“Why aren’t you defending Tommy Robinson?” asked many readers last weekend. The answer is simple: sometimes this British political activist and frequent critic of Islam and Muslim migration deserves defending. But not this time.
Unfortunately, ideological trench warfare can be the enemy of reason. And right now there is a lot of bunkering down over Robinson’s arrest last Friday. Too many of his supporters won’t budge an inch when it comes to the facts of his arrest. Just as too many critics of Robinson, who regard him as a far-right lunatic, are bunkered down in a dark place where free speech has died.
Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) was arrested last week while live-streaming outside a Leeds court about a case, being heard inside, of alleged child-grooming by nine Muslim men. Robinson claims he was arrested for “breaching the peace”. His supporters say his only crime was breaching the silence, that he was just doing what the BBC and ITV should have been doing: reporting on a case of national significance because child-grooming by Muslim men in Britain is a serious problem. Arresting Robinson was the essence of totalitarianism, they say.
If only it were that simple. While Robinson says he thought the verdicts were due on Friday, court officials say the case is continuing. Robinson was arrested for contempt of court because his actions created a real risk of impeding or prejudicing the ongoing trial.
A year ago, Robinson was sentenced to three months in jail for committing contempt of court over similar actions during a gang-rape case in Kent. Suspending that sentence for 18 months on condition he didn’t commit further offences, Judge Heather Norton told him: “This is not about free speech, not about the freedom of the press, nor about legitimate journalism, and not about political correctness.”
However heinous the crime, defendants are entitled to the presumption of innocence, a fair trial and a determination of guilt or innocence by a jury not prejudiced by statements outside the court.
If you object to contempt of court laws, make that case. If you object to the judge in the Leeds case on Friday slapping a reporting ban on the case until its conclusion, argue that point.
If we rise from our bunkers, we ought to be honest enough to say that Robinson has been wrongly censored for his views about Islam and migration in the past, and that his arrest on Friday was not censorship. His detractors refuse to acknowledge the former, such is their disgust for the founder of the English Defence League, while his supporters have trouble saying the latter about a man they regard as their martyr.
Therefore, on Saturday, Alternative for Germany MP Petr Bystron said Robinson “is a political prisoner, whose life is in clear and pressing danger”. Bystron joined a 5000-strong march by Germany’s largest opposition party, where people waved #FreeTommy signs. “We have to do everything we can to make sure he is granted political asylum,” said Bystron, who escaped communism in the former Czechoslovakia, arriving in Germany as a political refugee aged 16.
Bystron is right to say that freedom of speech is under attack across the West, but Robinson’s arrest is not a case of the state silencing dissent about Islam and immigration. There is enough happening on that front without having to stuff up.
Here’s a clear-cut case of censorship. Twitter, which previously removed Robinson’s “verified” blue tick, banned him from the social media platform in March for tweeting this: “90% of grooming gang convictions are Muslims.” The Twitter police claimed he inflated numbers, breaching its code. It was bollocks. There is daily inflation of facts and figures on Twitter that never attracts a wrist-slap, let alone a ban, yet Robinson was banned for being out by 6 per cent.
Maajid Nawaz, a former Hizb ut-Tahrir recruiter jailed in Egypt, who set up the Quilliam Foundation to veer young Muslims away from Islamic extremism, came to Robinson’s defence: “Tommy & I argue lots, but here he’s quoting a FACT. @TwitterSupport are confused.” Nawaz cited a Quilliam report released a month earlier that found 84 per cent of people convicted of child grooming offences since 2005 were Muslim.
Reactions to Robinson’s battles expose what’s wrong with modern politics. No one should be surprised that some of his supporters have joined the toxic pursuit of identity politics, with slogans such as White Lives Matter. That backlash is the inevitable consequence of dividing people up according to race, religion, sex and sexuality.
Equally unfortunate is the left’s refusal to stand by Voltaire’s principle that free speech means defending the right to say something even if you disagree with it. But they should remember that when your ideological opponent is censored for expressing a view that you loathe, the nature of our society changes, and soon enough you may be the one censored for your ideas. That’s the road to totalitarianism.
Writing in The Spectator a few years ago, Douglas Murray, the author of The Strange Death of Europe, wrote about his own knee-jerk reaction when he first met Robinson: “I told him to ‘f..k off.” Without knowing anything much about Robinson or the EDL, Murray assumed from the white, working-class supporters wearing the Cross of St George that this was a British National Party front. While Robinson told Murray that “we’re not racists — we’re just working-class guys who are losing our country and can’t bear it”, the rebuff stood more than four years until they met again.
Like Murray, Nawaz also originally refused to meet Robinson. Later conversations between the two men led Robinson to leave his party in 2013 because he had grown concerned that the EDL was attracting extremist members who favoured violence over words.
It’s no coincidence that Murray and Nawaz are members of that loose affiliation of free thinkers known as the Intellectual Dark Web. They both looked beyond the initial stereotype of Robinson to defend a man with views they may not agree with to defend the foundation principle of a liberal democracy.
Robinson is no angel. He has been jailed for fraud and arrested for incitement. He has admitted that he has made sweeping statements about Muslims that attract understandable accusations of racism. He has been bashed in jail by Muslim prisoners. He has attracted death threats from Islamists and neo-Nazis that the police say they can’t act on.
Robinson also has been stopped by police from walking down streets where extremist Islamic preachers walk freely, and Robinson’s flyers are confiscated while Islamist pamphlets are handed out without obstruction, leading Murray to say this: “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.”
Robinson’s critics won’t concede that, just as his supporters are intent on misrepresenting his recent imprisonment as political persecution. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth. And searching for truth, whether we’re talking about the role of Islam in the West, or episodes of despicable censorship, ought to be our mission in a liberal democracy.
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Tearing down opponents instead of debating different viewpoints produces heat but not light.