This year, instead of the most-read articles of the year, the team have picked their favourites of the 1,500 or so we have published in 2024. They will appear in no particular order until New Year’s Eve. Today’s choice was first published on September 9, 2024.
WHEN Jordan Peterson sat down with Douglas Murray a few weeks ago to talk about the protests in the US and UK, Peterson explained why he decided to go ‘out on a limb’ to interview Tommy Robinson. This was an interview that took place well before Robinson’s huge and peaceful rally in London on Saturday July 27, itself just days before the killings of three little girls in Southport and the subsequent riots for which parts of the MSM slanderously and groundlessly blamed Robinson.
Peterson said: ‘I have been watching Tommy for a long time and he’s struck me as particularly interesting for two reasons. The first reason I suppose is because he is a genuinely working-class guy . . . and second I haven’t seen anyone anywhere who’s been more unwavering in his commitment to reveal the atrocities of the grooming gangs in the UK which are organised patterns of activity that are very pervasive [and] that are so terrible that it is almost impossible to talk about them without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. No doubt there are many things you could accuse Tommy Robinson of – many of those he would admit to – but the fact that he’s pointing his finger at something that seriously needed to be attended to and has paid a major price for is also not ignorable.’
He went on to ask rhetorically: ‘Do we expect someone brave enough to do that also to be perfect in every regard? That’s asking a bit much given there’re many people who in principle have moral characters much more unsullied than Tommy Robinson who are cowering in silence constantly in the face of this absolute and brutal atrocity.’
Quite so. It also made me think of the many far more sullied characters on our political stage who have got away with it, and never been subjected to the across-the-board branding, silencing and curtailment of freedom he has been treated to. No epithet has stuck more effectively than those words thug, racist and far right have to him. You have to look quite far to find someone to whom you mention his name who doesn’t judge him so, who doesn’t assume he is the hooligan the press have told us he is, who doesn’t call him an idiot or simply display the distaste they feel for him on their faces. But ask those with these attitudes what they actually know about him and whether they have any idea of his story, and what his ‘beef’ is actually about they go quiet. They have no idea. Their judgement, as was mine in the past, is an unthinking one – based purely and simply on how the MSM cast him, and the fact he is actually working-class (unlike the elite politicians like Starmer so desperate to claim this background). This is a ‘tarring’ that is so universally accepted that anyone defending him in any way also risks being so tarred and outcast.
Of course no one ever sees him interviewed by the mainstream UK press or broadcasters: he is never allowed to defend himself, let alone be asked to tell his story. So there is nothing and no one to challenge the official Tommy characterisation as a law-breaker, inciter, thug or crook. Any out-of-context ‘angry monologue’ clips that people may have seen confirm their prejudice. It’s only when you hear his whole 20-year story that you start to understand it and empathise and are horrified by the cover-up. And understand his anger. There is such a thing as righteous indignation, and that without doubt is what Tommy feels.
So what did Peterson think of Tommy? ‘He’s very articulate; he can certainly make a case for himself.’ He says he thought ‘Tommy and his crew handled those protests well . . . of course in the aftermath all sorts of chaotic hell has broken loose.’ At this point he turns to Murray (who had watched the interview) to ask his opinion.
After flagging up the primary problem of the elite’s denial of deep (and valid) public concern about immigration, Murray says: ‘They [the people] don’t forget very quickly that just years ago the son of a Libyan migrant detonated a bomb at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester or that three people who had no right to be in the UK at London Bridge in 2017 hacking at the throats of passers-by.’ It’s the fact that Governments don’t know what to do about this or about the grooming gangs that Robinson has always spoken to, he explained. He went on: ‘If you are me – for the time being – you are allowed to write about it, sometimes, speak about it, somewhat, raise alarms, somewhat, but if you are Tommy Robinson and grew up in Luton, disadvantaged, white and working-class, you are not allowed to do anything. You are not allowed to say anything because if you do we will call you a racist and we will call you far right.’
Peterson then hits the nail on the head: ‘That epithet of far right is a very effective brand of tarring – even amongst people who are sceptical of such things.’
This is a long introduction to why having watched the entire Jordan and Tammy (his wife) Peterson interview with Tommy to examine the basis of any remnant prejudice of my own. The Petersons did a great service not just to Tommy, who has been systematically silenced and persecuted here – he said it was perhaps his most important interview ever – but to all of us. They gave Tommy the platform he has never been given to tell his story to the sceptical middle classes – with Peterson as host people would listen to him. It has transformed my view not just of him but of the authorities. Censorship and news management did not arrive with the covid era. Becoming an enemy of the State is not just the stuff of American action thrillers. But you will decide for yourselves.
Tomorrow’s article starts with the spurious grounds for Tommy’s detention by the immigration authorities on his recent circumscribed visit to Canada.
