Why Nigel Farage is right to not associate himself with Tommy Robinson

For the attention of Elon Musk, and any other foreigners curious about our politics

Elon Musk has recently made headlines for endorsing Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), an anti-Islam activist and co-founder of the EDL. It is clear enough why: Musk believes, not unreasonably, that Robinson is a hero for drawing attention to Pakistani rape gangs when most people were too cowardly to speak out. Soon after this, Musk posted on X that Farage needed to be replaced as the leader of Reform UK. This seems to have been prompted by Farage refusing to endorse Robinson’s claims that he is a ‘political prisoner’, and deliberately driving a wedge between Robinson and himself.

It is understandable why many Americans might feel like they should back Tommy Robinson, especially after reading about the horrors of the rape gangs, and why they may think that British politicians like Farage are simply being cowardly for refusing to associate with him. Many of those reporting on British politics from North America, most notably Rebel Media, have devoted themselves to pushing the narrative that Robinson is a hero.

Sadly, they are wrong. This is mostly because, as foreigners who do not follow our politics closely, they are not sufficiently informed about the facts of the matter. Robinson isn’t bad news because he is uncouth: he is bad news because he is a probable police informant, a definite cocaine addict, and a definite scam artist. In fact, he isn’t even more right-wing than Nigel Farage (and it should be noted that Pimlico Journal have criticised Farage many times for being too weak on immigration). And no, he isn’t a ‘political prisoner’ either.

1. Tommy Robinson has admitted to being a police informant

Between the middle of 2012 and the end of 2013, Tommy Robinson seems to have become involved with people seeking to ‘deradicalise’ him. It is unclear, and probably unprovable, whether and to what extent the British intelligence services had a direct hand in this. This process began with a series of meetings with Muslim commentator Mo Ansar, who he met after a televised debate. Soon after this, Robinson (alongside EDL co-founder Kevin Carroll) began meeting with various people involved in the ‘counter-extremism’ think tank, Quilliam. This included their chairman, the former Islamist Maajid Nawaz (himself an interesting case), and an academic who sought to teach Robinson and Carroll about Islam, Usama Hasan.

He finally made the decision to quit the EDL, along with Carroll, after spending eighteen weeks in jail — a nice coincidence, as I am sure that he was in constant conversation with the police at this time. He announced this at a press conference with Quilliam. He claimed that he had been uncomfortable with the direction the EDL had been taking for some time, and was worried that his efforts to keep out ‘extremists and racists’ had proven futile. As J’accuse have noted in a useful X thread, in an interview after quitting, he told The Guardian that he would co-operate with the police in rooting out ‘criminal racists’ in the EDL. In other words, it isn’t just speculation: he has publicly admitted that he is working with the police.

In my view, what most likely happened is that the British intelligence services did indeed have a hand in Robinson’s public renunciation of the EDL. Quilliam came to prominence at a time when concerns over ‘integration’ and ‘extremism’ — Islamic and, conveniently, ‘far-right’ too — were at their height, endorsed by the Prime Minister himself. It is also known that Quilliam has received hundreds of thousands of pounds (and perhaps even millions of pounds) in funding from the Home Office.

Nawaz had his own motivations, of course: while I am sure he ideologically agreed with what he did, Nawaz himself is something of an attention-seeker and grifter. He blatantly exaggerated his ideological achievement with Robinson, and gave the (incorrect) impression that he had totally changed politically, in terms of ideology rather than tactics. Later, Robinson stated that he had received thousands of pounds a month from Quilliam in exchange for allowing them to take credit for him leaving the EDL. Quilliam eventually acknowledged they had paid Robinson, but denied that this was in exchange for him leaving the EDL.

My interpretation of this apparently contradictory information is the following. Robinson agreed to leave the EDL in exchange for money and (perhaps) a degree of legal protection, but this pot of funding proved insufficient for him to keep up his lavish spending (more on this later) on foreign travel, cocaine, alcohol, and gambling. Moreover, he never really changed his opinions. As such, he eventually fell back on doing what he had always done: making a scene, getting arrested, and raising money from his supporters which he then diverted towards his personal expenses (once again, more on this later). It wasn’t financially viable for him to truly ‘deradicalise’, in the sense of genuinely changing his behaviour. However, despite his renewed focus on street protest (something he claimed to have rejected in 2013), he has kept open some of his contacts with the British intelligence services, and probably gives them information (especially on ‘extremists’) from time to time. He pits his supporters against the police in order to exploit both for maximum gain.

Some of his other behaviour since this time seems to fit into this interpretation. For instance, on Remembrance Day in 2023, he encouraged thousands of people to turn up for a scrap in central London, which — as you would expect — is one of the most heavily policed areas in the entire country (a very large proportion of the arrests during the Southport Riots were in central London for this reason). This is an obvious trap. Those people who turned up did what you’d expect, and faced the consequences. But, just as things started kicking off and arrests were being made, Robinson somehow, very conveniently given that he was in the thick of it, managed to find his way into a black cab in Chinatown, making it out safe and sound. Meanwhile, his supporters got into a different type of car: a police van.

Many other street protestors (especially those based in the south of England) have now become aware of Robinson’s behaviour, and avoid him like the plague, believing that his presence will end up with them getting arrested. Nonetheless, he often succeeds at inserting himself into others’ protests despite them trying to make it clear that he is not welcome. There are images that show that he has police officers as contacts on his phone (though this could be claimed to be an innocent attempt to get his applications for protests cleared). It is known that virtually everyone who is involved with him ends up getting a knock on their door of some kind. Whether this is malicious, or mere incompetence, is up to the reader to decide.

2. Tommy Robinson is ideologically to the Left of Nigel Farage

Tommy Robinson has received substantial backing from neoconservatives in the United States. Yes: Tommy Robinson has been funded to the tune of tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of pounds from the most discredited faction in American politics. The Guardian writes:

A Philadelphia-based thinktank, the Middle East Forum (MEF), acknowledges it has spent about $60,000 (£47,000) on Robinson’s legal fees and demonstrations staged in London earlier this year. A senior MEF executive has been closely involved in preparations for this weekend’s march, though the thinktank said she was there in a personal capacity.

A US tech billionaire, Robert Shillman, financed a fellowship that helped pay for Robinson to be employed in 2017 by a rightwing Canadian media website, the Rebel Media, on a salary of about £5,000 a month.

These links perhaps help explain his rather odd ideological position, and more specifically, why Tommy Robinson is so vocally pro-Israel, and so monomaniacally obsessed with Islam, and only Islam.

On many occasions, he has asserted that the problem is not immigration per se. Rather, the problem is Islam itself. Even much more recently, Robinson has never budged from this view, claiming that he wants to build an alliance of Sikhs, Jews, Hindus, and blacks against Islam.

This is ridiculous. While such a focus on ‘Islam’ (in practice meaning ‘Pakistanis’) may make sense from the narrow perspective of northern mill towns, inner Birmingham, or a place like Luton or Slough; or perhaps might make sense if you are focused on the threat posed by Islamic terrorism (something that has visibly receded from its mid-’10s peak), it is now outdated at best, and irrelevant at worst.

There is little evidence that the dysfunction of these communities is due to Islam (indeed, it may even be the opposite). Moreover, many problematic immigrants are not Muslim at all. The Boriswave featured massive levels of immigration from countries like India and Nigeria, neither of which are majority Muslim countries. Robinson, who has repeatedly cultivated support from other immigrant communities (especially ‘based’ Sikhs, whom he has repeatedly praised), has no answer to this. Farage, on the other hand, despite some foolish comments in his campaign to leave the European Union, has never been quite so misguided in his approach. And, more importantly, as the world has changed, so too has Farage. Farage never fully pigeonholed himself into the total dead-end that is the ‘counter-jihad’ movement. Robinson, on the other hand, is saying exactly the same things as he said ten years ago.

Perhaps it is something to do with the views of his major financial backers in the United States?

3. Tommy Robinson has an obvious cocaine problem

It’s not surprising they’re confused: Americans aren’t used to seeing working class people with a cocaine problem. For them, cocaine is a drug mostly used by bankers and other such wealthy degenerates. But in Britain, and to a lesser extent Europe more generally, this is not the case. It’s not just the wealthy: tradesmen, football hooligans, and undergraduate students will do lines of cocaine in pub toilets. It’s a very different world.

As such, many Americans might not immediately see what seems obvious to any British person. Where we see substance abuse, they will often just see a highly passionate person. Because, even aside from his erratic behaviour, you can spot his substance abuse from the way he talks, and how he is constantly sweating, sniffing, and gurning in numerous videos, including those that he has posted himself. But it’s not just this. Fundamentally, cocaine isn’t just a drug that gives you energy and makes you more sociable. It’s a drug that turns you into a waste of space. It partly explains his violence, and his incoherent, screaming rants. Reform, rightly, shouldn’t want to associate with cocaine addicts.

But don’t take my word for it. He’s admitted to using cocaine himself, on more than one occasion! In a bizarre video obtained by The Sun, Robinson says:

No matter where I’ve gone in the world I score… I’ve gone to fucking Qatar, to Doha, and scored gear [i.e., cocaine] on the sesh while they’re all praying. Everywhere mate, every city I’ve gone to.

This seems to be a large proportion of what he spends his naïve donors’ money on.

While a less direct connection, in his mortgage fraud case (see below), in the dock with Robinson was a man by the name of Steven Vowles. As well as admitting conspiring with others to obtain a mortgage by misrepresentation and transferring criminal property, Vowles also admitted possessing 3.48 grams of cocaine with intent to supply and being concerned in the supply of class A drugs. (A number of sources, including mainstream media, have claimed that Robinson himself has been convicted of this crime. This, so far as I can tell, is a misreading of the BBC’s reporting on his mortgage fraud case. Some people have privately alleged that he does indeed deal, and that Robinson has also previously claimed to be related to the Kinahans, but I have no way of verifying either of these claims.)

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, reports that ‘Tommy Robinson’s right-hand man “had cocaine-fuelled affair with married US communications director now working for Texas congressman”’. Much like Tommy Robinson, he had allegedly been misappropriating donations for his own personal use.

A Canadian far-right activist by the name of Bethan Nodwell has also attested first-hand to Tommy Robinson’s drug problem, alleging that during his tour of Canada, he drank heavily, did cocaine, and spent donor money on prostitutes. I have also personally heard from a reliable, inside source that Tommy Robinson has done lines with another Canadian far-right activist, Lauren Southern (with whom he has allegedly had a sexual relationship, which he began after taking her to see Luton Town at Kenilworth Road).

What seems clear is that in Robinson’s circles, cocaine abuse is rampant, and that it is often this (as well as gambling) that supporters’ funds are wasted on. This cocaine abuse can help us explain some of their erratic behaviour, as well as their desperate attempts to earn money, including through scams, so that they can stay financially afloat.

4. Tommy Robinson is the world’s least political ‘political prisoner’

Tommy Robinson would have us all believe that he is a ‘political prisoner’. He tells us that he is constantly in legal trouble purely because of his political beliefs and direct, forceful, anti-establishment action. This is fanciful. The best way to demonstrate this is, starting from the very beginning, to go through the series of events that eventually led him to getting locked up in HMP Belmarsh.

But first, we should note that this was not his first run-in with the law. Aside from two convictions for assault and another conviction for public order offences, he has also been convicted of using a false passport to enter the United States (because, due to his criminal record, he was not legally allowed to enter the United States, meaning he could not use his own passport). More significantly, in 2012, he was found guilty of mortgage fraud, with the judge ruling that he had personally benefitted to the tune of £160,000, and that he was the ‘instigator’ of a series of frauds totalling £640,000. Obviously, neither of these two convictions can really be said to be a direct consequence of state persecution. Of course, his political activities may have incentivised the police to investigate him more thoroughly than an ordinary person. However, even if we interpret things as generously as possible, we can still say that both of these convictions were entirely avoidable on his part.

But back to the matter at hand. Back in 2018, the British Right’s eyes were on Huddersfield, where there was a prominent trial of twenty predominantly Pakistani child rapists in progress. Whilst the trial was ongoing, a ‘forwarded many times’ video was circulating in the local area. In this video, a Syrian schoolboy was shown being beaten up on his school grounds. After watching this video, Robinson, ever the attention-seeking fabulist, threw himself into the debate by publishing two videos on Facebook with his commentary claiming that the Syrian schoolboy in question was not innocent, and had actually violently attacked English girls at the school. He also claimed that the Syrian schoolboy had threatened to stab another schoolchild, and that he had beaten one girl ‘black and blue’. For all of this, predictably, he provided no evidence.

Unsurprisingly, Robinson was sued for libel. In 2021, the High Court found against Robinson, and ordered him to pay £100,000 in damages to the Syrian schoolboy and his family, who had to move house after Robinson posted his two videos.

Robinson argues that this was not a fair trial. This was because, like all libel trials, there was no jury, only a judge. He also claims that an excessive amount of evidence was thrown out. Unfortunately, there are two massive holes in his narrative of state persecution. Firstly, there was no schoolgirl who was ‘beaten black and blue’. She doesn’t exist. There is no ‘evidence’ of this that a judge could possibly ‘throw out’. After all, if she was a real person, at the very least there would have presumably been incident reports filed at the school, even if she did not want to testify herself for whatever reason. Secondly, and more importantly, the story does not end here. After all, his libel occurred in 2018; the trial concluded in 2021. He was only arrested in 2024, and from this point in time onwards, he is solely and knowingly responsible for everything that has happened.

In July 2024, on his newly-reinstated X account, Robinson published a 1 hr 44 mins documentary entitled ‘Silenced’. In this documentary, he restates all of the claims that he has previously made — yes, the same claims that he had already lost a libel trial over! He informed us that all of the previous court judgements against him were incorrect; that everything was just a total miscarriage of justice.

The release of this film was meticulously planned, and a blatant, indisputable breach of the injunction placed on Robinson at the conclusion of the libel case in 2021. There was no good reason, political or otherwise, for doing this. Robinson was completely, one-hundred percent aware that he was very publicly, very blatantly breaking the law when he did this. Why did he do this? Was it just that he thought he really was telling the truth, and was angry about being gagged? Or was there some other motivation?

In fact, it is virtually impossible for him to have broken the law any more publicly than he did, because on 17 July 2024, he hosted a rally with 10,000 or more people in attendance in Trafalgar Square to present the documentary. This was particularly significant, as he was due in the High Court on 29 July 2024 to answer claims of contempt of court for producing and publishing the documentary, and thus breaching the injunction placed on him by the judge, Justice Nickin, at the conclusion of his 2021 trial.

Instead of attending court on 29 July, Robinson opted to flee the country. This is obviously illegal. This is not politics — these are the actions of a common, moronic, thuggish criminal. In response to this, unsurprisingly, an arrest warrant was issued in the event that he failed to appear at a follow-up hearing on 28 October of the same year. Yes: the British state gave him another chance! Does this seem like the state persecuting an innocent dissident, or the law acting precisely as all good people think it should towards people who fail to attend court because they fled the country?

At the rally on 17 July, Robinson goaded the police to try to arrest him for ‘telling the truth’ — a cheap stunt which was nothing more than a setup for his latest GoFundMe campaign, which he launched while he was abroad in Spain, on the run from the law, raising a whopping £96,000. We can only guess how this money is going to be used by Robinson, given past form.

This is just a taste of how Britain’s #1 scam artist Tommy Robinson operates. Because it seems as though Robinson was used to this particular scam: manufacturing a run-in with the law in order to get supporters to fund his lifestyle. The aforementioned far-right Canadian activist, Bethan Nodwell, who met Robinson during his tour of Canada, alleged the following:

“While we were coming back into the hotel, [Robinson is] like ‘Right, [the] tour’s over, we’ve sold no tickets… I’m going to Calgary, I’m going to get nicked and then the tour is over.’”

…

“And then when I saw that arrest last night… I was like ‘that’s what he meant!’. Oh and then the “Save Tommy” thing was out. They had a domain name, they had it ready to go… I’m like ‘that’s how you make your $80,000 folks’, right there.”

In summary: Robinson planned to get arrested in Canada, because he knew that he could raise more money from his supporters if this happened. Given how intentional his arrest was on his part, it seems safe to assume this is what happened in London in 2024 as well.

But just to really put the nail in the coffin: when his court date in October came, what did he do? He immediately pled guilty! There was no defence, and indeed no intention of a defence. He was and is guilty in a literal and moral sense. And, worse still, he knows this better than anyone. Someone with this kind of moral calibre has no place in any political party in Britain that wants to be taken seriously. The actual politics of Pakistani rape gangs played absolutely zero part in Robinson’s most recent arrest, despite the superficial connection to the trial in Huddersfield.

Conclusion

Tommy Robinson has many supporters in Britain. They think he is a hero for speaking out against the Pakistani rape gangs and (so they think) against immigration. There is, of course, a scintilla of truth to this (although it isn’t true that he was quite as alone on the issue of the rape gangs as he claims, nor even that he is as anti-immigration as his supporters believe). To a certain extent, it may be true that he has been a victim of state persecution — though most of his legal troubles are basically self-inflicted.

However, Farage’s decision to drive a wedge between Robinson and Reform UK is indisputably the correct one. While Robinson is capable of rallying thousands of supporters — no small feat — at the drop of a hat, he is far more hated in this country than loved, even among Reform’s core supporter base. For some people, this is because they find his politics, or at the very least his methods, distasteful. For others, this is because they think he is a criminal and a thug. For others still, this is because they think he is a grifter, a scam artist or, worse still, a literal state asset designed to discredit the British Right (which may sound conspiratorial, but as we have shown is well-evidenced). Reform can only lose from associating themselves with Robinson.

---

Image credits: Shayan Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

This article was written by our editor-in-chief, Nigel Forrester. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?