The Latest Lies from Tommy Robinson

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Tommy Robinson at Speaker’s Corner. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

2,208 words

Czech version here [2]

The latest lie in the ongoing Tommy Robinson saga came in the form of a report that he has been moved from a prison with a smaller Muslim population to one that is “seventy-one percent Muslim,” the implication being that the British government is intentionally trying to get Tommy killed by placing him among populations that will do their dirty work for them. The claim appears to have originated from Caolan Robertson [3], Tommy’s “manager.” 

Given the dishonesty in his advocates’ initial coverage of the stunt that got him arrested [4], I found myself skeptical of this claim, and decided to see if I could find any more plausible explanation. If you haven’t read that original essay [4], please do so now.

Tommy’s advocates would have us believe that all hope for formally administered justice in the UK is lost—why? Because Schrödinger’s Muslim is never arrested for his crimes, unless someone like Tommy steps in to help. According to them, this is why we shouldn’t judge Tommy for his recent stunt, even if it did risk endangering this and future trials.  [4]Yet somehow, when Tommy goes to jail, Schrödinger’s Muslim is already there in vast numbers, ready to threaten him with murder.

What gives? Is Schrödinger’s Muslim imprisoned for his crimes or not? As I pointed out in my last essay on this incident, they most certainly are [4]. Official UK statistics show us that a whopping three-quarters of imprisoned child molesters in the UK are Muslim.

Has the system failed at times? Yes. Should we angry about that? Yes. Should we seek to ensure that it never happens again? Yes. But it still works more often than not—and Tommy’s stunt really did make a successful trial less likely. This is why he doesn’t deserve our support. Short-sighted and counter-productive actions don’t deserve our sympathy, and we should be angry when we are treated as suckers, such as when Robinson feigns bewilderment and surprise after clearly communicating that he knows what he is doing will get him arrested. [4]

So the claim that the State has whipped up some false pretext to arrest Tommy Robinson purely for the purposes of silencing him is ridiculous. Tommy was arrested for exactly this same thing in a previous trial already—and if the British establishment were simply out to get him at all costs, it would have thrown him in jail for the full sentence after that first offense. It didn’t. Instead, the State let him go—with a warning not to do it again. Tommy went and did it again. Thus, if he is a victim, he is only a victim of his own stupidity. More likely, the real victims are those who fell for the stunt and are now pitching in donations, marching in the streets, and risking injury and arrest over a lie. Perhaps Robinson simply learned how profitable a prison sentence can be after crowdfunding appeals during his previous arrests [5].

All of this makes me quite suspicious when the same people are telling me that the State is now out to throw Tommy in with as many Muslims as possible just to get him killed. Again, if that were their intent, why did they not even make him serve his sentence the last time he was convicted of the very same crime? It beggars belief.

Let me be clear about the fact that none of this is officially confirmed—the State is prohibited from publicizing the specific details of the case. This is simply the result of my own digging. However, it appears that Tommy Robinson was relocated from one prison to another in order to move him closer to his family. Robinson was arrested in Leeds. He was then held in a prison in Hull, about an hour’s drive east of Leeds. Leeds and Hull (source [6]) are part of the northern half of England (known to Brits as “the North”), in a region known as Yorkshire and the Humber. Robinson and his family live in Luton (source [7]), which is in England’s South, about an hour north of London.

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The reports claim that Robinson was moved to “somewhere in the East Midlands,” though no specific city can officially be named [6]. Plugging these locations into Google Maps, Hull is about three hours’ drive from Luton [9]. The part of the East Midlands that’s farthest from Luton is Derbyshire. The closest point is Northamptonshire. Derbyshire is only two hours away [10], while the distance between Luton and Northamptonshire is about fifty minutes.  [11]Ergo: Tommy Robinson was moved to a prison that is one to two hours closer to his home. This is a far more likely purpose for the relocation.

Interestingly enough, the original comment made by Caolan Robertson was, “We’ve found the statistics of the prison, it’s about seventy-one percent Muslim. Really, really, really disastrous. The last one was close to two percent.”

The reference to “finding the statistics” was clearly supposed to convey that they were in possession of officially collected, cold, hard statistics on the makeup of inmates at the prison. But the claim quickly fell apart, because there are no prisons anywhere in the whole UK where Muslims are seventy-one percent of prisoners. Overall, Muslims are about six percent of the British population and about fifteen percent of its prison population. When exempting children and only taking into account the population over the age of 15, this is an overrepresentation of nearly four times. When the claim was disproven, Caolan backtracked to claiming that Tommy Robinson had merely said that the prisoners on his particular wing “looked to be about” seventy percent Muslim. [12]

But this was an obviously dishonest move. You just don’t talk about “finding statistics” by accident. And who eyeballs a group of people and then throws out a number as specific as “seventy-one percent,” anyway? [13] These people think you’re stupid. You should be angry about that.[1] [13]

As it turns out [14], 7.4 percent of Hull Prison’s 1,062 prisoners are Muslim, for a total of 79. While we don’t know to where in the Midlands Robinson was moved, the only candidate to be named by the individuals pushing paranoia about this so far is HMP Leicester. 14.3 percent of Leicester’s 308 prisoners are Muslim, for a total of 44. If Robinson was moved from Hull Prison to HMP Leicester, then the total number of Muslims around him was nearly cut in half.

Another piece of disinformation floating around in our circles is the fact that Kevin Crehan, the British man sentenced to a year in jail for wrapping bacon around the door handles of local mosques and posting “No Mosques” flyers nearby, was killed by Muslims in prison halfway through his twelve-month sentence. This story [15], which does not even mention his cause of death, has been endlessly shared on social media as “proof” that Tommy Robinson is in danger of being murdered by Muslims.

It turns out, though, that Crehan died from a methadone overdose [16]. The other three perpetrators who were arrested along with him, including his wife and two other individuals, one male and one female, all served their four- to nine-month sentences and made it out unscathed. So far as I’m aware, there isn’t a single precedent for someone being murdered by Muslims in jail in the UK.

I’d like to end on a note making it clear I have no sympathy with the Left just because we both agree that this was a bad move on Tommy Robinson’s part. A year ago, I wrote an essay entitled “Bad Apples [17].” Its thesis was that the Left’s idea is that diversity is fundamentally, intrinsically good. Our idea is that diversity is fundamentally, intrinsically a cause of ineradicable, subliminal conflict that will always resurface in human affairs—like a beach ball that has to be constantly pushed under the surface of the water in order to be kept out of view.

Thus: the Left’s bad apples undermine the Leftist thesis, and prove our point for us. But our bad apples also undermine the Leftist thesis and prove our point for us, too. What makes it possible for someone like Tommy Robinson to gain mass support and cause civil unrest through fraudulent stunts like this?

The answer is: D I V E R S I T Y [17].

Pushing radically different people into the same country and then punishing them when they realize they don’t get along very well is like a zoo deciding to put cats and dogs into the same cage together and then rushing in to beat the animals whenever one of them growls at one of the others. As long as you have cats and dogs in the same cage, you’re going to have needless violence that could be avoided if the cats and dogs were simply each given their own space. And as long as you insist that diversity is to be promoted at all costs, you’re going to have things like ethnic-predatory rape gangs [18] and you’re going to have figures like Tommy Robinson profiting from and funneling peoples’ frustration away from it.

To make sure I hedge my bets here, there is at least one way that there could be some truth to Caolan’s claim: if he was moved to HMP Olney. Olney is in the East Midlands, and about thirty minutes from Tommy Robinson’s home in Luton. While I can’t find exact numbers, it looks like HMP Olney can hold more than seven hundred prisoners, and as many as thirty percent of them might be Muslim. This could give HMP Olney more than two hundred Muslim prisoners, and Olney does indeed have more problems with violence and drugs [19] than other prisons as a result. But I’m not holding my breath until I find out that this is what’s happened.

Finally, before anyone claims we ought to endorse lies about this for propaganda purposes, I want to know exactly what you think the play should be. Exactly what would lying about this help us achieve that we can’t achieve while telling the truth?

Currently, the only thing this is causing people to do is to donate to Tommy Robinson and call for his release. Neither of these two things helps us. Is the idea that if we said nice things about Tommy, they’d give us clicks and donations? If that were our motivation, we could just sell out to Conservatism, Inc. and call it a day.

On the other hand, if you think the group marching on Tommy’s behalf is really ready to begin The Revolution, exactly what do you think this is going to look like? What is the revolution you think they’re going to achieve, and what specific steps do you think they’re going to take to achieve it?

More importantly, if you really believe this, do you think it’s so fragile that a handful of articles are going to prevent it from happening?

I’ll tell you the specifics of my strategy.

First of all, rewarding bad moves that prioritize publicity over real achievements harms us all, which is why it deserves to be fought. Specifically, it creates incentives that will be felt by everyone in our entire movement: take real action in order to tangibly help Rotherham victims, and you’ll be ignored and forgotten. Hijack this issue without actually doing anything about it, and then risk actual harm to the victims in an act of self-promotion, and you’ll be handsomely rewarded with fame and funding.

Case in point: It was the efforts of the British National Party over fifteen years ago that caused action to finally be taken to bring the cases to light. Specifically, Marlene Guest worked tirelessly towards this end and devoted the last years of her life to the case. [20] And yet, as recounted by David Yorkshire, formerly of the BNP, at Mjolnir [21], Tommy Robinson’s EDL was antagonistic towards the BNP from Day One. Now he commits actions that pose a threat to the successes that the BNP’s efforts achieved, and his supporters argue that we shouldn’t care because achieving success “within the system” is impossible, anyway.

If the BNP had followed that mentality, the perpetrators of Rotherham never would have seen a day in court in the first place. Thankfully, the BNP didn’t, and consequently the perpetrators did. There are people out there who have more intelligence, due diligence, and integrity than to fall for these types of claims. The people we alienate by endorsing dishonesty are the best among us.

Instead of alienating them, my goal is to send up a signal flare to let them know that there’s a place where they are both welcome and necessary. And it’s inevitable that if we can get all of the best people in one place, then the following steps will all fall into place.

Many of them are already here. So let’s keep collecting them.

Note

[1] [22] Of course, while backtracking from the very clear, explicit claim that they “found statistics on the prison,” Caolan changed the number from seventy-one to seventy percent. He changed the rest of the story to sound more plausible: seventy-one percent looks like a hard statistic and seventy percent looks like merely an observation a person could make. So while this may not be as bad a lie as I made it sound, it is still just as obviously a lie.