Jailing Tommy . . . Again

By Bruce Bawer

Another disgraceful day for Soviet Britain.

In the last few days a new chapter has been added to the storied saga of the 41-year-old British activist, author, and citizen journalist Tommy Robinson. On Friday, upon his return to Britain after several weeks abroad, he was taken into police custody – an event he had expected and discussed publicly before flying back home – and charged with several “offenses.” One of the charges, contempt of court, relates to his documentary Silenced, which premiered in July at a screening in Trafalgar Square and has been viewed on X more than 50 million times. In that documentary, Tommy gathered ample witness testimony showing that Jamal Hijazi, a Syrian refugee portrayed in the British media as the victim of bullying at the school he attended in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 2018, was not a victim but was, in fact, himself a bully – and a rather horrible one, at that.

What, then, was Tommy’s crime? He’d been ordered by a judge not to contradict the official narrative about Hijazi – specifically, not to describe him as “aggressive and bullying” or as “threatening,” even if he was aggressive and bullying and threatening. A second contempt-of-court charge was leveled at Tommy for several related “offenses,” such as discussing the Hijazi case in an interview with Jordan Peterson, holding that July screening in Trafalgar Square, and posting Silenced on X and YouTube. In addition to the contempt charges, Tommy was charged under the Terrorism Act for refusing to provide the police with access to the contents of his mobile phone, which include material that would compromise his sources.

On Saturday, supporters of Tommy held a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London, turning out in such significant numbers that, as the Guardian put it, “the demonstration spilled out from its meeting point around Victoria Station.” The Guardian made sure to point out that the protesters, many of whom were treated to an outdoor screening of his new documentary, Lawfare, were “mostly male, white and middle-aged” (all bad things, of course) and that many of them were waving Union Jacks (that most toxic of items). Meanwhile counter-protesters took part in a rally arranged by a leftist group called Stand Up to Racism.

Aside from his documentaries, Tommy has also written (and self-published) a couple of books. Enemy of the State (2015) is an autobiography that focuses on his demonization by the British government, which finds his determination to expose monstrous Islamic crimes inconvenient, distasteful, and threatening to “community cohesion.” His second book, written with Peter McLoughlin, is entitled Muhammed’s Koran (2017). His newest, Manifesto: Free Speech, Real Democracy, Peaceful Disobedience, also written with McLoughlin, came out on October 4, but when I looked for it on Amazon UK it was identified as being “currently unavailable.” After trying to find some other way of acquiring the book online, I was finally able to secure a copy through the good offices of a friend of mine who is also a chum of Tommy’s. (On October 25, Tommy – or somebody – posted at his X account that orders for the book could be placed at a dedicated website and that new copies would be available this week.)

What to say about Manifesto? Put it this way: the authors show that Tommy’s previous topics – the reality of the Islamic threat and the British government’s determination to crush Islam’s critics – are only two details in a much bigger picture. In the U.S., the MAGA movement is a rebellion against America’s unelected but powerful Deep State, a.k.a. The Swamp, which has its equivalents in pretty much every Western country. And as Tommy and McLoughlin note, it’s been around, at least in the U.K., for a long time. Two centuries ago, the English writer William Cobbett (1763-1835) called it “The Thing”; in America, a century or so later, Jack London (1876-1916), of Call of the Wild fame, coined his own name for it – “The Oligarchy” – in the obscure 1908 novel The Iron Heel. Throughout Manifesto, Tommy and McLoughlin use this term to describe the Deep State of our own day, mostly in the U.K.

To be sure, they do devote a degree of attention to “The Oligarchy” in America and other countries – for example the Netherlands, where Pim Fortuyn, a fierce opponent of the immigration policy of the Dutch establishment, was murdered on May 6, 2002, only days before an election after which he probably would have become prime minister. His killer was routinely identified in the Dutch media as an animal-rights activist, but he also despised Fortuyn’s criticism of Islam, hence the assassination. Shockingly, the killer was released from prison after only twelve years and allowed to take a new name under which he could start a new life. As Tommy and McLoughlin point out, theories about possible Deep State involvement in Fortuyn’s murder – theories not unlike those that have been proffered for decades by researchers into the JFK assassination – are now being served up by Dutch commentators.

But Tommy and McLoughlin’s major emphasis is on The Oligarchy in Britain. One fact of which many Americans have become aware since the beginning of the Trump era is that our own Swamp creatures aren’t exclusively Democrats; on the contrary, Deep State operatives – whether they work on Capitol Hill, or for a think tank, or at the FBI or CIA or DoD or IRS, or as lobbyists, or in the legacy media or military-industrial complex – can be found in both major parties. The same is true in Britain, where the Tories held power from 2010 to 2024 without doing anything significant to reform the scandalously mediocre NHS, to reduce the country’s sky-high immigration levels, to address the Muslim “grooming [i.e. child rape] gangs” that can be found in cities all over England, or to protect critics of Islam from arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.

Things were, as Tommy and McLoughlin observe, scarcely different a century ago. The playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), revered, then as now, by Britain’s cultural elite, was nominally a socialist; the politician Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), reviled, then as now, by the same cultural elite, was nominally a fascist. But there was really little in the way of an ideological gap between them. Both admired Hitler and Mussolini; both looked kindly upon the idea of eugenics-based extermination (in 1938, GBS published a newspaper article entitled “Heil Hitler”); both advocated for a welfare state that limited individual rights. In fact both GBS and Mosley were Fabians – members of the organization, established in 1884, that called for a gradual transformation of the U.K. into a hard-core socialist state and that, not incidentally, founded the London School of Economics (LSE).

In other words, both Shaw and Mosley, whether you want to call them fascists or socialists, were at the big-government end of the political spectrum – the spectrum, that is, on which the important distinction lies – and were therefore the ideological forebears of the likes of Tony Blair, who in 2006 unveiled a window at the LSE that openly celebrated the Fabians, including the Hitler–loving GBS. At the other end of that spectrum were people like the brilliant politician and scholar Enoch Powell (1912-1998) – whose brave, prophetic dissent from The Oligarchy’s mass- immigration policy in his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech led to his immediate expulsion from the political elite and his labeling as a “fascist.” In reality, Powell was no more a fascist than Donald Trump is – on the contrary, he was, like Trump, a patriot and a populist who was deeply concerned about the deleterious impact of Deep State policies on the native inhabitants of his own country.

Also at the small-government end of the spectrum, needless to say, was Margaret Thatcher, who, Tommy and McLoughlin suggest, was expelled from the prime ministership because she’d started to challenge the growing power of the EU. They also speculate that if Thatcher had managed to triumph over the coup that removed her from power, she might well, within the next few years, have acted upon Powell’s warnings and restricted immigration dramatically – an action that would have made today’s Britain a very different country indeed from the one that is, thanks to The Oligarchy, well on its way to having a minority British population.

Granted, the overall message of Manifesto – about the perils of rule by a globalist, authoritarian elite and the drastic need for a democratic, populist shake-up – will hardly be new to readers of this website. And the voice throughout most of the book, if it matters to you, sounds less like that of Tommy, a plainspoken working-class bloke, and more like that of a historical scholar – in this instance, McLoughlin, who has an academic background and has written a book about Oliver Cromwell and another entitled The Pattern of History and Fate of Humanity. No matter who wrote what in Manifesto, however, the value of this book lies not in its main argument but in its many illuminating specifics – from its perceptive account of the enduring significance of Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) to the long, highly detailed chapter pondering the relevance of the gold standard, cryptocurrencies, and other economic phenomena to the mechanisms by which the Deep State exercises its control.

But, alas, some of the branches of The Oligarchy – in this case, the publishing houses that refused to put out Manifesto and the bookstores that refuse to stock it – are doing their best to make it difficult for you to get a copy of it. Meanwhile, other branches – namely the police and judiciary – are intent on barring you from being able to hear Tommy. On Monday morning, a court hearing was held to determine whether Tommy – who has previously served long, hellish terms behind bars after “trials” that were models of injustice, and who was most recently arrested this past June in Canada after giving a speech in Calgary – would yet again be sent to prison.

At the hearing, which took place at Woolrich Crown Court in London, the prosecution maintained that this case wasn’t about Tommy’s politics or “even directly a case about freedom of expression,” but rather “about the disobedience to a court order, and the undermining of the rule of law that goes with that” – never mind that the court order itself was preposterous. When the judge issued his ruling, he read it, noted Ezra Levant of Rebel News, who was tweeting from the courtroom, “from his computer,” leading Levant to wonder: “How can he do that, given that there was literally no pause at all after the submissions by the lawyers? Did he pre-write this? How does that work?” Good questions.

And what was the ruling? No surprise: Tommy was sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which he will serve half – probably in solitary confinement, given that British prisons are dominated and controlled by Muslim gangsters, who would tear him to bits otherwise. In short, in a country that is scared to properly punish the Muslim rapists he’s exposed, Tommy is essentially being sentenced once again to the Hotel Graybar for telling a truth of which The Oligarchy disapproves. As Levant put it, “In the U.K., the government is now the arbiter of truth.” Of course George Orwell, whom Tommy and McLoughlin discuss in Manifesto, saw all of this coming in 1984, in which the role of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth is to disseminate lies and suppress facts.

Oh, well. Yet another disgraceful day for British justice – and the beginning of yet another season in hell for Tommy Robinson. What can you do? If you haven’t done it already, start by watching Silenced online – and thank Elon Musk for not having taken it down. And what else can you do? Ponder what my friend Valerie Price of Act for Canada wrote to me about Tommy the other day: “He is my personal hero and yet it must be said that all he has done to become heroic is something that we all can do, should do, and must do: he has spoken the truth.”

First published in Front Page Magazine