Mohammed Ansar: My 18 Months with Former EDL Leader Tommy Robinson

Mohammed Ansar and Tommy Robinson

THE GUARDIAN: I'm not sure how much I changed the former far-right leader's views on Islam, but I don't regret making a film with him

Tommy was much shorter than I anticipated. Surrounded by an entourage, huddled in one corner of the green room, he kept shuffling uncomfortably and throwing his shoulders back. He looked like someone who was getting ready for a fight. We didn't make eye contact, but it wasn't long before we were called down to the makeshift studio in the grammar school in Bury. It was April 2012, and it was my first face-to-face meeting with Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), the leader of the English Defence League (EDL). We were appearing on a BBC1 programme called The Big Questions. Little did I know this would be the start of an 18-month journey together that would end with Tommy leaving the EDL.

It's odd the little things I remember about that encounter. It felt almost like an out-of-body experience to sit opposite the leader of the English far right in a television debate. As discussions got under way – I called for the EDL to be proscribed and talked about links between EDL ideology and the Norwegian killer Anders Breivik - I found myself distracted by Tommy's hair. It was slicked to one side as if prepared for a school photo.

Then, as the debate continued, the protests outside the studio seemed to fade and something slightly odd happened. We shared a moment of levity, perhaps humanity. As the presenter, Nicky Campbell, spoke into the camera, Tommy and I looked at each other and cracked up slightly. I'm not sure why, but Twitter noticed. Robinson was no friend of mine, and albeit condemned by people around the world as an enemy to Islam, but suddenly we were kids at the back of the class. » | Mohammed Ansar | Saturday, October 19, 2013

Who Is the Real Tommy Robinson?

Tommy Robinson, né Stephen Yaxley-Lennon

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The former leader of the English Defence League, the organisation he founded in 2009, is a man of multiple identities, finds Matt Rowland Hill

“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