Tommy Robinson, best known for being the English Defence League (EDL) founder in 2009, was jailed on Monday, October 28th, after admitting contempt of court by breaching an injunction made after he was successfully sued for libel. This court appearance followed an earlier arrest under ‘anti-terror’ legislation, after he failed to surrender the PIN number to a mobile device.
If this anti-terror arrest in Folkestone, Kent, on Saturday seems disproportionate, that’s because it is. Charges against Robinson, which previously include mortgage fraud and travelling to the United States on a friend’s passport, are pursued with much more rigour than is normal in the UK criminal justice system. In turn, he will play the victim and, more recently, cite his own experience as evidence of two-tier policing in action.
In this spirit, Robinson made a documentary in which he says he was silenced by the British state. Since his EDL days, there has been some truth to this: his hostility to Islamists and willingness to mobilise football hooligan ‘firms’ against them would not be tolerated by the authorities—likewise, his allegations made ‘too early’ about small-town ‘grooming gangs’ led by men of predominantly Pakistani origin. The film now under scrutiny, Silenced, repeats Robinson’s claim that a teenaged Syrian refugee assaulted a girl at school.
Successfully sued for libel at London’s High Court by that Syrian refugee, Jamal Hijazi, in 2021, Robinson was ordered to pay damages and also made subject to an injunction preventing the repeat of the allegations. After Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, admitted contempt of court by breaching the injunction ten times, his custodial sentence was imposed. The presiding judge said he wanted to make the point that no-one is above the law—but critics of two-tier policing argue that no-one should be beneath it either.
Whereas this latest conviction stands up as a legal ruling, the wider context might go some way to explaining it further. On Saturday, at the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, up to 25,000 Union Flag-waving marchers shouted ‘free Tommy.’ Just two arrests were made, while most patriotic marchers largely avoided confrontation with a nearby counter-demonstration.
Left-wing protestors carrying banners saying “Refugees Welcome” and “Smash the Far Right” attended the counter-demonstration, ‘Stand Up to Racism,’ addressed by Jeremy Corbyn MP, Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal, Lindsey German from the Stop the War Coalition, Aslef and NEU union general secretaries Mick Whelan and Daniel Kebede, and Labour MPs Jon Trickett and Kim Johnson.
Also in attendance at the counter-protest was Arfat Hussein from Friends of Al Aqsa, who said:
Today, we all need to confront another form of racism—the ongoing repression of the Palestinians by the Israeli state. We must stand with our Palestinian brothers and sisters and we will not be silenced.
Near-weekly ‘pro-Palestinian’ marches through central London since the October 7th pogrom, including one staged last year before Israel responded to Hamas attacks, have helped to fuel the sense that ‘enough is enough’ among the Unite the Kingdom marchers and their wider sympathisers across England and Wales.
