How censorship made Tommy Robinson

The week began with the news that Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – had fled the UK, mere hours after being arrested and interrogated under the Terrorism Act. Now there are calls to have the anti-Islam influencer scrubbed from the internet, and for the (largely defunct) English Defence League (EDL), which he once led, to be proscribed as a terrorist outfit.

Robinson has been linked to the rioting that has broken out in the wake of the senseless murder of three girls in Southport, Merseyside on Monday. On Tuesday evening, a mob surrounded Southport’s mosque, throwing bricks and bottles, setting fire to a police car and chanting, ‘Who the fuck is Allah?’ – a favourite chant of the EDL. A day later, groups in London and Hartlepool yelled Tommy’s name as they clashed with police.

As these ugly scenes have shown, there are good reasons to be worried about the ‘Tommy’ phenomenon. But you do not have to agree with a word Robinson or his acolytes say to be worried about the state’s increasingly censorious approach to him. In fact, censorship might just be the worst possible way to confront this movement.

Robinson’s arrest under anti-terror laws on Sunday ought to alarm anyone who cares about free speech and civil liberties. He was detained at the Channel Tunnel in Folkestone under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act 2008. This draconian post-7/7 law allows officers to stop, examine and search passengers at the UK border. Under the law, a suspect can be detained for up to six hours, is obliged to answer questions and must provide police with access to any electronic devices. In an audio recording posted to Robinson’s X account, he claims he was held for the full six hours. He also says he was ordered to hand over the PIN for his phone, but refused. This, then, became the pretext for an arrest, although he was subsequently released.

Still, while ‘frustration of a Schedule 7 examination’ may have been the immediate grounds for Robinson’s arrest, this cannot explain why he was stopped under the UK’s terror laws in the first place. Although Schedule 7 powers are incredibly wide-ranging, they are only supposed to be used to determine whether a person has been involved ‘in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism’. If Robinson is to be believed – and going on previous form that is a big if – officers used the opportunity to grill him about his political beliefs, on everything from Gaza to the Great Replacement Theory.

As objectionable as Robinson’s views might be, unless there is some explosive information we do not know, it is hard to see what any of this might have to do with terrorism. The same surely goes for the calls to proscribe the EDL. Rioting and attacking a mosque are obviously despicable, not to mention criminal, but they are plainly not acts of terrorism. Nor should Robinson be held directly, legally responsible for the actions of his fans. Perhaps Robinson’s arrest under the Terrorism Act was a one-off abuse of the law. Perhaps the fault lies within the law itself. I’ll leave that to the legal experts. But surely terrorism powers must be reserved for terrorists, rather than troublemakers.

If the aim of the arrest was to limit Robinson’s reach, then surely it has had the opposite effect. As soon as it came to light, there were spontaneous ‘Free Tommy’ protests outside Downing Street and Scotland Yard on Sunday afternoon. It has given him yet more ammunition to the claim that he is some sort of noble truth-teller being persecuted by a corrupt, totalitarian state.

Of course, the idea that Robinson has any interest in the truth is surely dispelled by his knee-jerk tendency to blame every mass tragedy on Muslims, regardless of the facts. He has spent the past 72 hours accusing the authorities of lying about the Southport suspect’s immigration status and calling for the borders to be closed (the suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents). Earlier this month, Robinson described the rioting in Harehills, Leeds as being instigated by Muslims, even though it was sparked by an altercation between social services and a Roma family. Earlier this year, when a knifeman ran amok in Sydney, Australia, Robinson declared that ‘jihad has no borders’, although it soon became clear the perpetrator was a white Queenslander with known mental-health issues.

Robinson has also been less than honest with his followers about some of his legal troubles. A warrant was issued for his arrest on Monday (separate to the terror arrest), because he failed to turn up to a High Court hearing. In this instance, Robinson has been accused of contempt of court for allegedly breaching the terms of a libel case he lost back in 2021. Should he be found guilty, he could face two years in prison.

The libel / contempt-of-court saga is a perfect case study in how Robinson continually uses the threat of state sanction to his advantage. Back in October 2018, a video went viral showing a teenage Syrian refugee being attacked by a schoolmate. The video shocked the nation, and was even condemned by the then UK prime minister, Theresa May. Yet, according to Robinson, nothing in that video was as it seemed. The Syrian boy, he claimed, was not a victim but a villain. Robinson made lurid claims about the boy ‘violently attacking’ his female classmates and threatening to stab a schoolboy. In response, the boy successfully sued Robinson for libel, as not a single one of his claims could be proven in court. On the contrary, school records showed the Syrian boy to have been well-behaved.

Robinson has since repeated the false claims online and in his new documentary, Silenced. He also screened the film in London at the weekend to thousands of his supporters. Writing on X, he even challenged the authorities to come after him. ‘I’ll be jailed for two years for showing the inconceivable truth’, he wrote on Saturday, urging his followers to share the film widely.

Jail time for screening and sharing a film is indeed an extreme, alarming punishment. Infamously, the UK has some of the harshest and most repressive libel laws in the democratic world. But as his tweet at the weekend shows, Robinson was well aware of the consequences of repeating his libellous claims. He decided to do so to create the impression he is being persecuted for exposing the truth, when the real reason he could be punished was for repeating a malicious lie. We can both oppose our alarming libel laws while recognising the way in which Robinson is exploiting them. Otherwise we risk an absurd situation in which a rank authoritarian, who has flirted with calling for Islam to be banned, can pose as a free-speech warrior.

Ironically, the libel case has bolstered Robinson’s dubious claim to be speaking unpalatable truths in a PC age. It is as if all the cases and arrests, and attempts to paint him as a ‘terrorist’, have numbed his followers and the Tommy-curious to any criticisms of Robinson at all. Anyone who draws attention to his untruths, misrepresentations or even blatant criminality can expect to be branded a deep-state shill by his overgrown fanboys.

Worse still, the broader climate of censoriousness, cancel culture and political correctness means that it is often only the likes of Robinson who are willing to speak about certain sensitive issues. Relegating conversations about migration, grooming gangs or Islamist extremism to the fringes has provided a wide-open space for chancers to exploit. What’s more, the shameful conflation of commonsense or even liberal criticisms of multiculturalism with hard-right ideology has only made it harder to push back against actual bigotry when it does appear – like when a mob attacks a mosque, gripped by anti-Muslim animus and conspiracy theories.

The truth is that censorship is a gift to conspiracy theorists, grifters and narcissists with a martyr complex, like Tommy Robinson. It has allowed a flagrant liar to assume the role of truth-teller. We need free, open and frank discussion – both to get a grip on the issues roiling society, and to expose those trying to exploit them for their own ends.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.