How Tommy Robinson gained extraordinary influence

LIVESTREAMING FROM the passenger seat of a car in San Diego, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, breathlessly described the past year. Twelve months ago he was in solitary confinement, having been found in contempt of court for repeatedly libelling a Syrian schoolboy. In September, he claimed, he brought 1m people onto the streets of London for a rally (police say it was 150,000), beaming in a speech by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Despite criminal convictions he was allowed into America, visiting the State Department, which had given him a waiver, hobnobbing with congressmen and touring podcasts to warn that radical Islam was changing Britain. On May 16th he will be back home to hold “the biggest patriotic gathering [the] country has ever seen”.

Mainstream politicians shun him and commentators dismiss him as “marginal”. He is too toxic even for Nigel Farage, the right-wing populist who leads Reform UK. A survey for The Economist by More in Common suggested that only 14% of Britons have a positive view of Mr Robinson (though YouGov, another pollster, finds that 29% of British men like him, up from 9% in 2021). He is brazen about his bigotry, posting messages implying that Muslims poison dogs in parks, and is accused of grift: during his libel case he admitted losing £100,000 ($136,000) gambling while collecting donations from supporters (though Mr Robinson insists that the money came from a property sale and donations never go to him personally).

Yet in many ways it is irrelevant what the mainstream thinks. Backed by rich American donors, for over a decade Mr Robinson has sold a distorted vision of Britain that has gone global: the cautionary tale of a nation overrun by “Islamic invaders” (Muslims are 6.5% of the population in England and Wales, roughly double the 2001 rate), its people silenced by a woke liberal elite. Efforts to deplatform him have backfired. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former strategist, has called him the “backbone” of Britain. Mr Musk pays his legal fees.

At home Mr Robinson has what politicians would die for: better name recognition than almost any cabinet minister, and the ability to mobilise supporters. His rally in September was the largest organised by the far-right in British history. According to More in Common, some 48% of Britons believe the Muslim population is changing society in mostly negative ways, suggesting that even if the public don’t like him many agree with some of his ideas (see chart).

Mr Robinson is a case study of how political influence is changing. For a long time the idea of Britain as the place that once stood alone against fascism seemed an insurmountable obstacle to the far right. After the second world war protesters heckled Oswald Mosley, who had led the British Union of Fascists, as the “senile Führer”. The British National Party failed to make an electoral dent in the 2010s. In 2009 Mr Robinson co-founded the English Defence League (EDL), a football-hooligan-inspired street movement with the slogan “not racist, not violent, just no longer silent”, only for it to fail when it was infiltrated by neo-Nazis.

Then he found a new way to cut through. In 2017 he got a job making videos for Rebel Media, a far-right Canadian news site, rebranding himself as a “citizen journalist”. Today two-thirds of people around the world consume social videos for news.

His dispatches soon went viral: bellicose broadcasts from the scene of a terrorist attack in London, an anti-migrant protest in east Germany, a scuffle with a migrant in Rome. One of his early backers was Robert Shillman, a right-wing American tech mogul whose other beneficiaries include Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist close to Mr Trump; Geert Wilders, a populist-right Dutch politician; and Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist who was assassinated last year.

Mr Robinson combined his transatlantic connections with a new identity: free-speech martyr. Last year America’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, shocked allies when he suggested that the demise of free speech in Europe, and especially Britain, was a bigger threat than Russia. Yet the issue had first attracted MAGA attention in 2018, when a judge jailed Mr Robinson for disrupting a trial involving the grooming of white British girls by Asian men.

Sam Brownback, then the American ambassador for religious freedom, raised concerns about his case with the British ambassador; Tucker Carlson proclaimed that Britain had become a “shadow of the nation that gave us freedom of speech”. Some 40% of the millions of tweets bearing the hashtag #FreeTommy came from America. The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who funded his libellous documentary about the Syrian school boy, would later describe him as one of the world’s “most famous political prisoner[s]”.

The biggest amplifier of all arrived when Mr Musk bought Twitter, rebranding it as X in 2023. He restored Mr Robinson’s account and spread his message to a vast new audience. When an immigrant killed a British dog walker, Mr Musk compared the native English to the hobbits of Tolkien’s shires, and warned that they would “surely all die” without “hard men” like Mr Robinson to defend them. Over the new year in 2024-25, Mr Musk posted nearly 200 times about grooming gangs, claiming that Mr Robinson had been jailed for “telling the truth” about them.

The establishment is partly to blame for Mr Robinson’s success. Surveys by Ipsos show that out of a list of issues, people in England and Wales feel most obliged to self-censor on transgender issues, race, religious extremism and immigration. Authorities have ignored evidence of systematic child abuse in several English towns out of fear of appearing racist, and continue to dodge questions about perpetrators’ ethnicity by failing to record it in crime statistics. Research by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford found that working-class Brits often feel misrepresented by the news (only 12% of journalists are from a working-class background like Mr Robinson’s). Trust in the government and the media are at or near record lows, creating a vacuum for Mr Robinson to fill.

Like Reform, he has benefited from other “considerable unforced errors” by politicians, notes Daniel Trilling, author of “If We Tolerate This”, a book about the far right. Net migration peaked after Britons had voted for Brexit; the economy remains stagnant. According to Gallup, no other western European country saw a greater fall in satisfaction with public services and infrastructure between 2011 and 2023.

Into this fertile ground, enter social media. Olivia Brown of the University of Bath notes that around 10% of users create about 97% of political content on social-media platforms: a “funhouse mirror” of public opinion, reflecting real attitudes in exaggerated, contorted form. In a recent paper Dr Brown and Ed Harrison show how Reform, which dismissed mass deportations as a “political impossibility” in 2024, shifted its position within a year. An argument first made by far-right accounts travelled through adjacent networks and into the accounts of more moderate conservative influencers. X functioned as an engine for pushing the Overton window of acceptable policy.

Mr Robinson’s influence is greatest when his audience is already primed for outrage. After an attacker stabbed and killed girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, Mr Robinson tweeted incessantly from Cyprus—“Stoking Race Riots from his Sunbed”, as a Daily Mail front page put it. While Mr Farage mostly kept quiet, in one weekend 268 posts from Mr Robinson racked up 160m views. On Telegram, another social-media app, he posted messages like: “What will it take for you to be angry enough to do something about this?” Though he denies inciting the riots, and says he called for them to stop, protesters marched through the streets singing his name.

There are limits to Mr Robinson’s reach. The MAGA media ecosystem which nourishes him is fracturing. And though Mr Farage and Mr Robinson need one another—the former to make his views look moderate, the latter to mainstream his—there are signs that Mr Robinson’s indirect influence over Reform harms it. He has a positive approval rating with people who voted Reform in 2024 but a negative one with new voters, who have put the party top of the polls. He remains electoral poison.

Mr Robinson knows this. Instead of standing for office, he speaks of using “culture and identity” to draw the disillusioned into politics. On May 16th organisers hope for more families than hooligans: “No masks, no excessive alcohol, be peaceful and respectful,” warns a flyer. He hopes that politicians will pick up his ideas. When Mr Farage talks of “two-tier policing”, the notion that white Britons are policed more harshly than minorities, he is echoing language first used by Mr Robinson’s relative and EDL co-founder Kevin Carroll. When Robert Jenrick, a Tory who has since defected to Reform, filmed a foray into a migrant camp in France, his could have been one of Mr Robinson’s old clips. Last May, a centre-left prime minister spoke of an “island of strangers”. Mr Robinson’s world is closer than you think.■