Money for Nothing, Jail for Free

At the end of October, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, began an eighteen-month jail sentence, following contempt proceedings for breach of an injunction. This is the fifth time Robinson has been sentenced to prison since he began to play a leading role in the far right including – the moment that brought him to worldwide attention – his imprisonment for ten months in 2018 for breaching reporting restrictions on a trial in Leeds.

Following his imprisonment six years ago, more than half a million people (including fifty thousand in the US and a similar number in Australia) signed a petition calling for Robinson’s release. The signatories included Katie Hopkins in the UK and Alex Jones of InfoWars in the US. Sam Brownback, the Trump-appointed US ambassador for international religious freedom, lobbied the British ambassador in Washington to demand Robinson’s release. His imprisonment at that time also led to the largest sustained wave of far-right street protests in British history, with between fifteen and thirty thousand of his supporters repeatedly turning out – more than ever marched for any of his predecessors.

Robinson’s most recent imprisonment, like his previous difficulties, was shaped by his relationship to social media. For nearly a decade, Robinson has been trying to present himself as a citizen journalist, making films for broadcast on social media. His films benefits from the general rightward lean of YouTube, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), their encouragement of the sensational and Elon Musk’s policy of welcoming Trump supporters and all kinds of conspiracy theorists since he took over Twitter. Robinson has a million followers on X, five times as many as Kemi Badenoch.

He receives personal donations from his followers totalling up to £10,000 per month. This success, however, has produced its own difficulties – to keep the money coming in, he must generate enough new content with him at its centre to satisfy his audience and stop their attention wandering to newer, younger rivals on the right.

In November 2018, Robinson published a video on social media concerning a 15-year-old refugee, Jamal Hijazi, who had been hurt in a fight at his West Yorkshire school. Robinson’s film made unfounded allegations that Hijazi was ‘not innocent and he violently attacks young English girls in his school’. The film was viewed a million times. Because of it, Hijazi suffered an extraordinary volume of abuse. He had to abandon his education. His family were obliged to flee their home. Hijazi sued Robinson for libel and won. At the end of the trial in 2021, the judge made an order restricting Robinson from repeating the lies.

At the beginning of 2023, Robinson began making new films that repeated the original libels. By summer 2024, he was building a new street movement around them. On 26 July, he held a march through central London which ended with the showing of a film to his supporters, repeating the old allegations. Thirty thousand people watched in Trafalgar Square, and up to half a million people followed the livestream online. Robinson was summoned to a contempt of court hearing but instead left the country, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Three days later, the news broke of the Southport stabbings. The people who had attended Robinson’s march took part in the worst race riots Britain has witnessed since 1919. After the riots, a story leaked that the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, was considering a ban on the English Defence League. The EDL, the group through which Robinson first came to prominence, hasn’t marched since 2013. But the story shows how the networks which Robinson’s supporters have created can be repurposed, renamed and used to do harm.

On Friday, 25 October, Robinson returned to England and handed himself in at Folkestone police station, where he was separately charged with failing to provide the PIN to his mobile phone under anti-terror laws which enable police or border officials to demand access to people’s devices (he is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court in relation to this on 13 November). Robinson must have known he faced jail but gambled that a further period of imprisonment would produce more of the publicity that had boosted him in 2018.

On Saturday, 26 October, rival far-right and TUC-backed marches held the opposite sides of Whitehall. Robinson’s supporters chanted ‘We Want Tommy Out’ and held up banners calling for the release of the ‘political prisoners’ jailed after the Southport riots.

On the other side of the road, anti-racists made patient arguments in favour of the right to flee persecution and against all forms of racism.

On Monday, 28 October, the High Court heard an application by Jamal Hijazi’s lawyers to commit Robinson to prison for his breaches of the injunction. After weeks of insisting on his innocence and demanding funds from his supporters to fight the law, Robinson admitted the breach – an argument that found little favour with the judge.

In 2018, Robinson was at the head of a rising movement. The fantasy that he was confronting an all-powerful, vengeful cultural left that need to be resisted in the name of free speech fitted well with the way the global far right liked to see itself – as a movement of critics and dissidents. Six years later, circumstances have moved on. Right-wing politicians across the globe, including the next president of the United States, are now calling for people who disagree with them to be jailed. The cultural politics are different: the right doesn’t want martyrs to ‘free speech’ but their own prisons with their enemies languishing inside them.