TOMMY Robinson announced last week he had ‘to leave the UK to protect my family and those around me’ from ‘terrorists’ and British official persecution after spending three years living with friends and in hotels.
He suggests his visit to America is not permanent, since he intends to return for the Unite the Kingdom rally on May 16. However, he has posted also that he intends to help Americans to avoid Britain’s mistakes.
Could he claim asylum? And would the US grant it? It is far from impossible.
Another Briton is already in discussion with the US government for asylum from Britain. Yes, ‘another’ as potentially hundreds of thousands could mount similar claims.
First, let’s explain the case of Hamit Coskun, who is the first to have gone public with a claim.
A year ago he burnt a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish Embassy in an act of protest against the nature of the Islamic regime in Turkey and was physically assaulted in response by two passers-by. The first, Moussa Kadri, shouted: ‘F***ing idiot! Burn the Koran? That’s my religion!’
He pulled out a bread knife and twice attempted to stab Mr Coskun. A second man is reported to have spat and kicked at Mr Coskun at the same time. Mr Coskun was then convicted for a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’.
Mr Coskun rightly won his appeal against his conviction in June 2025. However, the Director of Public Prosecutions is appealing against the High Court’s decision to quash the conviction. This is despite the facts that:
· Burning a copy of the Koran is not a crime.
· Insulting Islam is not a crime (that would be blasphemy).
· Insulting President Erdogan’s Islamism (to which Mr Coskun – a Turkish asylum seeker – was trying to draw attention, according to statements he had posted in advance) is not a crime.
Nevertheless, the CPS argued that the Turkish man who attacked Mr Coskun with a knife, shouting ‘I’m going to kill you’ proves that Mr Coskun committed a religiously aggravated public-order offence.
Mr Coskun confirmed earlier reports that he is in talks with the US government for asylum. A senior US official said his is ‘one of several cases the administration has made note of’.
The High Court reserved judgment for a later date, which gives more time for British authorities to consider the embarrassing spectacle of an asylum claimant fleeing a second British conviction for blasphemy against Islam without any statutory crime of blasphemy.
But don’t let the postponement tempt you to underestimate the potential scale of British claims for asylum in America.
Mr Coskun is not the first British person to earn the sympathy of the US government.
Graham Linehan, creator of the comedies Father Ted and The IT Crowd, has based himself in Arizona since late 2024 (after Donald Trump won re-election), claiming that his opposition to trans dogma had attracted British judicial persecution and commercial cancellation.
In September, Linehan was met by five armed officers at Heathrow Airport and arrested on suspicion of inciting violence against transsexuals through three satirical tweets dating from April. In this case, Linehan was bailed, initially on condition that he would not access X. In October, the Crown Prosecution Service decided on no further action.
Earlier this month, Linehan testified to the US House Judiciary Committee on European censorship of scepticism about gender fluidity, the invasion of women’s spaces by men pretending to be women, medical experiments on gender dysphoric children and men competing in women’s sports. His main point was that ideology and freedom of speech ‘cannot coexist’.
US interest in such cases is virtuous, yes, but also self-interested.
The self-interest starts with selective immigration. Upon coming into office in 2017, Trump suspended immigration from countries with propensity to terrorism. Returned to office in 2025, he did the same.
In August, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) updated internal policy to allow officers to consider whether an applicant’s beliefs or statements are ‘anti-American’ when adjudicating green cards and visas.
In January, Trump doubled down on stopping asylum for nationalities that tend to welfare dependency and welfare fraud (such as the Somalis of Minnesota).
Selecting-out risky immigrants is a small step towards selecting-in valuable immigrants.
One way to select-in valuable immigrants is to grant asylum to advocates of what are considered American values, such as free speech.
The US government has already identified Britain as a threat to such freedoms and to American companies that fall foul of British expectations for self-censorship.
An early affront to Trump’s administration is Britain’s ban on prayer outside abortion centres (under the Public Order Act 2023, effective in England and Wales from 31 October 2024).
This coincided with accelerating two-tier policing of dissent, within the first month of the Labour government, epitomised by the sentencing of Lucy Connolly to 31 months in prison, after she was fast-tracked for prosecution for tweeting hatred of asylum centres in response to the stabbing of girls in Southport by second-generation immigrant Axel Rudakubana.
The US State Department’s annual report on human rights concluded that Britain’s human rights had ‘worsened’ in 2024, and the British government is partly to blame. ‘Significant human rights issues included credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism.’
The activation of the Online Safety Act in August provoked US complaint about further British repression of speech online, and the burden of censorship and fines (if the censorship is not quick enough) on American social media companies.
In late July, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Jim Jordan, Republican from Ohio) led a bipartisan group of committee members to Brussels, London, and Dublin. Upon return, he said: ‘Nothing we heard in Europe eased our concerns about the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, or Online Safety Act.’
In November, the Trump administration aired the possibility of asylum for censored and cancelled Britons. By January, the United States Department of State was contemplating asylum for British Jews too, given increasing anti-Semitism in Britain, Robert Garson revealed to the Daily Telegraph.
Garson is a Manchester-born Jew who emigrated to America and works as one of Trump’s personal lawyers. He explicitly ties America’s morality and self-interest in British asylum seekers. British Jews, he argues, would integrate into American society, without the burdens associated with other refugees. Garson categorises British Jews as a ‘highly educated, English-speaking community’ with low propensity to crime.
This is a reminder that Britain’s more affluent, educated, skilled, law-abiding, English-speaking residents are already emigrating at an accelerating rate. Their emigration adds to the British Government’s lie that it is lowering immigration. Net immigration has fallen because emigration has increased. Britain’s most valuable citizens are being replaced by net drains on Britain’s economy. (Just this week, the government released monthly unemployment data, proving that unemployment is at a five-year high.)
Economic decline then encourages more emigration of Britain’s most valuable citizens. Not just Jews: the over-taxed parents wishing to distance their children from crime and woke education, free speech advocates, free marketeers, and educators scared of being referred to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme for showing videos of Trump supporters or saying that Britain is a Christian country.
The Trump administration has already pushed for self-interested targeted immigration. True, the US has capped the number of refugees it will accept in 2026 to 7,500. Nevertheless, permitting entry for British Jews has more historical precedent and domestic support, than asylum for Afrikaaners, who will make up most of the 7,500 refugees permitted this year.
Britain is home to no more than 292,000 Jews according to the 2021 Census. Most (51 per cent) see no future in Britain, according to a recent poll. That means more than 150,000 Jews might prefer asylum in America. It is not impossible to imagine the US government legislating to permit all as asylum seekers, after the repeated or larger attacks on their safety, such as the stabbings at a synagogue in Manchester in October.
Then consider the potentially hundreds of thousands of Britons with claims to politicised judicial persecution and economic destitution from shadow bans and academic cancellation such as Dr Scott McLachlan, or threats to life or liberty, such as Tommy Robinson.
Some Britons could even claim a denial of the right to family life, given bans from schools and sports fields under an opaque and non-judicial ‘safeguarding‘ system for political views expressed on social media. British fathers might consider a similar claim given two-tier family law that fleeces fathers for most of the support but doesn’t enforce their access to children. And their sons could claim asylum given government plans to target British boys for re-education for ‘violence against women and girls’ instead of the illegal immigrants who are the true drivers.
Such self-interested asylum flows would make America’s median immigrant look wealthier, more educated, more skilled, more law-abiding, more English-speaking and more freedom-loving as Britain shifted further in the opposite direction.
