“Are you non-violent then?” my colleague asked. “Yeah, we are non-violent,” the then leader of the extreme-right English Defence League (EDL), Tommy Robinson, replied. “So, when you just said when the mic was off that if there are Muslim extremists outside the university campus next year, that ‘you’d kick their heads in’, do you stand by that?” I gulped. I tried to hold the microphone steady. It was a freezing day in December 2010, and BBC journalist Phil Kemp and I were sitting inside Robinson’s black SUV in a car park in Luton. “I do personally stand by that,” he said. “I’m not going to stand there and watch extremists recruit my youth in my town. Not any more.”
Phil and I had spent the morning in the Bedfordshire town for a BBC Radio 4 documentary. Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly had recently detonated two bombs in Stockholm; he had studied in Luton and was living there at the time of the bombings. This was the latest in a line of links between the area and terrorist activity dating back to the 1990s.
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