Posted 20 October 2018 - 08:27 AM
Going to prison was the best thing that ever happened to me,” declares Tommy Robinson. I am sitting in a hotel bar in Luton town centre, listening to him explain why he has quit the English Defence League. Before his imprisonment he had been receiving death threats from Islamists, and neo-Nazis were threatening to take over the EDL. As a result, he says, he was “drinking alcohol, going out three times a week, neglecting my wife. I thought I was dealing with the pressures of the English Defence League, but I was pretty much just bingeing my way through it.”
Short and stocky, like a welterweight grown pudgy between bouts, Robinson speaks with an understated manner that belies the intensity of his words. In January he was jailed for travelling to meet American EDL supporters in New York using somebody else’s passport, and spent eighteen weeks in solitary confinement after running into trouble with Muslim gangs on the inside. Those long hours in his cell were, he says, his first opportunity since 2009 to take stock. “And that’s when I started to question, where’s the EDL going? Because, you know, we march up and down this country, but what is it we want to get out of it? And how do we succeed?”
Multiple identities are a theme of Robinson’s career to date. His real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon; he adopted the alias “Tommy Robinson” in the early days of the EDL as protection, he says, against reprisals from Muslims. To many, he is little more than a cut-price demagogue in designer clobber who has spent four-and-a-half years inciting hatred against Muslims with his menacing and often violent rallies. To others, he is a misunderstood liberal unafraid of trampling cultural sensitivities while speaking up for “British values”. He now says he wants to become an advocate for moderation and dialogue by working with Quilliam, an anti-extremism think tank. If he does so, it will be his most audacious transformation yet.
In order to understand how Tommy Robinson came to this point, you need to understand Luton, the town where he was born in 1982, where he went to school and where later he formed the EDL. His father was English, his mother Irish. “Everyone in Luton is the son of immigrants,” he says. “Whether it be Irish, West Indian, Ghanaian, everyone I know.” He grew up with his mother, who worked in a bakery, and his adoptive father, who worked at the local Vauxhall car plant. At Putteridge High School, Robinson scored 11 A-Cs at GCSE. “Got an A in Maths, too,” he boasts. “I never studied and I still breezed the exams.” But outside the classroom there were, he says, “problems”.
What does he mean?
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“There were problems with . . . ”, Robinson begins, and then checks himself. “Look, when I was at school, Imran and Kamran, two identical twins, were some of my best mates. But there were problems with Muslim gangs, and there were fights between the English lads and the Muslims. Whenever you get in a problem at school, it’s flooded with Muslim men. They always seemed to be waiting for trouble.”
Despite his academic ability, nobody encouraged Robinson to stay on for sixth form, so he left school at 16. Around the same time, his father received his redundancy notice from Vauxhall. Robinson speaks with obvious pride of the way in which the man he came to see as his real father “used to go all over the world doing specialist pipe fitting” for Vauxhall. The company had been building cars in Luton since 1903 and was for many years the town’s biggest employer. It was Luton's reputation as an industrial hub that had once made it attractive to immigrants, including Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh. When Vauxhall's assembly lines closed in 2000 – the rock-bottom of the town's long industrial decline – Muslims comprised 15% of its population. Today they are 25%, and Luton is one of a few British towns where white Britons are an ethnic minority.
One of the few institutions that provided a sense of continuity for locals was Luton Town Football Club, where Robinson was taken to matches from a young age. “It’s a community,” says Robinson. “Most of the friends I’ve got now, I’ve met through going to Luton Town.” But on match days Robinson encountered the same tensions between Muslims and non-Musliims he had found at school. Luton’s stadium, he explains, is “slap bang in the middle of Bury Park”, the town’s main Muslim area. Robinson recalls being involved in confrontations between football fans and local Muslims where he soon learnt, he says, “you either back down or get your head kicked in”.
And yet Robinson almost sounds envious when he talks about the sense of community among Muslims in Luton. “The mentality they have, I realised it when I went to the World Cup,” he says. “When an Englishman out there gets in trouble, every other Englishman defends him. It’s the mindset, you’re away from home and he’s your brother. And that’s the brotherhood they have every day. You get in trouble outside a nightclub here, they’ll get out of their taxis, their chicken shops, they’ll come from everywhere. They don’t need to know each other. Just cos they’re a Muslim and you’re not.”
Tommy Robinson speaks to supporters of the EDL near Downing Street. (GETTY IMAGES)
After he left school, Robinson applied to study aircraft engineering at Luton Airport, one of the few remaining providers of skilled blue-collar jobs in the town. “I got an apprenticeship six hundred people applied for, and they took four people on,” he says. He qualified in 2003 after studying for five years, but almost immediately his life was turned upside-down when a criminal conviction – during a drunken argument he assaulted a man who turned out to be an off-duty police officer – meant he lost his job. Robinson explains that, as a result of tightened security measures after September 11, his criminal record meant he was blacklisted from working at airports.
It was during this time, bitter at the loss of his career and labouring on a building site, that Robinson read in a newspaper about a group of local Islamists who were attempting to recruit men to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan. “They were doing it outside Don Miller's,” he says. “And I was like, they can’t do that! In working class communities, we all know somebody in the armed forces. I’ve got a mate who lost his legs. And these lot were sending people to kill our boys.”
At this point, Robinson knew little about Islam as a religion. But now he began to look back on the tension between Muslims and non-Muslims at school and at the football in a new light. “I always knew there was a hostility coming from that community, and I never really knew what it was. I didn’t know anything about the religion. It’s only when I looked into the religion that I thought, this is what it is. It’s got to do with Islam.” As Robinson now began to see things, the Clash of Civilisations had been happening all along at the gates of Putteridge High School.
So Robinson set up a group called Ban the Luton Taliban. “We had a demonstration, and it worked!” he says. “I stood up and I said, look, when we were at war with the IRA, would we let the Irish stand in the middle of the town and recruit for the IRA? No we f------ wouldn’t! So why are we letting these? And after that, for the first time on a Saturday, the police didn’t let them go there. It worked!”
In 2009, when another Islamist group, Anjem Choudary’s Al Muhajiroun, burned poppies at a homecoming parade for British soldiers who had died in Afghanistan, he repeated the formula. The next protest snowballed, and soon the newly formed English Defence League was making headlines with a series of unruly protests up and down the country. At 26 years old Robinson was thrust into the national spotlight as the most controversial – and the most hated – far-right figure in Britain.
Robinson claims his goal was not to terrorise individual Muslims but to raise awareness of the dangers of Islamic extremism. “But in jail I realised that the way we done it, it’s never going to happen,” he says. “With ‘Allah Allah Allah, who the f--- is Allah?’” – a notorious chant heard at EDL demos – “it’s never going to happen. And I realised that the only way to succeed is to have reformists, moderate Islamic voices with you.”
An English Defence League supporter. (GETTY IMAGES)
I must look surprised at this – Robinson, after all, has previously described Islam as a “disease” and a “threat to our way of life” – because he immediately starts telling me about his friendship with Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam, whom he met while filming a BBC documentary last month. Nawaz told Robinson how he had turned his back on extremism during his own spell in prison in Egypt, where he was tortured for his involvement with the Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. “He said to me, ‘Tommy, if you ever think about leaving the EDL, and you want to chat, I’m here for you.’”
As he’s talking, Robinson notices that he’s still wearing a rubber English Defence League wristband on his left arm. "From now on," he says, "I don't want anyone else to represent me. I want to be representing myself." He takes the wristband off, looks at it, and casually tosses it across the table to me. “You can have that,” he says. “That’s over now.”
Robinson now says he is sorry for provoking fear among British Muslims, for fostering an atmosphere of “us and them” and for blaming “every single Muslim” for “getting away” with the July 7 bombings. But at times he seems unsure whether to accept responsibility for his former behaviour or to defend it. Some have portrayed him as a media-savvy Machiavelli disguising race hate with liberal rhetoric, but there is a naivety about the way he believed he could brand EDL protests “peaceful” and then simply disown the “minority” who, inflamed by his speeches, turned violent. Does he understand why he has been criticised?
“Yeah, I do. I’m not an angel, you know?” he says, looking down at the table. “I was a young lad when I started this, and I was leading one of the biggest street protest movements there’s ever been.”
But does he retract his previous views on Islam, which he has called a “violent” and “fascist” religion, and which he has declared the root of all kinds of evil, from terrorism to paedophile grooming gangs? Does he understand that, by failing to make a distinction between Islam as a religion and the actions of certain Muslims, he has stigmatised a whole section of the British public?
He shifts a little uncomfortably in his seat. “Yeah, it’s the seventh century interpretation of Islam,” he says. “Political Islam, Salafism, Wahabbism. I don’t care if they want to practice their religion. It’s when they’re not integrating, and asking for special treatment.”
When I press him on whether he still advocates banning the building of new mosques, as he has done in the past, he begins, for the first time in our conversation, to falter. “I want to see . . . Look, there’s a problem with extremism, yeah? And how are we going to work together to get it solved? Well, I don’t think it’s by allowing Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Iran to fund multi-million pound mosques and manipulate which form of Islam is being taught in them. So we can stop the foreign funding to all religious institutions, and until they’re regulated and moderated in a similar way that Ofsted does with schools . . .” He shrugs. “So that’s where I stand on mosques. When the problem’s solved, crack on.”
Does he have any interest in changing the minds of people who have criticised him over the years?
This time his gaze does not waver for a second. “I know I’ll change their mind,” he says firmly. Robinson tells me he has “changed as a person" in the eight months since he was released from prison. He has stopped drinking – making a single exception on St George’s Day – and says he has a new sense of clarity and focus. Of those who refuse to believe in his change of heart, he says: “They don’t say that to Maajid Nawaz today. He was in Hizb-ut-Tahrir, he did six years [in prison] in Egypt for terrorism. You know, and I find stories like that inspiring."
“Do you know what would have really wound up the Islamists?” he says. “This will have really, really p------ them off. Because they hate Quilliam, because Quilliam are exposing them. So by us sitting together, it’s p----- them off and p----- the far right off.”
Robinson admits he is nervous about running into EDL supporters on Luton’s working class estates following his decision to quit. “Cos, you know, I love Luton, man. It’s chiselled me into the person I am.” Then he adds: “And I think, what choice did we have? Because you wouldn’t even think about coming to Luton and talking to us if it weren’t for the English Defence League.”
Robinson stares out of the window for a moment, and Luton town centre glares back at him. “What does David Cameron know about growing up in Luton? All these people sitting on TV, all these experts, they don’t have a clue about a town like this.” He turns and meets my eye again. “Well they don’t, do they?”
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