impressive display of class contempt.
He misses the entire point of the Tommy Robinson phenomenon. Here it is in plain English.
1. Robinson’s case is that race-obsesse educated types (Anil’s colleagues, Anil himself?), who have been a key and growing influence on institutions in this country for a long time, have marginalised the white working class in public policy in every area of our national institutional life;
2. Now that the British white working class has finally noticed (and Christ it took them long enough!) that the country’s left-liberal, educated elites despise them the country’s institutional and media leaders respond by slandering them as “far right” and then simply ignore the issues they raise: e.g. two -tier policing, discrimination in terms of housing and other services, and, frankly, the social acceptability of ornate character-assassinations like Anil’s.
Too many scholarly people in this country, Anil included, have this, frankly, Third World habit of assuming that anyone against whom an injustice has been committed must, if they are unsympathetic, be ignored and their protests disregarded. It is very poor analysis and reflects a level of illiteracy in the principles of liberty and freedom that are more common in Anil’s country of origin. If he’s going to comment on British affairs then he’d better up his game.
Here’s some advice: when considering Tommy Robinson we should look at the case of John Wilkes in the 18th century, a purveyor of porn and scandal, he was central to the battle in this country to win freedom of speech. it is precisely because he is not always sympathetic that we should be defending Tommy Robinson and demanding just treatment on his behalf.
Dr. Anil’s article is no more than carefully-wrought snobbery and serves as a rather disgraceful example of what it denies.

Claire D
Claire D
3 months ago

Well said.
It’s worth pointing out I think that there is also a degree of two-tier education. There is plenty of help, both practical and financial, out there available for black children, but not for poor white boys who are now the most marginalised of our time and suffering for it.

William Amos
William Amos
3 months ago

The writer has made little effort to understand his subject here. He asserts his prejudices in the opening paragraph and then proceeds with laboured humour, erratic register and sneering saracasm to maintain them throughout the piece.
Tommy Robinson has many flaws and his appeal to ethno-national solidarity is certainly paradoxical – Disraeli’s ‘Two Nations’ passage being the definitive comment on the subject. However, surely noone familiar with the life and works of Mr Robinson can come away honestly thinking he is a physical or moral coward, that he is ignorant or that he is venal.
There’s an easier way to earn a pound note in modern Britain than the path Stephen Yaxley-Lennon has taken.

Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
3 months ago

Some would designate our entire 21st century liberal establishment as ‘far left’ given how far its race-guilt tripping, sexual dysphoria obsessions are from what Left-wing previously used to mean.

Vesselina Zaitzeva
Vesselina Zaitzeva
3 months ago

The system used by UnHerd to moderate the comments is absolutely terrible. I’ve had my absolutely innocuous comments removed on a regular basis, only to be restored after I send a mail to UnHerd Support. However, sometimes it might take days, which renders any commenting meaningless.
In addition, the votes cast for/against comments often disappear just a day or two after the article was published. There are other technical glitches, too.
I’ve suggested many times here that people whose comments have been taken down, write immediately to UnHerd Support with a complaint, asking why specifically their comments have disappeared.
The more people do this, there higher the chance that UnHerd will do something about it.
After all, they should be interested in their credibility and, even more so, in engagement statistics that includes comments, apart from other things.

Graham Cunningham
Graham Cunningham
3 months ago

Thank you….useful to know.

Vesselina Zaitzeva
Vesselina Zaitzeva
3 months ago

Oh yes, I am very persistent in this regard, because I believe that there is much to be done to improve the way the moderation system is functioning now.
And thank you for you reply, am happy I was of some help 🙂

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
3 months ago

Perhaps they think you’re a bot.
You could try posting as Yolanda Yaxley-Lennon. Or Tarquin St.John Eccelsley-Smythe.

Vesselina Zaitzeva
Vesselina Zaitzeva
3 months ago

By now they should have learned that I am a real person, because I correspond with them incessantly 😉
The irony is that I am here under my real name and it is as common as the ones suggested by you 😉

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
3 months ago

Completely agree. UnHerd needs to take the problems with its comments section seriously, as participation is such an important part of why people choose to subscribe. I suspect they’ve subbed it out somewhere on the cheap.

Vesselina Zaitzeva
Vesselina Zaitzeva
3 months ago

Thank you for replying, Simon.
Yes, choosing the cheapest option is my suspicion, too.
But as they position themselves as a niche publication, targeting a discerning enough audience, they should re-think their choice, in my view.
It is so demotivating to post a comment, carefully wording it (esp. if you write under your own name), only for it to be removed, for reasons unknown. And then, after an exchange of mails, this very same comment is restored, after a couple of days sometimes, when it is completely useless.

Gary Taylor
Gary Taylor
3 months ago

Around 70% of voters agreed with Powell at the time, and around 64% of Brits today believe immigration is too high.
The British public has always been aware of race and immigration and voted against it at almost every opportunity.

Simon W
Simon W
3 months ago

Elitist disdain accompanied by a plethora of evidentially unsupported assertions does not a good article make!

James LS
James LS
3 months ago

Tommy Robinson has been funded for years by the Israeli lobby to spread anti-muslim hate. Keir Starmer and over half his cabinet are also funded by the Israeli lobby.
This Zionist influence has to end.
div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240810-exposed-what-links-israel-to-uk-far-right-riots/

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Reply to  James LS

You’re right. Robinson is actually the king pimp running grooming gangs right across England. All those upstanding, handsome, law abiding, spiritual and peaceful “men” led astray by Tommy Robinson for the sole purpose of spreading “anti-muslim hate” .
We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. I don’t support Zionism but if I lived in Luton, Bolton, Rochdale, Dewsbury, Bristol, Telford, Rotherham, Bradford, Batley, Halifax, (on and on) and my underage cousin had been violated by a bunch of seedy, protected men, Zionism would probably be below the culture that rapes kids of my country – by the thousands – on my list of urgent threats. That’s leaving out all the weekly jee-hads over the last decades.

James LS
James LS
3 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Well, it would be naive to suggest that Tommy R was not a major influence of the riots in the UK, even if he was sunning himself on a beach at the time.
And it’s also naive to think that child abuse is only committed by muslims. There aren’t too many muslims in all the churches where child abuse has been rife for decades.
The Israeli Zionists themselves have a very rapey culture for example, as is being demonstrated in detention centres throughout Palestine and Israel at the moment.
And there is the urgent issue of the UK being complicit in genocide and the war crimes identified by the ICC and ICJ just so Keir and his crew can receive payments from the Labour Friends of Israel etc.

Stewart Cazier
Stewart Cazier
3 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

His money comes from rich US zionists who also fund anti-Muslim think tanks. This isn’t opinion, it is fact. It is opinion to suppose that they control his agenda. However, if we think that they don’t, we won’t how much foreign money comes from wherever to fund our politics.

Toby B
Toby B
3 months ago

“The reality is that, excepting a few enclaves, crackpot identity politics is as alien to this sceptred isle as chlorinated chicken.”

“there was only a brief mid-century blip — Enoch Powell’s Britain — when many abandoned class-thinking and became race-mad”

Does this guy know what “communities” means? Has he heard of the term “institutional racism”, or the constant refrain of ‘racist’ from our political & media elders and betters? The Black Lives Matter protests? Or police and RAF recruits being overlooked because they were white?

Ah yes, identity politics and race madness are non-events.

JOHN B
JOHN B
3 months ago
Reply to  Toby B

Ethnic and cultural identity is permitted and encouraged within every group in Britain but for one.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

How utterly modern day English to have a faux intellectual ignore the documented systematic widespread rape of English girls . And its documented systematic, widespread cover-up by police and government. All the while pretending to a morally superior position because, well, Tommy is working class. It is,said that late stage degeneracy embraces its enemies and rejects those who wish to save the most vulnerable. This essay exemplifies that maxim.

JOHN B
JOHN B
3 months ago

Whether we like it or not ethnicity is a very powerful identarian signifier across cultures and through history – likely in part related to familial resemblance. The idea that we can entirely abolish that seems improbable, even if we think that is what ought to be done.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Reply to  JOHN B

Fortunately Robinson has no problem with race, ethnicity or colour.
He has stated clearly and repeatedly what he believes is a major problem in the West.
But the lie that he is motivated by racism is endlessly perpetuated by all and sundry on the Left.

Vici C
Vici C
3 months ago
Reply to  JOHN B

Indeed, it is not confined to ethnicity. “Otherness” is a hard wired trigger. It undoubtedly had survival objectives. You can see it in the animal kingdom, you see it at school. I went to a French school in UK and automatically the students segregated themselves, quite without malice. There are those in the world who would wish to unbiologicalise us (o.k. I made it up) and maybe they will succeed given the advances of AI.

Stewart Cazier
Stewart Cazier
3 months ago

Hardly an objective analysis of Robinson and his followers, just a condescending sneer of the type which provokes them to action in the first place.
He misses the most important point about Robinson – he is bought and paid for by US Zionist backers to forment anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK. If any other foreigners were interfering in the UK in the same way, there would be complete uproar.

Sue Sims
Sue Sims
3 months ago
Reply to  Stewart Cazier

Of course! Why didn’t I realise that? It’s all in the Protocols in the Elders of Zion.

Stewart Cazier
Stewart Cazier
3 months ago
Reply to  Sue Sims

His main funders are a matter of public record. Even the Times published them a couple of weeks ago, although without the condemnation that it would have expressed were the backers any other foreigners.

Vici C
Vici C
3 months ago
Reply to  Stewart Cazier

It is true his article is based on prejudice and is obviously un-researched. It is also true that Robinson had dealings at one point with Zionists. But it was a passing interest and he moved on. Considering his roots he has literally been on a journey and has grown as a man as a result. Unlike the lefty cowards who hide in their echo chamber bubble and whose only raison d’etre is to pour scorn.

Louise Henson
Louise Henson
3 months ago

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  div > p > a”>concluded in 2020, “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white”.’
This is an egregious claim belied by the facts. Proportionate to their percentage of the population Muslims are heavily overrepresented in the number of convictions for child sex exploitation. Furthermore decades of two-tier policing mean that those numbers are only the tip of an enormous iceburg.

Vici C
Vici C
3 months ago
Reply to  Louise Henson

Par for the course for far lefties.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

A thorough Prat wrote this disgusting pile of rot.
Pay to subscribe to Unherd? You must be joking.

Katalin Kish
Katalin Kish
3 months ago

Wow. An UnHerd article so unsavoury, I couldn’t read past the first two paragraphs.

David Frost
David Frost
3 months ago

Clearly the author hasn’t read or seen one of Tommys interviews or books
He isn’t racist, he doesn’t like the actions of the islamists who prey on white girls and try to make English cities Islamic in nature
He has actually lived the experience
I’m guessing this author is American, he clearly gets confused about the ideas of class in the UK
Possibly the worst article I’ve read on Unheard

Kiddo Cook
Kiddo Cook
3 months ago

Can’t take any article seriously that daubs ‘far right’ throughout. Sure people say silly things and maybe believe them but none of what she says in the article is ‘far right.’ We all know we’ve been lied to and betrayed for decades, not simply the ‘white working class’ The vast majority of the country shares feelings of distrust and deception, irrespective of ‘class’. That they are not violent but simply speaking out is now deemed ‘extremist’ and ‘far right.’

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
3 months ago
Reply to  Kiddo Cook

Hey dude, you like, misgendered him? That’s like, a hate crime, man.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

Why do Prats like this author always try to insist that people they disagree with are “racist”? Robinson is not a racist. He has valid and substantiated concerns about islam. Millions of us across the world share those concerns because of the obvious and serious harm it has done, and is currently doing, across the globe.
I am sick of hearing academics spewing absolute tosh like this dreadful article.
I’m as likely to pay to receive more nonsense from Unherd as I am to throw coins into The Guardian’s begging bowl.

Campbell P
Campbell P
3 months ago

The author needs to get out of the library and open his eyes and his ears. TR is doubtless an unsavoury character in many ways and has made many mistakes but he also points to some valuable home truths that Liberals and Libertarians like the author simply cannot abide. Also, the author is quite wrong in pointing only to class and not racial or racial cultural differences with respect to earnings. And by far the greatest factor in black teenage knife crime and older black gangs, violence, etc is absentee fathers: working with Social Services and the Police confirmed this for me – in spades; but of course officers and workers were never allowed to mention it.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Reply to  Campbell P

The author is many things. Two things he is not is “liberal” or “libertarian”.

Ray Ward
Ray Ward
3 months ago

Not bad, but with faults one wouldn’t expect to find in an Oxford academic. It is a pity to see the myth that Adolf Hitler’s original name was Schicklgruber yet again rearing its head. The link leads, not to the Wikipedia entry on Adolf Hitler, but to the one on his father, Alois, who was indeed born Schicklgruber but changed his name to Hitler about 12 years before the birth of his son Adolf. And Anil really should know there is no such word as “miniscule”; it should be “minuscule”.

Vici C
Vici C
3 months ago
Reply to  Ray Ward

It shows how low Oxford University has sunk. They take any old riffraff now.

Russell Sharpe
Russell Sharpe
3 months ago

“as if him and Helena Bonham Carter might just have more in common…”
Basic English grammar fail.

j watson
j watson
3 months ago

Superb.
Occasionally I worry UnHerd’s ownership and subscriber base ensures it’ll cycle alot of right wing culture war twaddle. But a slum-dunk takedown of a grifter like Robinson shows what it can still do.

Andrew R
Andrew R
3 months ago
Reply to  j watson

“Right wing culture war twaddle”. No JW that’ll be the Left with their, “Intersectionality” nonsense.

j watson
j watson
3 months ago
Reply to  Andrew R

There is some intersectional twaddle on the far left and I grant you that. But whilst I shouldn’t have been perhaps, I am surprised at how many subscribers defend a racist cretin like Robinson. I think a dreadful reflection on each one of you. It shows a far worse degree of intersectionality that because of his dog whistles you block out the obvious grifting racism. Reading the truth about his activities clearly v painful

Andrew R
Andrew R
3 months ago
Reply to  j watson

The mainstream Left JW, those policies being promoted by NGO’s and Quangos, you know “The Blob” that according to you doesn’t exist.
Where in my comment am I defending TR? I’m only pointing out your stupidity in believing that the culture war is a right wing creation.
That’s very dishonest of you but it’s what we’ve come to expect from you.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
3 months ago
Reply to  j watson

I am happy to read intelligent analysis from a leftist slant but Anil only provides a slam-dunk superficial confirmation of the conventional MSM view of Robinson by disregarding any facts that might tell in his favour. An impartial historian’s view it certainty isn’t and this has been largely recognised by the readers. At least he has confirmed your biases and he will no doubt be happy with his work which I notice he has highlighted on X.

John Corcoran
John Corcoran
3 months ago

The author is absurdly pompous and clearly does not like white working class oikish types . I would love to see Tommy R getting a right to reply.

Arthur G
Arthur G
3 months ago

TLDR: Our (The British upper class) racism against the white working class is virtuous. Their (the white working class) desire to preserve their nation and culture is horrible racist-fascism.
You can’t make this stuff up.

Jeff Dudgeon
Jeff Dudgeon
3 months ago

For Yaxley Lennon read Narendra Modi.

Sayantani G
Sayantani G
3 months ago
Reply to  Jeff Dudgeon

Anil is a Marxist Islamist. His foes are anyone not from that shade

Iain Fitzsimons
Iain Fitzsimons
3 months ago

This is a shockingly poor article that is overlong and thoroughly inaccurate. Robinson is no fascist. And from what I’ve seen of him, no racist. He is a vocal and ardent anti Islamist who in his home town witnessed an orgy of celebration of 9/11 and at close hand how Muslim ‘grooming gangs’ raped young girls. The author makes light of both of Robinson’s two issues – which speaks volumes about the author and the motivations of this hit piece.

Julia Cooper
Julia Cooper
3 months ago

Appalling piece. Poorly researched, subjective, snobbish. Whatever he is ‘teaching’ at St Edmund’s Hall can’t have much academic credibility if this is the standard of work he produces. Shan’t be renewing my 3 months for £1 per month subscription when it comes up for renewal.

Vesselina Zaitzeva
Vesselina Zaitzeva
3 months ago
Reply to  Julia Cooper

Yes, I have also been thinking along these lines today. The number of truly interesting, eye-opening articles on UnHerd has become low enough to make it possible to read them without subscription.
Plus, I have a serious issue with the moderation system and all the problems related to its malfunctioning – mostly the arbitrary removal of comments, but not only this. I have spent a lot of time exchanging mails with UnHerd support about this, but nothing has changed,
I was one of the very first paying subscribers – not least because I wanted to support UnHerd as an example of high-quality journalism. Now, I feel how my willingness to support them is dwindling… Sad…

Naren Savani
Naren Savani
3 months ago

The most “ up his own fundament “ writer to be given a platform on UnHerd. He must be hugging himself as the cleverest person on earth before going to bed at night.

James Collett
James Collett
3 months ago

In the first paragraph, Tommy Robinson is effectively lumped in with the “far-Right” and branded a racist.
This insufferably lazy tarring of the man’s character is a poor start.
When I grew up in the 1980s, I knew what the “far right” was. They were National Front types and Nazi sympathising skin heads; they were people with an anti-Semitic inclination; they were people who didn’t like black people because they had darker skin; they were people who referred to Asians with derogatory names.
Nowadays, it seems that you are “far right” if you hold vaguely traditional moral values; if you have anxiety about untrammelled immigration; if you object to the encroaching Islamification of the UK.
As far as I can tell, Tommy Robinson does not fit the first definition. He surely fits the second definition, as do many people in this country; as do I.
I am not on-board with this new definition.

Hugo Montgomery
Hugo Montgomery
3 months ago

Oh the smugness.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 months ago

Rather, what we have on our hands is an existential struggle between white and Muslim fundamentalists, ——> This is not true, which raises the question of why anyone should take a word the author says seriously. The problem is a govt that has ignored people’s reaction to unfettered illegal immigration. That your cities are gradually being taken over from within by Muslims is just a by-product of that.
It wasn’t ‘far right thugs’ who blew up an Ariana Grande concert, or set about with machetes attacking random people, or was involved in the most recent set of murders. It wasn’t even random Brits who were involved. In each case, there was a common element that the author is desperate to ignore.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

Let’s see if I can summarize here: “Grooming gangs don’t exist because the police say that whites commit most sex crimes, even though the police are accused of not investigating the gangs because of fears of being decried as racist.
Further evidence that grooming gangs don’t exist is that Tommy Robinson is a scoundrel.”
So you seem to dismiss the existence of “Grooming gangs” that might be associated with a cultural class largely because you don’t like one of the accusers.
That would be great to hear.
Pity that your presentation is so off putting that I can’t believe a word you wrote, even though it may be true. ‍

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

It’s an opinion

hugh williams
hugh williams
3 months ago

As a reader if there comes a point where you cannot help but notice the author is trying far too hard to show off how clever and articulate they are, the spell of any rapport is already broken. Sometimes less is more. Being desperate for adulation and validation glares too hard and obscures the scene behind. TR is not a nice person, not even to the people who triple lionise him, but there’s a whole treasure trove of discussion to be had by digging a bit deeper instead of just following the herd.

Your bio line “Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history.” means you are probably amply equipped to delve deeper than orange man bad. What might the people who support TR in the UK have in common with people and movements from Indian history? Are there examples in Indian history of such divisive figures around which populism seems to coalesce? Similarlities? Differences? Important context that should be accounted for? Cultural differences that lead to differences in outcomes? Does TR have even a single point that makes sense? How has changing population demographics affected Indian history? Has it caused conflict? An example from wider afield – Nelson Mandela, good or bad? Winne Mandela, Mandela FC and Stompie Moeketsi? I’m deliberately highlighting the bad because Nelson Mandela changed South Africa so much for the better, but it’s not black and white. I feel you should have so much more to offer us than word salad with a fancy dressing.

Anna Clare Bryson
Anna Clare Bryson
3 months ago

I’ve read articles by Anil on his specialist subject, the modern history of India, and been impressed by his fresh and by no means dogmatically progressive take on the subject. This makes it all the more disappointing, but also in a way puzzling, to read this piece, which is very very light on content – no attempt at any point to illustrate, let alone demonstrate the seemingly all-explaining and indeed axiomatic notion that Robinson is just a smelly lower-class racist thug, in the Mosleyan blackshirt tradition. It is also very heavy and laborious and self-congratulatory in its humour and its annoyingly coercive clubby assumption that the reader needs no persuasion because he or she must surely share Anil’s superior virtue and enlightenment. One could imagine treatments of Robinson and what he represents that were still negative, but hugely more intelligent and informative
I think the most generous interpretation of Anil’s sudden intellectual outage on this topic is that he’s a little bit afraid of Tommy. Indeed, one of the more interesting things about Robinson including in his EDL days, is just how much fear he aroused – and to some extent still arouses – in the establishment (police, courts, government, media etc..), which of course may say at least as much about the latter, as it does about Robinson himself.
Perhaps an equally valid and less generous interpretation, though, is that on sensitive matters like migration, even the most intellectual of our intellectual mainstream elite, cross a line separating areas of debate where they are free to show how individually brainy they are, and areas of dogma where they need to signal collective identity and distance from the common herd. As it were the line between analysis and incantation, with the emphasis on cant.

Sayantani G
Sayantani G
3 months ago

For many Indians like me, Anil’s takes on Indian history are as prejudiced and class- biased,and reeking of snobbish elitism as most British readers find this piece.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

Notice how “intellectuals” such as this author don’t admit, much less ponder, what the “far left” issues are. The actual reactionaries of today are those in power.

Margie Murphy
Margie Murphy
3 months ago

Gave up after the first few paragraphs. A simplistic hit piece on a man who has been proved right over and over.

Edward Seymour
Edward Seymour
3 months ago

I have no idea who Mr Anil is but I do have some idea of who Robinson is and where he is from. I watched his conversation with Mr and Mrs Jordan Peterson and was frankly moved by what I heard. I also watched his interview with another Canadian, the evolutionary biologist Mr Gad Saad. In both programmes I was struck by Robinson’s thirst for knowledge, for an attempt to make sense of the world around him. He has had what a Labour MP once described as a “bog standard” secondary education and has been surrounded by a hostile demographic both at school and in his town. Amazingly he has been able to make friends with some from that demographic but this has not blinded him to the real existential problem of living and thriving in towns like Luton if you are a white working class boy. Does he run with a wrong crowd? Probably. Is he alone in seeing that a fundamental problem facing the UK today is not just legal and illegal immigration but the cullture of those immigrating and what this means for our own sense of who we are and where we call home, undoubtedly not. In fact if we are to believe surveys, most people agree with him that the issue of mass uncontrolled and unidentified immigration is their number one concern, above the NHS and above the economy.
At one point in his conversation with Mrs Peterson in particular, he breaks down when contemplating the cost to him and his family of what he sincerely believes and his likely fate when the authorities succeed in jailing him again. I don’t think he offers the necessary political solution to the problems we face, but we had better find such a solution because the “Tommys” that might come after this one might be far more worrying. He has warned us I think.

Charles Wells
Charles Wells
3 months ago

What is happening to Unherd? The tone of an increasing number of articles seems to be sneering, elitist and uninformed.

Vici C
Vici C
3 months ago

Please tell me this is click bait. Never heard such half baked, moronic, infantile, self-congratulatory claptrap in my life. Boy, get a life, go out in the world a bit, see life and unbrainwash yourself, before subjecting us to this rather unpleasant, snobbish drivel.

denz
denz
3 months ago

Absolute tosh.

Steven Carr
Steven Carr
3 months ago

The author is in Oxford?
2013 Oxford Child Sex Abuse Ring: In one of the most significant trials, seven men were convicted at the Old Bailey for their roles in a child sex abuse ring in Oxford. The men, including two sets of brothers, were found guilty of a total of 43 charges related to the abuse of six victims. The victims, aged between 11 and 15, were subjected to rape, torture, and trafficking. Five of the men received life sentences, while two others were sentenced to seven years each.

2018 Oxford Grooming Ring: Another trial involved eight men who were convicted for sexually assaulting vulnerable girls between 1998 and 2005. The trial revealed systematic and widespread grooming and abuse, with the men using alcohol and drugs to exploit the victims. The men were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, with some receiving life sentences.

2020 Trial: Three men were jailed for sexually abusing a schoolgirl in Oxford between 1999 and 2001. The convictions were part of Operation Silk, a Thames Valley Police investigation into historical child sexual exploitation in Oxford. The men were found guilty of 35 offenses, including rape and indecent assault.
Does anybody want to wager money that these people were white?\
Of course this is just one city, chosen at random in case the author had any clue what was happening in the city they lived in.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago
Reply to  Steven Carr

“Does anybody want to wager money that these people were white?”
I’ll bet the farm that you are a racist.

Steven Carr
Steven Carr
3 months ago

Facts are racist.

Stewart Cazier
Stewart Cazier
3 months ago

Ruins what value there was in the dish by totally over flavouring and over cooking it, as many other comments point out. The diatribe about class v race is tired and simply untrue – the articule itself illustrates why large parts of the population are throughly disenchanted with mainstream politicians – middle class intellectuals like Anil condescending down to them and closing down/diverting their voices. He is also very wrong about the lack of a hard right in the UK – FPTP simply suppresses protest voting through marginal parties. Reform is attracting the socially conservative and is arguing why we have a Labour government. The latter aren’t popular- they simply lost voters less quickly than the Tories.
He does miss out one of the most important issues about Tommy R – he is bought and paid for by US zionists to forment anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK. If it were Chinese or Russian tycoons doing the same, there would be a massive outcry. Why is acceptable for US Jews to fund the incitement of racial hatred in the UK?

Steven Carr
Steven Carr
3 months ago

deleted

Gary Howells
Gary Howells
3 months ago

The text critiques Tommy Robinson and the English far-right, portraying them as marginal and out of step with mainstream English values. It argues that Robinson’s focus on race is “un-English” and rooted in a historical anomaly, contrasting his ideology unfavorably with class-based discrimination in the UK. The tone is dismissive, using sarcasm and irony to undermine Robinson’s credibility, framing him as a fringe figure whose influence is minimal compared to far-right movements abroad. The text is biased, offering a strongly negative view of Robinson without fully exploring the appeal of his views to his supporters.

hugh williams
hugh williams
3 months ago
Reply to  Gary Howells

Exactly. Why is TR’s support increasing? That’s a great question. What could be done to address the concerns of people being drawn to TR in order prevent TR representing a solution for them?. Instead we get “Poopy man smells of poop. Look how clever I am.” The useful idiots on the left are the greatest recruitment tool the far right ever had.

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
3 months ago

If race is not an issue in the UK, why does the British state insist that everyone describes themselves whenever they have to fill in a form by a racial designation?
And, moreover, a series of designations that, as Aris Roussinos has observed, gathers together people who have no cultural affinity or historical connection with each other under one description.
If race is not an issue in the UK, why are some buildings in Wales declared to be racist? Why do some people declare that black lives matter? Why is the countryside described as ‘too white’?
Immediately after the Southport murders one family displayed as part of a demonstration a home-made banner that implied that a person of colour born in Wales wasn’t Welsh. Does that indicate the success the British state has achieved in persuading everyone to think of themselves by their specious race designations?
Holding up Yaxley-Lennon as evidence that race in Britain is an anachronism is to make out that only people like him are typically obsessed with race. Yet, as the author points out himself, Yaxley-Lennon isn’t typical of the most of the British public. That notwithstanding, thanks to the British state and its specious designations, more people in Britain today may think more about race than anyone did in the Third Reich.
But of course, the author is really writing about class. And there’s the rub. Invent the idea that there are classes of people and everyone divides themselves off and starts fighting each other. Class is as just as specious.
And as if all that isn’t contentious enough, there is now the classification of ‘working people’ for whom every policy of the Labour government is to satisfy. Working people are not, apparently, as anyone might reasonably think, people who are in employment. They are people without savings. And as for the way the servants of the British state negotiate, like plenipotentiaries of some colonial administration, with community leaders, that’s a wholly different can of worms. A supermarket shelf full of them.

Lynwen Brown
Lynwen Brown
3 months ago

I’m glad that I haven’t read a single comment in this thread supporting this article, in all its snobbery and ignorance. My subscription to UnHerd however might be redirected to The Critic, where they publish articles by people who have a much better grasp of what is actually happening in this country.

https://thecritic.co.uk/shattered-illusions/

James Kirk
James Kirk
3 months ago

The sort of writer and writing who belongs at the BBC or writing for the Guardian. A recruiting sergeant for anti Islam prejudice that I’ve become convinced is being fuelled precisely to encourage civil disturbance. I don’t want to arm myself against my brown skinned neighbours with whom I get along and nor do they. This writer is part of the problem. He is breaking windows and blaming someone else. A nasty piece of work.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago

Looks like I was right again – the sheep at Unherd leap to the defence of this tin-pot racist clown. No surprise there!

David Bagshaw
David Bagshaw
3 months ago

Sorry Unherd but I won’t be hanging around much longer if this is the calibre of the articles you intend to publish for your subscribers. This abhorrently snobbish snipe at working class Brits quite frankly would not have looked out of place in the ghastly classist Guardian. I came here for discerning and non-mainstream views, not this smug woke pseudo-intellectual mush.

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
3 months ago

It is necessary that Unherd should commission articles which are unlikely to please its readers. Keep us on our toes!

But those articles should be logical arguments. Thoughtful. Backed with lots of evidence. They need to do this a bit more assiduously than the crowd pleasers

This article was a shocker. I’m a little bit of an academic myself (sums, not very advanced) and, one of the reasons I don’t write articles is that I’d be trying so hard to support my argument that I’d never start writing let alone finish.

The arrogance of this writer is so brazen that I hope he has a long hard look in the mirror before putting pen to paper.

Moreover, I would advise that he spend a few hours a week at the Four Candles, the Wetherspoons in Oxford. He might meet some ordinary people.

Peter Saffos
Peter Saffos
3 months ago

Jordan Peterson’s interview with T.R. was epochal. T.R. presented a mountain of circumstancial evidence in his defence, also a mountain of evidence that local government in England has become a tyrannical, violent, Mohammedan imperium in imperio. You don’t like to listen to T.R., then read his instead.

Jimmy Snooks
Jimmy Snooks
3 months ago

I’m very disappointed that UnHerd has seen fit to publish such a poor, hit-job of an article as this. I thought you were better than this. This writer should have been writing snarkey attack-pieces for the New Musical Express in the early eighties. Lefty, smart-arse student fare.

Tommy Robinson has some obvious faults and has done some stupid things, but why would we expect someone from his background to be perfectly measured and exquisitely presented in his utterances and past acts? His has certainly been an chequered career. And yet – all things considered – he has shown infinitely more grace, character and courage in more recent times than many – and certainly has more to recommend him than shown by the writer of this execrably sneering article.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

What a revoltingly nasty hatchet job on a man who it is quite clear that the entire British establishment from Starmer to Farage hate. Many of the statements he makes are very debatable.
The fact that Britain has no party in parliament like National Rally or AfD in parliament is primarily to do with the entirely undemocratic nature of the British electoral system. Does he not know that 600,000 voters in England voted for the unashamedly neo-nazi BNP in the 2010 election? These voters, I would suggest, were not real racists but desperate people. At which point the media pulled Farage out of the hat, a media creation if ever there was one!
The real paradox of the entire British political spectrum is that because leftists, the Labour Party and the Greens shamelessly cuddle up to political Islamism, we have a situation where ex-muslims, atheists from the muslim world and moderate Saudi dissidents are forced to find friendship with Tommy Robinson because they have been betrayed by so-called progressive forces in the UK.

Dan Miller
Dan Miller
3 months ago

I’m old enough to see what Enoch Power warned would happen appears to be happening

Keith Merrick
Keith Merrick
3 months ago

I didn’t read the article. Simply describing Tommy Robinson as a ‘class clown’ was too much for me. Robinson has endured too much vilification and has sacrificed too much to warrant such disrespect. I can only guess that Pratinav Anil thought at least some people would applaud his attempt to turn Tommy Robinson into a figure of fun. It appears that was a miscalculation. Clearly Unherd readers see things differently to Oxford academics.

Jos Haynes
Jos Haynes
2 months ago
Reply to  Keith Merrick

This sort of article is why I unsubscribed from Unherd. Some people should remain unheard. As always, the comments section is the only place where one can be sure of sense.

Derek McLellan
Derek McLellan
3 months ago

Just what is the definition of far Right? In Canada, the CBC denounced a Filipino-Canadian woman, who runs a cult in Saskatchewan and who proclaimed herself ‘Queen of Canada’, as far Right. It seems to be a pejorative the Left uses against anyone they don’t like.

Chuck Burns
Chuck Burns
3 months ago

Is it safe to say you don’t approve of Tommy?

Chris Milburn
Chris Milburn
3 months ago

Mr. Anil – read the comments and take some time to think a bit.
I believe you have been “ratio’ed”, as the cool kids call it. And you deserve it.

Andrea Vickers
Andrea Vickers
3 months ago

I’m no fan of Tommy Robinson, but this article was incredibly patronising (we got your English language credentials after the first paragraph, thanks). It was also tone deaf, doubtless written from the privileged bastions of Oxford academia.

How you can write so much ‘word salad’, yet still miss the real elephant in the room is risible. It’s radical Islam, and we are both importing and home growing it with alacrity. The real question is, how many more rapes and stabbings is the British public prepared to tolerate before saying enough is enough?

Brian Hunt
Brian Hunt
3 months ago

An I’ll informed, snide and overlong article by someone not qualified to comment on the lives of the white working class in the UK. I expect higher standards of objective journalism in Uheard, I can read dross like this in mainstream newspapers.

Sisyphus Jones
Sisyphus Jones
3 months ago

This kind of writing has got to be purged from Unherd or I’m going to cancel my subscription. It is unreadable, mastubatory drivel. If I sat across a table from someone talking like this I would have a hard time not grabbing him by the collar, shaking him, and asking him the hell is wrong with him.

Adrian Clark
Adrian Clark
3 months ago

“…. and joined them in opposing the teaching of tolerance to sexual minorities in schools.” Evolutionary biology disagrees.

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
3 months ago

from someone called Anil… no surprise then…

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
3 months ago

What is missing are people with a broad academic knowledge of history, religion, law, customs, languages,etc who have worked with people from all backgrounds, who can listen to people of all viewpoints without showing fear. Fear clouds judgement.
Richard Burton, T E Lawrence, Getrude Bell, Lt Col H R P Dickson
H. R. P. Dickson – Wikipedia
George Orwell,
The person who sits and listens needs to have the courage and toughness of those talking whether they be British working class men or Afghans. Lt Col Worsley was able to sit down ith Afghans, earn their respect so they told him their views: milksops will only earn contempt.
Henry Worsley (explorer) – Wikipedia
The Afghans told Worlsey they would fight any invaders, we did not listen.
The inability of those in power to actively seek out opinion with those who disagree with them causes much failure. Elizabth 1 listened to the House of Commons and toured the country in summer enabling her to gauge the opinion of the country and persuade people of her views. Charles 1 treated other peoples opinions with contempt which led to civil war.

John Galt
John Galt
3 months ago

So the article starts our by saying that Britain isn’t racist, then saying that Robinson shouldn’t be racist, and then pointing out that he’s racist because he opposes unconstrained immigration and concerns around Islam.

The only person that seems to be obsessed with racism is the British in power class. Furthermore I don’t think Robinson is racist because again and this is important ISLAM ISNT A RACE!

Maybe Robinson wouldn’t be so popular if the people that are actually supposed to be in charge of the UK actually confronted and dealt with problems rather than ignoring them and telling anyone who talks about it they’re racist.

If you keep creating Weimar problems you’ll eventually end up with people finding Weimar solutions.

Gill Hindmarsh
Gill Hindmarsh
3 months ago

gill.hindmarsh @btinternet.com

Matthew Jones
Matthew Jones
3 months ago

Tommy has his flaws, but he’s committed to telling the truth about Islam, and he has more courage in one finger than the author of this hit-piece has in his whole body.

Keith Carter
Keith Carter
3 months ago

The author of this article seems content to lighten his mood by humorously referring to the Southport killer as ‘an embittered Taylor Swift critic’. Such jokes.
I like to think he is right to say we in the UK have little to concern us on matters inter-racial. But Islam is not a race, and the author knows this. Yet he attacks TR as a racist for his anti Islamic extremism views.
My views on Robinson, insofar as I had any, were probably aligned with Anil’s dismissive intellectual snobbery – but listening to Jordan Peterson interview him (twice) (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000667195228) – does suggest that matters are more complex. Who would have thought it? Well, contributors to Unherd should. Like others here, I’m rather disappointed.

Neil Turrell
Neil Turrell
1 month ago

“Robinson and his ilk”. No need to read much further if you want to keep your BP within reasonable bounds. If we lived in a country where fairness and critical thinking were higher on the agenda, surely we would celebrate the fact that a modestly educated person from the working class makes the elites feel anxious.

Mark Royster
Mark Royster
1 month ago

As usual, the comments are brighter than the article. It appears to be a winning strategy for Unherd.

Victor James
Victor James
1 month ago

The author is a typical anti-white racist.

Peter B
Peter B
1 month ago

Bailed after the rant about Thatcher blowtorching the miners (what was that exactly ? anyone else remember this happening ?) and mindless chanting about “class”. That’s about 10% through.
I may thus have missed an absolute gem of an article.
But I suspect not …
Must do better if you want people to actually read your articles.

Saffa
Saffa
1 day ago

50% ok-eish piece and 50% kak piece.

Last edited 1 day ago by Saffa