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.