Is Tommy Robinson a Political Prisoner?

Who is Tommy?

Tommy Robinson is a working-class man from Luton, a town near London. For years he has devoted himself to denouncing the mass child-rape by gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men, known euphemistically as 'grooming gangs', in fifty cities in the UK.

The 'Grooming Gangs'

They have been operating for decades, undisturbed by local authorities and police, scared of being accused of "racism". The victims are in the tens of thousands. Vulnerable, under-age (even 11), English, white, working-class girls, lured and ensnared with small gifts or favours by the gang members, then drugged, raped, passed around, and set up as prostitutes. Not only white, also other ethnicities, Indian, Sikh, Hindu, in any case non-Muslim.

Andrew Norfolk, a journalist on The Times, also ran stories on this scandal. There were official reports on some cases in some towns. There have been some prosecutions and convictions. However, it was not only local authorities who 'covered up' or minimised these nefarious activities, failing to stop them. Recently, there was a proposal before the House of Commons to hold a national inquiry into these child-rape gangs. It was voted down on government instructions by all the Labour MPs. Not one of them voted in favour.

The government produced a Home Office Report, which stated:

“Right-wing extremists frequently exploit cases of alleged group-based sexual abuse to promote anti-Muslim sentiment as well as related anti-government and anti-‘political correctness’ narratives."

A government Committee on Islamophobia is now to establish a criminal offence of 'Islamophobia'. Critics say this will re-introduce a blasphemy law into the UK, but only to 'protect' the religious sensitivities of Muslims, not of other religions. Critics of the child-rape gangs, and in particular of the religious affiliations of the perpetrators are very likely to be targeted.

There is already a police system of recording 'Non-Crime Hate Incidents' against a person's name if they post comments on social media which fall foul of perceptions by one of the hundreds of police officers employed to trawl through the millions of posts on social media, that the words used could incite anti-
Muslim sentiments in readers.

One victim of this system was Allison Pearson, who happens to be a well-known columnist on the Daily Telegraph. When she received a visit from two policemen on Remembrance Sunday morning, this caused an uproar. In her case the recording of the 'incident' was erased. But for many others, less famous, this black mark against their names remains. It can lead to a criminal investigation, trial and conviction, under the existing 'Hate Laws', and there are people now in prison because of it. Even if it does not develop into a prosecution, it can mean that a job application is refused.

The Case Against Tommy Robinson

Tommy Robinson is in jail. He is also in solitary confinement, 'for his own protection', since there are many jihadist inmates in the prison he is in, and they want to kill him. His supporters say he has been targeted by the establishment for having denounced not only the child-rape gangs, and the deliberate failure by the local authorities and police to do anything to stop them, but also because he cited the passages in the Holy Koran used by the rapists to justify what they were doing – the same as those used by the terrorists of ISIS when they raped and reduced to sexual slavery the unfortunate Yazidi girls whom they had conquered.

Under Islamic doctrine, every line in the Koran is the literal word of God Himself as dictated to Mohammed by the archangel Gabriel. Drawing attention to this makes it more difficult to explain away the gangs as 'extremists' who are twisting their religion for their own wicked purposes. This casts the whole religion in a very bad light, as a religion not of peace, but of violence and wickedness.

There are 4 million Muslims in the UK with citizenship and voting rights. They make a bloc vote. In the last General Election, if they all voted Labour (and most of them surely did), they would have contributed over 40% of the total Labour vote (9.7 million, 34% of the total votes cast), giving Labour its enormous majority of seats (411, ie 63% of the total seats, thanks to the UK's system of voting).

With this system, in each constituency the candidate who comes first takes the seat, and votes taken by other candidates are binned, ie wasted. This is why the Muslim vote is essential to Labour's supremacy in Parliament, and surely a major reason why the Labour government is now enacting so many Muslim demands.

Other reasons include the weird love affair between the Left (including even feminists, gays and transgenders) and Islam, with Muslims presented as an 'oppressed racial (?) minority' and historic victims of Western 'white colonialism'.

Overpowering media hype depicts Tommy Robinson as a 'right-wing, racist thug'. He is always presented as the 'man who founded the English Defence League, a notorious haven for racist neo-Nazi types'. What they do not say is that while he founded and led the EDL to protest against the child-rape gangs, when he discovered it was being infiltrated by neofascist types such as members of the British National Party, he left it. He sees the problem as a conflict of cultures and belief systems. They wanted to turn it into a race war.

Is Tommy Robinson a Political Prisoner?

Robinson's 18 months' prison sentence was officially for Contempt of court. After he defied a court order to show Silenced, a video he had made, to thousands of his supporters in Trafalgar Square in central London. The court order which had banned the screening of Silenced stemmed from a defamation civil case, brought against him by a 15-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy which Tommy lost, because his witnesses (other children who had been bullied by the Syrian) had been bought off by the school authorities with hefty payments to make them sign NDAs (Non Disclosure Agreements), so they would not testify in court on Tommy's behalf.

This payment of witnesses not to testify is a criminal Perversion of the Course of Justice, but this assertion by Tommy was not investigated by the court or by the police. It was simply ignored! The judge (juries aren't used in civil defamation cases), did not believe the witnesses whom he did manage to bring, but believed the Syrian boy's story. Then he asserted that Tommy's allegations were "false", when they were simply unsupported. The media since then has focussed on Robinson's 'false allegations' against the Syrian, simply to blacken his character.

Robinson has expressed his public support for Nigel Farage's Reform Party. His hundreds of thousands of followers voted for Reform. But Farage himself refuses to support Robinson, completely accepting the mainstream media's view. He has said that Tommy is a "lout," has a string of “criminal convictions as long as your arm” and that he and Reform want “nothing to do with him and his lot”.

Farage has even gone further and said that Tommy has “convictions for violence against women”. This caused an outburst of indignation from Tommy, from his prison cell, who exclaimed that this was not just a slur but an outright lie. Indeed if he had had any convictions for violence against women they would be on the public record, but Farage so far has not cited any. What he says is that Tommy “is not in prison for denouncing the child-rape gangs, but for Contempt of court” - so he is not a political prisoner. Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, has said the same, adding that “We must have faith in British justice”.

Most British people do have, or traditionally have had, faith in British justice. Typically, trial by jury safeguards an innocent defendant. Tommy has never been convicted by a jury. There is a special procedure for 'Contempt of Court', used for a person who disobeys a court order, as in the case against Tommy: the decisions on verdict and sentence are entirely in the hands of a single professional judge. In the defamation case, Tommy's witnesses had been paid not to testify. The order which he then defied was unjust. But he was then prosecuted for 'Contempt'. In this case, exceptionally, the Attorney General - a politician - conducted the prosecution.

This means that Tommy was being prosecuted by the government, for political reasons. So he is a political prisoner.

Enter Elon Musk

Then, at the end of last year the world's richest man, with his enormous media reach, took issue with the prevailing media narrative on Tommy Robinson and with Farage's acceptance of it. Musk says Tommy Robinson is a political prisoner.

Musk is also generously putting his money where his mouth is and paying for a world-class legal team to go and help Tommy. There is certainly a lot for them to get their teeth into, in the conduct of the legal processes that Tommy has been subjected to.

Perhaps they will find a route to appeal against these wrongs...

William Dick

William Dick | Political and Legal Journalist