Though we’ve never met, I have a lot in common with Tommy Robinson. I was born just ten months after him, and to an Irish mother, just like him. I grew up in Dunstable, the town conjoined to Tommy’s Luton, as part of the Bedfordshire working class in the 1980s and 1990s. And like Tommy, I had a relatively inauspicious start in life. In fact, he shot ahead of me, gaining an engineering apprenticeship at Luton Airport, while I left school at 16 with no qualifications or prospects.
Though (I think) I never met Tommy, I know his world, and I did meet some of his later collaborators. When I knew him, Paul “Ray” (real name Cinato) was a reformed criminal and self-appointed youth street preacher. Once, around the year 2000, he caught me and my mates with a stolen moped, and we were given the choice of going to church with him or taking a beating (we chose the former). Paul later helped to set up the English Defence League (EDL) with Robinson, and whose ideas it was speculated appeared in the manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right mass murderer.
I’m pleased to say my path has since diverged from that of Tommy and his milieu – though he and I have both done well for ourselves in very different ways. I’ve become an academic, specialising in the study of genocide and mass atrocities. Tommy Robinson, meanwhile, whose personal finances are now the subject of media scrutiny, made himself rich and famous as the chief tribune of the English far right. From the late 2000s through to today, he has arguably been its most important figure: the summer riots proved he is capable of sowing anti-Muslim and anti-migrant discord with a few clicks from his holiday sun-lounger. He is no ordinary thug or activist. He inspires a large, cult-like following – his very name chanted alongside “no surrender to the IRA”, “ten German bombers” and good-old “Ingerlund, Ingerlund” by the crowds that follow him.
Beyond whatever delinquent charisma this is, he has another special trick. With a presentation style often earnest and pleading, he has convinced large portions of the political right that he is the authentic voice of the English working class. For a fawning Jordan Peterson, he is a “working-class leader” and a “genuine working-class guy”. And his Luton background is an irrefutable part of this image. As the conservative commentator Douglas Murray, speaking in conversation with Peterson, put it: “If you grew up in Luton and… you’re white and working class… you’re not allowed to say anything, you can’t do anything, because if you do, [you’ll be] called a racist.” The effect is to naturalise Robinson’s stoking of street violence as a consequence of his background. Fundamental to his authority in the mainstream is Luton; specifically, the Luton of the 2000s, plagued in his account by inter-ethnic conflict and hostile immigrant communities.
It’s worth saying that I readily recognise parts of Robinson’s portrayal. As he has said, “it’s a rough place”. Youth violence and anti-social behaviour, for instance, were quite common and serious problems. An especially scarring personal memory is the brutal murder of a close friend, a beautiful 17-year-old boy called Adam Ganly, in February 2001. Adam was from the Lewsey Farm estate in Luton, and the group of young boys who stabbed and kicked him to death, who I had been middle-school friends with, were from the Downside estate in Dunstable. To the best of my recollection, the fight was over a borrowed chair.
Racism and casual prejudice were common; the “p” word was used casually, to the point that it was not even really considered a bad word, although clearly impolite to use in the company of those of South Asian descent. The large Irish traveller community was also commonly viewed with hostility and suspicion. And drugs, as Robinson may know from his days in the Luton Town MIG football hooligan firm, were everywhere. You grew up quick; pubs were easily accessible from around the age of 15. Binge drinking, fighting, football and the constant pursuit of sex were our generation’s major recreations.
But there is also much that is foreign and peculiar in Robinson’s account, a distorted Luton that is too readily – perhaps as a result of well-meaning class sensitivity – considered as objective. Let’s take a couple of examples. In his recent interview with Peterson, Robinson tells how the “Pakistani Muslim” children at his school sat among themselves during lunch. This may or may not be true. I don’t know, I went to a different school. But when Peterson asks why this was, and Robinson says it was because “the Muslims did not integrate or assimilate”, he neglects to mention quite a bit of context. Though long forgotten now (outside of Luton at least), in 1985, only a few years before Robinson swaggered up to the lunch table, Luton and Millwall fans rioted through Bury Park – the area of town where most of the immigrant population lived – smashing windows and terrifying families and innocent people in their homes.
The violence was so severe that Luton Town were banned from hosting away fans for the next few years. And this event is symbolic of the kind of prejudice and insecurity faced by the second (or even third) generation of youths who, quite understandably, might have felt safer sticking together. In the same discussion, Robinson also codes his prejudice by distinguishing between “English lads” and “Pakistani Muslims”. Let us remind ourselves that like me Robinson holds an Irish passport. He really means “white”, but what his language conveniently elides is that Luton has long been an immigrant town and before many came from the Caribbean, or India, or Bangladesh, they came from Ireland. Robinson forgets the prejudice that this wave of immigrants faced. They too stuck together and largely lived in Bury Park. Their children were considered anything but “English”.
Robinson is able to point to some horrific truths. For instance, he often talks about the Gambino drug gang whose members were mainly descended from Muslim South Asian immigrants. Of course, criminal drugs gangs are not a good thing, but every town and city in the country will have them. Their existence is not indicative of some kind of fundamental incompatibility between Muslims and the rest of the community. And these drug gangs, unpleasant and doubtless violent, did not somehow rule Luton with an iron fist as Robinson implies. Indeed, when Robinson euphemistically tells Peterson he was friends with the “football lads” he is rendering his own youthful activities in more innocent terms than they were. Tommy Robinson was a football hooligan. He was, essentially, a member of a criminally minded (if not criminal per se) gang. With the group engaging in street fights with rival groups, he doubtlessly saw Luton as an ethnically delineated battleground.
But this wasn’t the whole of Luton. I can speak a little bit from experience. When Robinson was on the terraces, I was spending most of my free time at the Shamrock Boxing Club in High Town. Taken under the wing of the legendary Luton boxing trainer Jimmy Turner, I experienced Luton’s diversity in a rather different way. Lads of all ethnic, racial and national origins would congregate and compete here. Often unable to afford both the bus fare, the 90-minute walk from home took me directly through Bury Park, past numerous mosques, markets and fruit-and-veg shops owned by the children of immigrants. I can say that so far as I experienced it, most people in Luton lived peaceably side by side.
Political tensions have arisen in the time since, for instance around the controversial East Anglian regiment homecoming parade in 2009, when largely Muslim crowds protested against British involvement in Iraq. It was these events that set Robinson on the path to forming the EDL. But they can also be interpreted not as a sickness of Luton’s communities but as symptomatic of problems experienced by the UK at large. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were widely seen as illegitimate, and as implicated in a highly problematic late-colonial foreign policy (I say this as a person whose brother served two tours of Afghanistan in the British navy and died by suicide upon his return). Events like this do not stand in evidence, as Robinson claims they do, of a deep incompatibility between the Muslim residents of Luton and everyone else.
Though I’ve not been or felt close to Tommy Robinson for years now, this is where his activities and my current work on political violence have re-collided. England is still in possession of robust institutional safeguards, and thanks to police and law enforcement, the violence of this summer was curtailed. The rioters did not succeed in burning down hotels full of asylum seekers. But they tried to, and to see footage of that kind of ethnic-sectarian violence in the UK was truly shocking. One of the things that we know about serious identity-based violence, from Europe and elsewhere, is that it begins with words. It starts with the creation of intrinsically different “others”. It creates and reinforces powerful group identities, and then it labels these others as an irredeemable and existential threat. The increasingly poisonous rhetoric against refugees, migrants and Muslims that preceded the riots did not only come from the likes of Tommy Robinson. The slogans of much more “mainstream” political actors were also echoed by mobs from Rotherham to Plymouth. Yet Robinson has been instrumental in the gradual development of a narrative of “failed multiculturalism” which assigns these minority groups inherently “alien” and dangerous characteristics.
For years, Tommy Robinson has leaned on his upbringing in order to sow this sort of hate. He is not the “authentic” voice of the “genuine working class”. We saw in the response to the pogroms that a majority of people reject his rhetoric. But we can tear his claims out from the roots by looking at the real Luton, not his dystopic account of a bear-baiting pit contested by mutually hostile ethnic groups. Take Luton Carnival, a huge annual celebration of the cultures that make the town so special. And it continues to attract new waves of immigrants: most recently from countries in eastern Europe. No one would pretend that integration is easy, and I remember all too well the racism of my youth. But when faced by those capitalising on fear and resentment, it is imperative to remember that “ordinary” England does not belong to Tommy Robinson.
[See also: England in pieces]
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