Our society would have never heard of Tommy

On 19 October 2013, Conservative commentator, Douglas Murray, said this in The Spectator:

"The first time I met Tommy Robinson I told him to fuck off. The EDL had just formed... He took it very politely, said he understood... and then said, ‘We’re not racists, we’re just working-class guys who are losing our country and can’t bear it.’

Last week, four-and-a-half-years on, we met again. Several days earlier Robinson had announced he was leaving the movement he had formed… How has the reaction been since leaving? ‘Difficult,’ he says. ‘People saying I’ve been bought out'...

While walking through his home town of Luton, accompanied by a film crew, he was attacked by a gang of Muslims who punched him to the ground. ‘I went flying back on my arse,’ he says. ‘Another three came over and said, 'We’re going to decapitate you... You need to be decapitated.' I’m sat there thinking, this is what the world needs to see, this is what middle England needs to see'...

Robinson says that the politicians and press did not help. He claims that by calling the EDL ‘far-right’, politicians and the media have actually sent such elements their way. ‘It’s like they want it to be a far-right bunch of lunatics, instead of a bunch of ordinary normal people.’ Why would they want that? ‘So they don’t have to have the debate. So the issues that we’re raising don’t have to be spoken about’...

Robinson was in Luton town centre in 2009 when the Royal Anglian Regiment’s homecoming parade was barracked by the radicals of Al-Muhajiroun. In a disastrous policing decision Al-Muhajiroun were protected by the police and angry locals threatened with arrest...

It wasn’t the diversity but the double-standards that, he says, provoked the EDL. When he and his friends organised a protest to oppose the Islamists, they were prevented from getting to the Town Hall through which Al-Muhajiroun had previously walked. And while Al-Muhajiroun had flyered mosques for their protest with impunity, Robinson says he and his friends were stopped by police from handing out leaflets. ‘They knew it had a potential,’ says Robinson. ‘They put their hands in our pockets, cameras in our faces, made people take their shoes off. I was like, 'You didn’t do this to them. What are you doing this to us for? Why are you treating us like this when you didn’t treat them like this?'

Supporters of Unite Against Fascism often got involved in serious violence when they turned up to ‘oppose’ the EDL. But UAF receive significant political support, whereas from the beginning the EDL were pariahs whom no one in power could dream of supporting.

Robinson and his friends see some of this as a class issue and perhaps they are right in part. Certainly there is a disenfranchisement issue. Robinson says he does not know anyone who votes, and Luton borough council, which talks to Islamic extremists, said it would ‘never’ sit down to hear Robinson out..

There is a video of Robinson being arrested while attempting to walk through Tower Hamlets and he tells me that he was arrested for incitement after one EDL demonstration went three minutes over its allotted 30-minute running time.

Then there are the ‘constant, constant death threats’. When somebody posted his mother’s address online and promised to ‘chop up’ Robinson’s kids he finally went to the police. He says they told him they could do nothing about it. He began retweeting Twitter threats, but says he was told by police that if he continued doing so he could face arrest himself.

He has been repeatedly attacked. On one occasion, when set upon by a Muslim gang in Luton, the police handcuffed and arrested him. On another, the perpetrator was caught on camera but has still not been arrested. He says he’s given up on the police...

April this year saw the trial and conviction of six Muslims from the West Midlands who planned to carry out a terrorist attack at an EDL demonstration in Dewsbury last June. They missed the demo by minutes...

As we say goodbye, I cannot help reflecting that our society would never have heard of Tommy Robinson if it had dealt with Islamic extremists with anything like the severity it has meted out to him."