Tommy robinson

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The truth is we prefer to lie

There are no necessary truths any more. Everything is contingent. And those contingencies are the consequence not of what happens in the real world, but of the derangement in our own minds. Some will insist it was ever thus. Well, if so, it’s never been more evident. Take just two examples. We will never know the truth of the Kavanaugh case unless one of the two principal actors ’fesses up — and even then I wouldn’t be too sure. If the case went to court and Christine Blasey Ford were a reliable witness, and several of her contemporaries gave evidence that they witnessed the attempted rape and all Brett Kavanaugh did was mumble his repetitive idiocies, the right would still be insisting that it was a politically motivated put-up job.

Friday

Cockburn

The poetry of Tommy Robinson

From our US edition

Life’s not all politics. Even for Cockburn. Well, kind of. Cockburn enjoys poetry, but the digital news churn leaves him no time to recline with a slim volume of verse and a glass of dry sherry, as he was wont to do in his youth. Imagine, then, Cockburn’s delight at finding a poem that combines the pleasures of lyric with deep research into global issues—immigration, Islam, the ‘administrative state’ (rhymes with ‘people we hate’), and the budding romance between Steve Bannon and Europe’s new nationalist parties: ‘Letter to England: For Tommy Robinson’, by the American versifier Joseph Charles MacKenzie.

Tommy Robinson poetry

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Tommy Robinson and the rise of the new extremists

Other people’s worries are no different from yours. Just as you worry about how to pay the bills, and wonder where you will be in five years, so do extremists. You give them an unwarranted respect if you imagine them to be solely motivated by their ‘ideals’ such as they are. Think instead about the importance of earning a living: the politics of having enough brass to put food on the table. The most mundane reason why communists and fascists did not prosper in the 20th century has nothing to do with the supposed moderation of the British national character and everything to do with money. If you wanted to dedicate your life to the far left or far right, there were few ways to earn a living.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Cologne exposes a crisis in our continent, yet parliament is debating Donald Trump

Europe is going through a period of radical change, but it is facing this with a process of radical self-distraction. Unwilling to face up to our problems we obsess over the responses to those problems. There have been some startling recent examples. As the whole world now knows, on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, dozens of German women were sexually assaulted, apparently by some of that country's more recent arrivals. For days the media across Europe declined to even report the story. It was only because of new media that the story began to get out at all.

Thursday

Nick Cohen

The curious case of Mo Ansar

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_15_May_2014_v4.mp3" title="Douglas Murray and Haras Rafiq discuss how Mo Ansar came to prominence" startat=1154] Listen [/audioplayer]If a curious stranger asked you to name a British Muslim commentator, I guess you would name Mo Ansar. So omnipresent has he become, he seems at times to be Britain’s only Muslim commentator. ‘Mo Ansar: Open for business,’ read his first tweet on 8 August 2011, and business has been rolling in ever since. Ansar understands better than most that if you want to exploit the media you must always be available to harassed researchers on rolling news programmes. ‘He invented himself as a rent-a-quote commentator,' says the LBC broadcaster Iain Dale.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

‘When Tommy met Mo’ revealed how far we have to travel before Islamism is uprooted

Last night the BBC screened a documentary called ‘When Tommy met Mo’. It was good television, challenging and thought-provoking in a way that public broadcasting ought to be, is often said to be, but too rarely is. I would urge you to watch it. The programme followed Tommy Robinson during the period in which he was stepping away from the organisation – the English Defence League (EDL) – which he founded. It showed Robinson travelling around the country with a Muslim ‘spokesman’ called Mohammed Ansar.

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 podcast: is climate change good, Tommy Robinson and another Tory/Lib Dem pact

Are there any upsides to climate change? On this week's View from 22 podcast, author and columnist Matt Ridley discusses the economic impact of global warming with Fraser Nelson, and whether there are any benefits to a rise in temperatures. Will there be a tipping point for disastrous effects? Are we taking the right precautions to deal with that point? Douglas Murray also looks at his encounter with ex-English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, and what lies ahead for the far-right movement in Britain. Will the EDL wither away without Robinson? And are all far right parties finished in this country? Plus, Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth examine the prospects for another Conservative coalition with the Lib Dems and the problem of too many Tory red lines.

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind: For now, I’m choosing to believe in Tommy Robinson’s conversion

I’ve often thought it might be interesting to meet Tommy Robinson, or Stephen Lennon, or whatever one is supposed to call the erstwhile English Defence League frontman these days. Because, well, he’s not an idiot, is he? Or at least, not to the extent you’d like him to be. And it bugged me. I remember seeing him up against Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight a few years ago. Yes, he fell into bear-traps, quite a few of which he’d dug himself, and yes, he said more than a few things that any mainstream politician would have been crucified for, and rightly. But at core, there was something there with which Paxman simply couldn’t cope at all. This was an eloquent, white working-class voice, airing white working-class concerns.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Tommy Robinson: Zionist puppet, Neocon Fraud and Wahhabist Stooge.

If you ever want a laugh, read the websites of Britain's collection of far-right political groupings. It is worth doing so if only to remind yourself that the "threat" from right-wing extremists is often rather exaggerated. These people's relationship with reality is neither firm enough to threaten public order nor coherent enough to win them more than a (relative) handful of deluded followers. Keep an eye on them, by all means, but let's not make them out to be more than they are. After all, whenever the far-right does enjoy some success that success quickly evaporates. The public, when it has a chance to see these people for what they really are, tends to disapprove of the cut of their respective jibs. And rightly so.

Ed West

Did the Catholic Church get to Tommy Robinson?

I met Stephen Lennon/Tommy Robinson once, in Luton. Dreadful place – I’d wear a niqab just to reduce my view of the appalling architecture (like in Birmingham, the hub of the town is a shopping centre surrounded by a sort of ring road). I never liked the organisation’s tactics, nor am I completely sure of what their aims were, but as Lennon described it – of people openly recruiting for the Taliban while his classmates were off in the Army – the anger was understandable. In Luton, in particular, the Labour government also funded mosques in a way that was bound to lead to resentment among the white working class.