FOLLOWING my failure to become Mayor of London in 2024 as Reform’s candidate, and my second-place finish as the prospective Dover MP in the subsequent General Election (both due in part to Reform UK not taking my candidacy seriously or providing any requisite support), I was invited on to Dan Wootton’s new Outspoken YouTube show.
‘Doing’ TV was nothing new for me. Since founding the FairFuelUK campaign in 2011 – a public crusade widely credited with preventing a rise in Fuel Duty over all those years – I can’t count my national media appearances. As Reform’s Mayoral candidate and later as a prospective MP for the party, I continued to be in demand, with my views sought on tax, immigration, housing and health. So when Dan’s ‘out of left field’ question about ‘the paradox of Tommy Robinson’ came at me, I was not fazed. I just answered as honestly as I could. In short, I said that I knew very little of him, ‘except for his pioneering work to highlight the epidemic of Pakistani grooming gangs across the UK’, and I went on, ‘For that alone, he should be applauded and credited by us all.’
That was it. Not with Dan, but with the MSM. That one comment had me ostracised after my many years of regular appearances in the national media for my FairFuelUK Campaign. It was also, I found, unacceptable politically. It led immediately to a sinister threat of expulsion from Reform UK, the party for which I had stood proudly but naively in two elections. The party I thought was the bastion of free speech and democracy. How wrong I’d been. Reform was as ‘thought and speech’ controlling as Labour; that year a party emerged that would throw loyal supporters under the proverbial bus if they veered from the party line, which on Robinson was that he was a thug and worse. (Just as Nigel had been deemed too ‘toxic’ for Vote Leave, Tommy was now too toxic for the sanitised Farage.)
In fact, the hysterical response to my on-air remarks went off the Richter scale among the ignorant, those already biased against Tommy in the media, and, especially, those within the Reform Party.
The irony was that it set me on a course of finding out more about Robinson – why the establishment demonised him and treated him like a pariah. I found a man who had worked tirelessly, with complete disregard for his personal safety and financial security over a decade, up against non-stop lawfare, arrest and imprisonment, to challenge almost single-handedly the undemocratic infiltration of Islamic culture into Blighty, the imposition of multiculturalism and the national explosion of organised Pakistani child-rape gangs. It left me asking how anyone could disrespect, insult, defame, let alone vilify, a human being who, without any background advantage, had trodden a path for citizen journalists in the face of a self-censoring MSM and with the Crown Prosecution Service on his back?
Answers on a postcard to Sir Keir Starmer, Sir Ed Davey, Nigel Farage and those self-declared well-paid political commentators from increasingly partisan newspapers and TV news channels, all petrified of being on the right side of popular opinion.
Well, that is precisely what has happened to this citizen journalist, who is now forced to search daily for a safe place to rest his head.
The mainstream media and politicians from the major parties, including the opportunistic and undemocratically run Reform UK Party, have combined to deliver unwarranted attacks on Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson.
At other times and in other places, such freedom fighters, for that is what Tommy is, even those with pasts not untainted by violence, have been sanctified. In fact, history is full of revolutionaries with far more troubled pasts than the non-violent Tommy. Let’s consider the appropriately celebrated Nelson Mandela, for example. Working through a terrorist cell structure, he carried out acts of sabotage to exert maximum pressure on the government with minimal casualties; his MK group bombed military installations, power plants, telephone lines and transport links at night, because sabotage was the least harmful action, did not involve killing, and offered the best hope for racial reconciliation afterwards. A man who acknowledged that if this had failed, guerilla warfare might have been necessary. A veiled threat, potentially countering the use of violence.
The tyranny Tommy is challenging is a new apartheid – the woke oppression of the non-woke. That is what he is awakening ordinary Brits to, without resorting to the violence, aggression and intimidation of Antifa or Palestine Action protests. Unite the Kingdom events are characteristically good-humoured and peaceful family events. His aim? Not to overthrow the traditional British Government but to build a democratic movement that commands a massive following from all walks of life. And that is just what he is doing through the sheer force of his personality and clarity.
It makes the hypocrisy of the establishment all the more breathtaking. Remember how all was forgiven for Gerry Adams, who was allowed to take a seat in the House of Commons? Conveniently, in 2014 the CPS found there was ‘insufficient evidence to charge him with murder’. It seems that violence pays. No such luck for Tommy’s peaceful protest, which saw him imprisoned simply for showing a documentary that had the laudable aim of exposing damning evidence that countered the ‘official narrative’ concerning a Syrian refugee schoolboy.
Tommy, who offers hope, not terror, through peaceful assembly and debate, because he tells the truth about multiculturalism, mass immigration and Islam as they affect working-class communities, is the criminal. For stating what is happening to our country – the destruction of our British way of life, culture, proud history and Christian values – he is the criminal. His crime, then? Simply that he embodies the concerns of millions of decent, honest, tax-paying indigenous British citizens.
It is not that he is the only long-term critic of Islam. Highbrows such as Mark Steyn, Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are too. But they don’t speak to ‘the people’ and they don’t command the following that Tommy has built. They are not orators. He is. A veritable Wat Tyler, the leader of a 21st-century peasants’ revolt, and that scares the establishment beyond belief.
The British Government has to silence Tommy because he is the only one who has a Mandela, Gandhi or Martin Luther King effect on the people, and it terrifies them. But the dam walls are cracking. Ben Habib, leader of the burgeoning new Advance UK, is far from the only European party leader to endorse him. Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk, recognising his ‘CV’ (ability, courage and intelligence), have broken their silence on him; Musk gave him the rare honour of a long live interview this summer.
His political recognition and stature just continue to grow.
Freedom of speech in the pursuit of truth should never be a precursor to persecution or cancellation. Such a sentiment would once have been regarded as a cornerstone of our political culture, the one that differentiated us from communist, fascist and Islamic dictatorships. That is why it never occurred to me that my 15 years of fruitfully helping the economy, millions of businesses, and the world’s highest-taxed drivers would be shelved by the mainstream media as the price of my supporting Tommy.
It has cost me considerably personally as well. But let me be completely clear: I don’t regret ‘coming out’ or speaking warmly of such a stirring, principled human being. Freedom of speech is our foremost political battle, and most certainly mine.
