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| Tommy Robinson, né Stephen Yaxley-Lennon |
“Going to prison was the best thing that ever happened to me,” declares Tommy Robinson. I am sitting in a hotel bar in Luton town centre, listening to him explain why he has quit the English Defence League. Before his imprisonment he had been receiving death threats from Islamists, and neo-Nazis were threatening to take over the EDL. As a result, he says, he was “drinking alcohol, going out three times a week, neglecting my wife. I thought I was dealing with the pressures of the English Defence League, but I was pretty much just bingeing my way through it.”
Short and stocky, like a welterweight grown pudgy between bouts, Robinson speaks with an understated manner that belies the intensity of his words. In January he was jailed for travelling to meet American EDL supporters in New York using somebody else’s passport, and spent eighteen weeks in solitary confinement after running into trouble with Muslim gangs on the inside. Those long hours in his cell were, he says, his first opportunity since 2009 to take stock. “And that’s when I started to question, where’s the EDL going? Because, you know, we march up and down this country, but what is it we want to get out of it? And how do we succeed?”
Multiple identities are a theme of Robinson’s career to date. His real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon; he adopted the alias “Tommy Robinson” in the early days of the EDL as protection, he says, against reprisals from Muslims. To many, he is little more than a cut-price demagogue in designer clobber who has spent four-and-a-half years inciting hatred against Muslims with his menacing and often violent rallies. To others, he is a misunderstood liberal unafraid of trampling cultural sensitivities while speaking up for “British values”. He now says he wants to become an advocate for moderation and dialogue by working with Quilliam, an anti-extremism think[-] tank. If he does so, it will be his most audacious transformation yet. » | Matt Rowland Hill | Friday, October 18, 2013
