Tommy

The country has largely forgotten about ‘Tommy Robinson’, the controversial but undoubtedly brave man who spoke up against muslim provocation and violence and paid a heavy price for it. You may – irrationally – hate the man (hatred is an irrational and emotional response which benefits nobody) but he was emblematic of the need to stand up against a tide of frightening change, a change evidently unchallenged by those whose role it is to keep us all safe.

Naturally, the powers that be were, and remain, horrified by his very existence. In the complete absence of action on their part, how dare this upstart be capable of galvanising others into forming a resistance? How dare somebody – a low, uncouth somebody at that – say the things that must not be said? How dare an unelected figurehead do the things the elected dare not do?

Whatever you think of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon he did command the floor at the Oxford Union, having been invited there to be made a figure of ridicule. He engaged with a number of muslim groups, mostly hostile to him, in order to better understand what was happening. He was set up, time after time, and he was provoked far too often, as he later recognised himself, to physically fight back. But he learned from this.

He was very publicly vilified, long after he denounced the English Defence League, which he acknowledged had attracted the wrong type of people and had the wrong type of approach. If you wish to meet violence with violence you need the forces of state on your side, something he never had. Indeed, there was a prolonged period when it seemed that the police were under orders to prevent him from having anything approaching a normal life.

As a result of concerted actions by the police themselves, various disturbing muslim activist groups such as Tell Mama and Hate not Hope he was harangued and harassed wherever he went. He was denied platforms, as one by one his social media accounts were shut down. He was jailed several times, often on grounds which seemed tenuous at best, and appeared to be handed down sentences far in excess, one imagines, of those that would be dealt to a muslim transgressor. Hell, there is no doubt about it; he was targeted by agents of the state.

Not to defend him, because he did do some stupid, vainglorious things, but for what it is worth I tend to be on his side. What he is against is something we should all be against. How he went about it might not seem wise, but how many of us would have carried on, as he has, in pursuit of something he believes in? He has had his family life wrecked, been made bankrupt and had his ability to earn an honest living effectively taken away.

Why am I writing this now, when everybody has quietly forgotten all about him? He is in the news again because he has been landed with ridiculously high costs in his latest unequal brush with the law. Ask yourself whether a single penny would have been demanded had the adversaries in this case been the other way round. Or, you know, don’t bother; you have probably already adopted a position on the man you hate as Yaxley-Lennon.

Was he seeking a place in history? Maybe, I think part of him is driven by the modern obsession with fame. Is he a far-right terrorist, as many will claim? I don’t think so; the term terrorist is applied far too readily by security forces determined to pretend there is a balanced threat to society. Is he really just a nasty thuggish piece of work? Quite possibly, at the start of this crusade, but I think he has become thoughtful and genuinely concerned and has grown into somebody with real, useful insights into this struggle, who ought to at least be listened to.

Where does all this end?

But a far more important question to ask is why is he? People like this, would-be heroes, don’t arise out of nowhere. The threat he tried to counter is not only still there, it is growing and remains unchecked. If anything, it looms larger now than anything, as public concerns turns to the millions of people we let into this country without any concern for whether they pose a threat to our way of life. It doesn’t matter if you hate Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the fact is this country needs a Tommy Robinson. We broke this one; who will be next?

What's the point?

They are coming for Tommy Robinson [NHRN] again. Of course they are; they are terrified that despite the serial no-platforming he still has purchase, he still has resonance and on a level playing field he has a real chance of being elected as an MEP. The reaction of the establishment, instinctively left-wing in structure, is to frantically ban, block, obstruct and smear. In fact hysteria is the constant feature of the loony left’s schtick; everything is portrayed in apocalyptic terms: last chance to: save the NHS, last chance to save the planet, last chance to resist the rise of the far-right..

The shrieking, keyboard-bashing, Guardianista-style commentators have it wrong – and they are so hostage to confirmation bias that they simply can’t see it - pursuing the far right fox as if it was real and not just a figment of their imagination. David Lammy, as a flag-bearer for the most extreme of wolf-criers, daily exceeds even his own propensity for hyperbole and regularly, if tacitly, urges direct action against the imaginary lupine hordes. John McDonnell is less subtle. Thuggish behaviour exists on both sides, but if you kill for animal rights you are a saint, while holding a Brexit banner makes you a Nazi, apparently. And Nazis deserve to be punched, right? When this is the narrative Tommy Robinson _[NHRN] being ‘milkshaked’ becomes the act of a freedom fighter

The referendum was an act of direct democracy and certain people didn’t like it. Indeed the EU’s emptiest vessels have openly and loudly decried such blatant exercises of ‘populism’. “Let the people decide? Are you mad?” they cry. We have to decide if democracy is what we want because if we do want it we are inevitably going to get people voting in a way the elected heads disapprove. Trying to stifle the voices, shut down the debate, ban certain views, criminalise certain thoughts is expressly not democracy, it is totalitarianism and yes, this is exactly where socialism leads. If Tommy Robinson is the 'literally Hitler', then socialism is the direct road to full communism; a one-world open borders, ungovernable, chaotic, lowest common denominator planet, where a tiny minority rule over a vast human herd.

How about– and yes I’m going to say it – you just calm down dears. If somebody in a dead-end life in a boarded up street feels the local muslim community is taking over maybe they have a point? When four-year olds are being asked what gender they would like to be; when people think they are being abused and manipulated, marginalised and forgotten, maybe they have a point? When the British taxpayer, squeezed to buggery, wants to resist the too-rapid imposition of a fuel system which does not work for the majority and don’t want to pay yet more tax so that – once again – the better off benefit, maybe they have a point.

It's the same old question, 

but neither side really has the answer.

And when we say that the far right is nothing of the sort; when we point out that raising the spectre of Nazism is a hysterical propaganda move; when we recognise that the millions of working people voting to leave the grand socialist project are peacefully using their vote to express their dissatisfaction and reject the perpetual whining and impositions of the establishment and its leftist institutions... maybe we, too, have a point?

Gutless

History is always looking for heroes but what it seeks and what it gets are often worlds apart. When Nigel Farage took the aimless and disjointed UK Independence Party from its fruitcake and closet racist characterisation to become a serious challenger to the cosy LabCon cartel, he donned the cloak and took up the sword. His no-nonsense, man-of-the-people schtick rallied hundreds of thousands and forced the referendum. Make no mistake, Ukip gave us the EU referendum and earned for Farage a brief flicker of heroic flame.

But where did he go? My generous side is still inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt; that the relentless negative media, the Farage-bashing by the established politicians, the opprobrium of the chattering classes, drove him to exhaustion. I am even prepared to believe, to a point, that he felt he had built up a movement but had seen his portrayal as holding the party back and was honourably stepping down to allow fresh blood to take the stage. I’ll give him all that... except.

The referendum result, the rise of Ukip, the standing up of patriotic people to superimposed governance everywhere, has been described in the establishment press as a racist reaction to immigration. That simplistic label is both insulting and craven. Most British people are quite happy to see Pepe, Giuseppe and Krystyna bustling away with their continental verve; keeping the wheels of industry and commerce turning merrily away; contributing to society as a whole and generally fitting in pretty well.

We are comfortable that Piotr, Lukasz and Ugne are picking fruit and packing peas, just so long as our own kids are getting a look-in. To see whole sections of formerly traditionally British towns become East European backwaters was something of a shock, a decade or so ago, but even this was manageable; European immigration was never the worst problem. Even membership of a trading bloc was not an issue. What was important, the thing which really fuelled the Brexit vote, was the feeling of powerlessness against a state which had bought into something far worse.

Standing up to the EU at times had the churlish appearance of a teenager standing up to parents who ultimately wanted the best. So, you want to make your own rules? Which of our rules do you find so bad; which would you change? All governments in the west are simply shades of socialism, which in this wider form is hardly harmful and brings undeniable benefits. But this desire to be inclusive, non-judgmental and egalitarian harbours harmful hypocrisies, not least the acceptance of an ideology which will never align with our values.

So when Anne Marie Waters’ bid for the Ukip leadership was thwarted by Nigel Farage’s championing of the insipid and ultimately useless Henry Bolton his mask slipped. Happy to garner the acclaim for bringing about the referendum result; happy to bask in the plaudits for his audacious stand-ups in the European Parliament, he balked when confronted with a real issue which simply has to be confronted head-on. Was he got at? Was he paid off? Why is Nigel Farage afraid of tackling the elephant that is islam?

You want it blunt? Let’s not call it islamism, or islamic terrorism, or islamic fundamentalism; let’s be straight and call it what it is; islam. And this is what Anne Marie dared to do; to name the beast and stand against it for which she has been vilified, targeted and framed as some sort of Nazi. In her own words, Anne Marie Waters is a former Labour member who grew up. And stood up and went on to found a movement which unashamedly says what nobody else in public life has really dared to say. Oh, except for Tommy Robinson, peace be upon him.

You want heroes? Right there; Tommy and Anne Marie stand out, towering above the gutless appeasement of the established powers. Those charged with our protection are instead protecting those who would harm us. Those we should turn to have turned away. The defenders of our freedoms and way of life are not the entitled ruling classes, not the police, the law, Parliament, but those who should better know their place and get back into their stinking hovels and kow and tow and tug their forelocks.

When the leaders don’t lead, when the concerns of the population go disregarded, when the people learn they can rely only on themselves, that is how revolutions begin. When the soft-handed incumbents of safe seats, sit in silence and refuse to listen, it is we - the rough people, the low people, the unsophisticated who are sick to death of lofty moralising and empty words – it is ourselves to whom we turn. Every parliamentarian who has dared to defy their voters should be quaking in their boots; change is coming; it can’t come too soon.

Oh, Tommy, Tommy!

The shadow of the fictional far-right falls across the land once again, cast by the diminutive figure of one man who has come to represent many things to many people. To Owen-Squealer-Jones he is a fraudster and fear figure, a leader of brown-shirted thugs, who has radicalised every thicko in the land to commit hate crimes against a beleaguered people afraid for their lives, who, allowed their cultural freedom, would happily dispatch Master Jones from the tallest tower in the capital.

To others he is a figure of singular significance, here to deliver us from the fate decreed by the forces of the evil leftist global dominators and their muslim attack dogs; leading the grass roots fight back against the oppression of the state. He is a V-for-Vendetta revolutionary, inspiring a heroic resistance to the overbearing state’s desire to neatly package its human livestock into easily defined categories that can be filed, and controlled.

Conspiracy theorists see the hidden hand of others – the Rothschilds, the Illuminati, Klansmen, Murdoch, *add favourite evil empire here* – secretly manipulating his appearances, his words and his media treatment for their own ends. As always, however, conspiracy theory is a mass of such muddle, contradiction and batshit-crazy, lizard-overlordity that it rarely survives scrutiny. But is that just what they want you to think?

Too much, you think? Well batty leftist Guardian witch, Carole Cadwalladr recently tweeted: “Robinson is the intolerable face of the new fascism. He’s funded by foreign interests to incite violence & racial hatred in UK. This is a threat to our national interest & national security. & it’s Bannon. The same Bannon who played major covert role in Brexit.” If that isn’t a master class in two-plus-two equals five then I don’t know what is. But hey, anything which gets the likes of Catweazle all balled up in fist-clenching, teeth-gritting fury is okay by me!

Isn’t the simple truth the most likely? Local footie hooligan gets angry at muslim disrespect for returning troops, sees how his home town has changed and recruits other hooligans to the cause. Realises thuggery is not the way, publicly leaves the group he founded and denounces violent direct action . Educates himself, grows up, sees the threat to himself and his family and finds himself targeted by the authorities for speaking out. Makes a decision to carry on and finds that millions support his cause, while millions revile him.

The State leans heavily on him and clumsily tries to silence him; puts him in the way of harm, harasses him frequently; he emerges stronger. It is the classic Robin Hood tale; the little man against the might of the law; the unsavoury truths they cannot silence. Now TR has become an international symbol of the fight against the less than savoury practices of the increasingly authoritarian British Establishment. TR is Brexit – Cadwalladr says so – and more so every day comes to be a symbol of the ordinary people versus the changes they haven’t been able to arrest.

It could be you

But what Tommy Robinson is, most of all, is a barometer of who you are. What you think of him speaks volumes. Swallow him whole and you might just be a gullible camp follower, quick to fists and slow of wit. Despise him and call him a Nazi and you are clearly part of the problem which created him in the first place. Others, without a firmly held agenda are surely capable of recognising that he has a point, however bluntly he makes it, and what ought to worry everybody greatly, is that what has happened to him could happen to anybody.

Rough Men

Much unrest afoot and abroad; the Chinese curse has been realised and we live in interesting times indeed. The population votes for Brexit and is decried as uncivilised, racist, ignorant and in a spectacular inversion of the definition, unpatriotic. (Support for an independent nation state is now the opposite of patriotism, apparently) Meanwhile, over in Italy, the EU demonstrates – yet again – that this institution is the antitheses of democracy, while simultaneously rewriting the general understanding of democracy to fit their actions. There is a pattern.

Here is another pattern. In the movie A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessop says, “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it.” This is but a variation of a sentiment often, if erroneously, attributed to Churchill, that "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us." And linked to this is the idea that you are only free to express dissent because people of whom you may disapprove have fought and continue to fight for that right.

I confess, I have never taken to the streets in protest. I have had no need. I have often argued that there is no ‘far right’ to worry about, as the bedwetters of the huddled leftist masses imagine because those they fear wish them no harm; we generally pay them no heed at all. But let me explain: Left and right originally was used to describe the sides in the French revolution; commoners on the left, aristocrats on the right. Now the aristos are few, but the peasants have formed two broadly distinct classes – ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ – and a whole class war has evolved around it.

The nominal rich have no need of association; they wield power and influence commensurate with the depth of their pockets and willingness to intervene. Often, despite all the propaganda to the contrary, the well-off have deep social consciences and are a far greater force for good than the rabble rousers of the ‘lower orders’ will admit. (See how easily the language of class conflict floats to the surface.) So it is to we lower orders that the real duties of society fall. On the one side are those of us who work hard, earn well and pay taxes so that the rest may supplement their perceived penury. For which playing the game we are called ‘right wing’; we shrug and shoulder our burden.

On the other side are the aggrieved, the disenchanted who feel the world has not bestowed its riches upon them, the disenfranchised who feel their voice is unheard and unheeded. The young, the ignorant, the unlucky and sometimes – let’s not be coy – the plain idle, who, no matter the real reasons for their lack of the success they feel is theirs by right, are easily persuaded by meddlesome minds that they have been wronged. This is the flock, the constituency, of the left and everybody who disapproves of their cajoling and bullying ways is labelled ‘far right’ and dismissed as bigots.

The fictional hero James Bond is a killer, a cold-blooded killer at that, but he’s okay; he’s cool, even. The much-admired SAS has a high proportion of actual psychopaths in its ranks, but you are happy for them to mete out summary justice, especially when you don’t have to witness it, or when you can dress it up in glory. But Tommy Robinson? He may be the very definition of an ‘Inglourious Basterd’[sic] but your world is a safer place with him in it. Call him ‘far right, call him a Nazi, call him a thug. But just realise that you are allowed to call him all this, allowed to openly despise him, precisely because people like him have stood up to be counted.

Some rough men, doing what they had to do...

And while you are busy spitting your righteous hatred in his direction, you may want to take a moment to consider that Anjem Choudary is being released. So while one rough man, who has practised vocal, often clumsy, but peaceful opposition, is placed in mortal danger by the state (and I don’t give a toss about the legal technicalities involved, I really don’t) the state (you and I) will spend millions to protect a man who is directly implicated in the brutal killing of Lee Rigby and others and who has effectively declared islamic war against all of us. Are you still sleeping safely in your beds?

Get Mad

The newsreader dropped an octave and in a husky voice, on the point of breaking and punctuated by dry sobs, she intoned the news. “It is twenty-four hours now since Jasmine, the nation’s sweetheart, went missing. A candle-lit vigil was hastily convened last night after she didn’t respond to the usual entreaty, ‘puss puss puss’ to come in for her supper. By this morning, some three thousand tea lights were being watched over by a crowd which overwhelmed Trafalgar Square and the steps of the National Gallery were adorned with flowers and tributes from well-wishers.”*

She paused a moment, bowed her head and clasped her hands together as if to offer a silent prayer. A single tear slid down one cheek, captured in close-up and broadcast to the millions who were simultaneously planning how they would mark their loss. The regular public sharia beatings, the gassing of protesters and the jailing of free speech advocates went unreported save for the coded columns in subversive, minor, former news publications such as the underground Mail and Express pamphlets, secretively distributed and often only passed on by word of mouth among trusted friends.

When did we become such a nation of crybabies and religious appeasers? In the last week we have seen wall-to-wall wailing over the losses in the Grenfell fire and the Manchester Arena bombing, yet the fifth anniversary of Lee Rigby’s brutal murder has been treated gingerly, so as not to cause offence. The BBC in one news item even referred to the Manchester Arena event as ‘an accident’. And in recent weeks there has been a push for increased legal powers to police ‘hate speech’ and criticism of islam. Blasphemy laws, in secular Britain?

And yesterday, of course, Tommy Robinson was sent to prison where, no doubt his life will be under threat, for a breach of the peace. It appears he has breached the terms of his licence, but he was simply doing what he is cheered on by many of us for doing and highlighting the otherwise unreported monstrosities committed by the hidden community concealed behind the very visible massed aggression which the government insists on portraying as a persecuted minority.

What happened to the stiffness of our upper lips? The black-shrouded, grieving widow was an aberration, her strange, ethereal, inability to move on the antithesis of Britishness, yet tolerated in true British fashion. But now it’s as if we must all join in the tortured misery and self-flagellation in the pseudo-scientific notion of closure. This isn’t closure; it’s a perpetuation of a snivelling inability to grasp cold reality. When 96 year old war hero Jim Booth faced down an attacker armed with a claw hammer he shrugged off what the press has to call ‘an ordeal’ with the superbly British response that worse things happen at sea.

Nothing has changed...

It’s time to ‘man up’, surely? It’s time to take to the streets in protest, to rattle a few cages and to unseat a few so-called leaders who neither lead nor offer solutions. It’s time to stop getting maudlin, to give up the widow’s weeds and shout out ‘enough is enough.’ Standing proud? Standing together? All this vigil nonsense is neither; it is hollow words to cover up the reality that we are standing against nothing; we are giving in. Well enough. Don’t get sad, get mad. Then don’t’ get mad, get even,

(*No cats were harmed in the making of this blog.)

Muslamic Ray Guns

Almost 40 years ago I spent a weekend with a school friend at his aunt & uncle’s place in Brentford. A lovely welcoming couple and a happy home; for us it was a staying-over arrangement to research the London galleries for A-Level Art History. All went well until one day we found ourselves in the company of just the friendly uncle – we’ll call him Bill, because I've forgotten his real name – who, apropos of nothing, asked us if we believed in evolution.

Over the years I have several times had interesting conversations come to an abrupt halt when the earnest interlocutor asked something similar. Fuck, they look and sound just like us! Up until that fateful point, Uncle Bill had been talking about footie but in a single bound he had leaped from the safety of sport to the insanity of intelligent design. It’s the surprise of the thing; the sudden realisation that you have been talking to an imposter; from Spurs to the coelacanth and how God had put it there as a puzzle for science.

And there, in a nutshell is the anti-logic of religion. Uncle Bill wasn't a paedophile, he wasn't a gangster and he would no more beat up his wife and kids than would anybody else of rational and law-abiding British stock. But there and then he revealed to my teenage self that the deranged walk among us whether we know it or not. No rational argument would sway him from his view that the world was about five thousand years old. At least he meant us no harm.

The same cannot be said for others though and in a departure from the traditional fifth columnist methodology of blending in, the islamists don’t even try to hide in plain sight. At every turn they flaunt their differentness; men in dresses walk the streets, grow scarily deranged beards and threaten to kill us. And we simply let them. This wouldn't be an issue for the stoic Brits, if they simply talked the talk, but they don’t; they also walk the walk and bomb the bomb.

Worse than do nothing, we allow the hate talk to continue under police protection yet seek to criminalise those who speak out. It seems it is perfectly acceptable to burn Union Flags, form your own Sharia militias and actively hassle and abuse gay people, courting couples and drinkers but it is entirely intolerable to so much as hold an adverse opinion on the effect of radical islam on our country. There are cities in the UK where any reasonable person would be forgiven for assuming they have been transported to a foreign and entirely alien and hostile land.

Why Labour thought we could absorb islam into British society when even Catholics are still held in suspicion is a mystery. In a largely secular society, where many church attenders pay mere lip service to their god, Catholicism’s insistence that children brought up in mixed Christianity households should be raised exclusively in the Catholic faith is extreme enough to largely prevent such unions. God* only knows how they thought the ushering in of a Middle Ages mentality would work. (*There is, of course, no such thing as god but at least, unlike islam, there is a rich Christian tradition of art in his honour, testament in the main to a belief in the benign, rather than the vengeful.)

Those who do try and start a dialogue are labelled immediately as racists and their cause is not helped by the idiotic and juvenile real racists who hop aboard the bandwagon. This YouTube clip epitomises how the politically liberal classes wish the EDL to be portrayed. The moron being interviewed, no doubt to the inner hilarity of the inquisitor, doesn't actually say ‘ray guns', it’s a rather more sobering ‘rape gangs’, but too late, the damage is done.

Tommy Robinson founded the English Defence League out of the frustration of seeing his home town accepting defeat at the hands of what many millions of others also see as an unwelcome invasion, brought about partly by New Labour’s cynical multicultural revolution but also by islam’s fevered determination for world dominance; dominance over all things in the name of something with absolutely zero provenance, has caused strife wherever it has prevailed and preaches death and eternal damnation to unbelievers.

But despite Tommy’s eloquence in debate and the fact that he authentically represents the views of ordinary decent people, his message is overshadowed by the idiots and those who seek to present fear as racism. He appeared on the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live yesterday and charmed even Esther Rantzen with his sincerity as he explained why he had turned his back on the movement he had founded.

I like Tommy Robinson and I respect his restraint. If he can truly strike up a dialogue with ordinary muslims – and there are many intelligent, secular people raised in the muslim faith, who just like we Brits pay only lip service to a cultural tradition – he deserves our support. But some of his former followers are now calling him an imposter, a turncoat, a convert to islam, a media-brainwashed dupe. I hope for all our sakes that they’re wrong.