Tommy Robinson: Guilty of Being White and Working-Class

‘… it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!” 

But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot’ 

‘Tommy’, by Rudyard Kipling

The hatred directed at Tommy Robinson shows that today’s left is a classist clique, living like feudal lords off voters they think of as vassals, and whose votes to them are mere feu duties.

I was 39 years a Labour Party member, joining in May 1978 just before my fifteenth birthday, – fifteen being Labour’s official minimum joining age back then. In the late 1970s, Labour was still a substantially working-class party at its grass roots; even in Parliament, albeit to a lesser extent. According to a 2022 study entitled ‘Social Background of MPs 1979-2019’ (available online from the House of Commons Library), sixteen percent of all MPs elected in 1979 were former manual workers. By 2019 though, that number had dropped to just four percent. A whopping 32 percent  however, were already in politics or closely-related occupations such as journalists, trade union officials, party hacks or professional lobbyists. Many were researchers for other MPs before they became MPs themselves. In other words, a large proportion of MPs, Labour more than most, have never had a proper job.

Right from the start of my Labour membership, I heard and saw things that made me question how much Labour really adhered to its supposed ideals. For all the posturing, racism was everyday casual. Helping out in Geoff Lofthouse’s Pontefract and Castleford by-election campaign in October 1978, I was shocked to hear one comrade describe another in his absence as being “as thick as a nigger’s bottom lip.” In my own branch, Swillington near Leeds, an elderly lady member regularly voiced opinions of black people that even the then National Front führer John Tyndall might have been too embarrassed to enunciate. But she was tolerated. Nobody ever called her out on it. She paid her subs and displayed our posters at election time, and in any case, the branch had no black members to take offence. Swillington was and remains an overwhelmingly white Leeds suburb.

Worse than the casual racism was the proprietorial attitude of many Labour activists towards their voters, and Labour’s own internal class system. Ironically for a party born of a desire to raise the living standards of the poorest and least powerful in society, Labour is possibly the most classist of all the mainstream parties when it comes to its own members. The Fabian Society in particular have always seen themselves as Labour’s intellectual caste. This was noticeable in the 1980s Leeds District Labour Party, with an enormous cultural divide between the managerial and educationalist types on the one hand, and the true working-class members on the other. Sure, the white collars were always careful to keep on side those whose support they knew they would need to further their political careers, but their patronising of the blue collars was palpable to anyone attuned to the subtle nuances. One Leeds Labour councillor I remember summed up their attitude towards Labour voters thus, “They either vote for us forever, or are too thick and lazy to vote at all.” As we see now though, Tommy Robinson’s message has more resonance with the working class than anything Labour has had to say since 1945. And that, more than anything else, makes him Labour’s Public Enemy Number One.

Labour likes to think of itself as the enlightened party, always willing to see the best in people and always willing to give another chance. To be fair, I have known many Labourites that have had a genuine concern for the rehabilitation of reformed former offenders. The late Lord Longford, who I never met or knew personally, epitomised the forgiving and reforming Christian Socialist tradition. I’ve met many more like him, every bit as genuine, hardworking and sincere, albeit much less famous and thankfully less gullible. Labour also likes to think of itself as the party of women’s and LGBT rights. Again, to be fair, it has arguably been the most progressive of all the main parties in that regard. Considering all that then, you might think Labour would embrace a man who speaks out against an ideology that promotes the murder of its own disobedient female adherents, the rape and exploitation of other females not subscribing to it, and the execution of those whose sexual preferences it considers an affront to God. Here, though, is where it all falls apart for Labour. They can never embrace Tommy Robinson, because those he is accusing of heinous crimes are overwhelmingly Labour voters. So heavily does Labour now rely on Muslim votes that the prospect of alienating the Islamofascist oppressors of women, gays, and lesbians, petrifies the party to its core.

The left, therefore, will never give Tommy a second chance. For him there is no possibility of redemption. Most Labour figures, with a few honourable exceptions, were silent over the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, and Muslim MP Naz Shah even retweeted and liked a tweet from what she obviously did not realise was a parody account of the journalist Owen Jones, saying “those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of #diversity.” When it comes to Tommy Robinson though, they will harp on forever about his conviction for mortgage fraud and his history of violence. To be sure he has been no angel, but let us take a closer and objective look at his past.

Tommy Robinson was convicted of mortgage fraud in 2013. I do not condone fraud of any kind by anyone. What I will say is that there are degrees and types of mortgage fraud, and Tommy Robinson appears to have been unlucky. Despite the fact that no lender lost any money, he was jailed and made the subject of a ruinous confiscation order. However, anyone who knows anything about the pre-2008 mortgage market knows that there were no bigger proponents of mortgage fraud than the banks and building societies themselves. They actively encouraged the kind of behaviour that later got Robinson convicted. It is also worth saying that no single ethnic group has been more guilty of mortgage fraud than British Pakistani Muslims, though you’ll never get the figures out of the lenders to prove it. Like the police and politicians with the rape gangs, the banks and building societies are scared to publish the facts for fear of being called racist. I shall write more on that in a future article.

Tommy Robinson was also a young football hooligan, of which he makes no secret. Like most but not all in that sub-culture, he has aged out of it. I do not defend thuggery. Quite a few of my school friends of the 1970s became violent members of the Leeds United ‘Service Crew,’ ‘one of the most notorious hooligan firms in the history of English football,’ according to Wikipedia. It seemed insane to me at the time and still does, but we are, as the late MP Alan Clark said of the hooligan problem, “a martial race.” I would not encourage anyone to spend their leisure time beating the living daylights out of others, but we’ve relied on Tommies just like Tommy to duff up our monarchs’ enemies for the last thousand years at least, and when the chips are down, one man of Tommy Robinson’s ability is more use than hundred Owen Jones’s. As Kipling said in Tommy, ‘it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot’

Finally, there are his more recent assaults. The Guardian News YouTube channel has footage of him punching a man to the ground outside a football stadium, when England were playing in Portugal. What the Guardian did not report, no surprise, is that the man whom he punched later admitted that he and his friends had earlier been harassing and verbally abusing Tommy Robinson unprovoked, and that he therefore made no complaint to the police. Robinson also headbutted a BNP member who tried to infiltrate the EDL. Headbutts are not Parliamentary language, but fringe street politics is something else. Twice in my years of Labour activism I was assaulted by members of the far right in Leeds, the first an NF supporter in 1979, the second a BNP supporter in 1982. On both occasions, they started it, but I finished it. I bet the Guardian wishes it had some footage of me that it could selectively edit as it has edited the footage of Tommy Robinson. Methinks, though, that the Guardianistas protest too much. They of all people should recall Leon Trotsky’s Letter to the French League Communiste of March 2, 1934, in which Trotsky encouraged his fellow Communists to give fascists ‘a good beating’ and said that they should ‘grab every fascist … by their collars, acquaint them with the pavement… and … leave them with a few good black and blue marks.’ 

So, Tommy once nutted a Nazi. Big deal. So once did I. Trotsky would have approved. Tommy Robinson is a working-class hero, but he is one who won’t follow the failed multiculturalist script. And that is his downfall. Because the effete bien-pensants of today’s left hate nothing more than a working-class white man who thinks for himself, and who, worse still, refuses to be their vassal.

(Photograph: Anything Goes With James English, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Neil F. Liversidge is an Independent Financial Adviser running his own firm in Castleford, West Riding Personal Financial Solutions Ltd, www.wrpfs.com. For 39 years until 2017 he was a member of the Labour Party. A Brexiteer, he voted Conservative in 2019 and is now a member of Reform UK, the New Culture Forum, and the Free Speech Union.

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