Tommy Robinson is a paradox: he is a brave and enormously successful activist-journalist with a mean right hook. At the same time, he’s prone to sentimentality, sensitive to criticism and sees himself as a victim, tethering his own private troubles — mortgage fraud, travelling to the US on a false passport and an upcoming contempt of court case to name just a few — to the political grievances of the white working class he claims to represent. His greatest contradiction, though, is that while he’s a trenchant critic of identity politics, mercilessly mocking the whiny victimhood of Black Lives Matter, the transgender movement and shady Islamists, he’s also an unmistakable product of that politics, weaponising the language of tribal resentment and self-pity for his own personal and political purposes.
Every multicultural society, it turns out, has the Tommy Robinsons it deserves. Which is to say that if you fetishise identity and create a hierarchy of identities, whereby some are protected and defended while others are stigmatised and attacked, you’ll end up with a less than harmonious society. It also turns out that if you reward “marginalised” non-white identities, many whites will bristle against this and start reasserting their own white identity — or search out those who will do it for them.
It is from this toxic context — the “Lebanonisation” of the UK, as Sam Bidwell strikingly describes it — that Robinson has emerged, becoming the first white “community leader” here. But unlike his counterparts in the “Muslim community”, no British politician or senior police officer would be seen dead breaking fried bread with Robinson. If Robinson has a victim-complex, it is in part because he is one and because he seems to go out of his way to be one. Indeed, it’s almost as if he enjoys being a victim and the sense of righteousness and authenticity this gives him.
Robinson’s arrest on Friday at Folkestone police station, where he was charged under the schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act for refusing to hand over the pin to his mobile phone, and his return to custody immediately after, will further solidify his victim narrative. This will surely be compounded by his appearance today and tomorrow at Woolwich crown court on separate charges relating to repeating libellous statements he made about a Syrian refugee back in 2018.
Though he wasn’t there for it, Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally still went ahead, with podcaster Liam Tuffs hosting in his place. I watched a livestream showing the main speakers and I sat through the whole of Robinson’s new documentary, which was shown in its 124-minute entirety. It is titled “Lawfare: Lust, Fear and Loathing — and the UK riots”, which is a bit of a mouthful, lacking the punch and clarity of, say, “The Rape of Britain”, Robinson’s 2022 documentary about Asian grooming gangs. Robinson must have intuited this, because he spends the first 15 minutes performing the yeoman’s work of explaining its subtitle. In short: lust refers to the greed of the elites and their desire for power, fear is about the elites’ capitulation to Islam, and loathing denotes their contempt for ordinary people and Britain.
The documentary begins with an encomium to Peter Lynch, who last week committed suicide in prison. Lynch, 61, was serving two years and eight months after he pleaded guilty to being part of a violent mob outside a migrant hotel in Rotherham during the peak of this summer’s anti-immigration riots; he had shouted “scum” and “child killers” at police. The judge who sentenced Lynch called him a “disgraceful example of a grandfather”, but for Robinson he is a martyr-like figure whose sacrifice exposes the cruel face of a two-tier system of criminal system in the UK.