Tommy robinson

Man with man to dwell Sir: Your editorial (‘All ye faithful’, 13-27 December) suggests that scepticism about Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s (Tommy Robinson’s) Christian faith tends to coincide with credulity about conversions among refugees from Muslim-majority countries, and vice versa. This does not reflect the experience of many churches. Over the past year in our congregation, several young men have come to faith alongside a larger number of Iranian asylum seekers. One of the former was so affected by the murder of Charlie Kirk that he came to church the following Sunday. Many of the latter are sincerely seeking Christ, having become disillusioned with Islam in their homeland.

A meeting planned in secret. A message deemed subversive. The authorities both antagonised and confused. The gatherings of the early Church in the time of the Roman Empire? Or Tommy Robinson’s proposed carol concert at an as yet undisclosed London location, proclaimed as the event to put ‘Christ back into Christmas’? To draw even the most strained comparison between the two would seem to offend most mainstream sensibilities. Established churches across the country have reacted with horror and disdain at the former football hooligan and recent prison inmate claiming to be Christianity’s champion this Christmas.

Riotous summers seem to occur in Britain with about the same frequency as sunny ones: roughly every decade. Sometimes it’s Afro-Caribbeans protesting (Brixton in 1981), sometimes Asians (Oldham in 2001). The white working classes rioted over the poll tax in 1990 and in Southport this year. The riot in Harehills, Leeds, last month was precipitated by social services removing children from a Roma couple. Whatever sparks the unrest, what all riots have in common is that they involve mindless destruction. Rioters smash and burn their own communities and opportunists descend, trying to exploit the situation for political ends. Fake news and misinformation abound.

As a young journalist in the mid-2000s, there was the occasional circumstance where I was asked to ‘prove it’: upon showing up to a news event I was covering, whoever ran check-in insisted that I show some press credentials. You know, those badges you see on episodes of Law & Order to denote that someone’s a reporter. (More often than not, the guest star probably holds it up and indignantly yells ‘Press!’ in order to enter a crime scene.) Working for a digital-first outlet – CNET Networks, later acquired by CBS – I never had anything like it except maybe business cards. To me, it seemed like an antiquated request; to the people checking my legitimacy, it was an obvious question.

We might not care for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon but we should care very much about what happens to him in prison over the next two months or so. Lennon, also known as ‘Tommy Robinson’, was convicted at the Old Bailey yesterday for contempt of court after he live-streamed footage of defendants on trial for sexual exploitation arriving at court. Yaxley-Lennon had previously served time in custody for this but was freed on appeal pending a retrial. Just to make matters more complicated, he was also sentenced yesterday for an earlier contempt committed at Canterbury Crown court in 2017, again at a rape trial that involved four Asian defendants that attracted a suspended sentence, now activated.

Should we make it illegal to study the social sciences? Imagine the amount of tendentious rubbish we could erase from the world if we did. The economists who pretend on Newsnight that they know what’s going on, when they haven’t a clue. The sociologists fabricating evidence to support their inane and inevitably woke theses. The lies masquerading as fact and able to gull the public because of the spurious claim that they are ‘scientific’. There is no science in economics or sociology, interesting though those disciplines might be once they have been shorn of their pretensions. Let me give you a recent example.

Hours after being knocked off Facebook and Instagram last week, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, Patient Zero for Twitter-banning, joined the messaging app Telegram and wasted no time firing off the n-word. To his growing list of followers there, he wrote, ‘Like John Lennon, I take “n*gger” to mean any oppressed person. Today’s n*ggers are me, Laura [Loomer], and Alex Jones,’ adding that his black husband gave him permission to write that. That, of course, would have never been allowed on Facebook or Twitter. But Telegram is the new platform of the damned (Tommy Robinson has over 35,000 followers there).

Does Facebook have a grudge against the right? It’s an accusation that’s been leveled against Mark Zuckerberg before — notably in a Congressional hearing last year — and is rearing its head again, with the suspension of two British right-wing broadcasters, Tommy Robinson and Raheem Kassam. Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League, has been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram for ‘repeatedly breaching’ their Community Standards by ‘posting material that uses dehumanizing language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims’, according to a Facebook blog post. ‘What they’re saying about me is complete lies,’ Robinson told Cockburn this morning. ‘What they’re saying about “hate” is all lies.