Tommy Robinson is believed to be in the Mediterranean, on the island of Cyprus. “Photos were published on Sunday which allegedly show him in a hotel,” reports an article in the centre-left British newspaper, The Independent. The far-right activist is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in July. He is accused of repeatedly making defamatory remarks against a Syrian refugee teenager in 2018. “I’m not on the run, I’m on holiday,” said one of the founders of the English Defence League (EDL) – an ultranationalist movement created in 2009 – in his defence. Comments reported by the British centre-right mainstream media, The Times.
According to Merseyside Police – the county in which Southport is located – the EDL are suspected of being among those responsible for injuring “more than 50 police officers and terrorising Muslim worshippers during the riots”, according to the same source. The Times. Although Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has not been part of the movement since 2013, he continues to spread hatred towards foreigners through his social networks. “There is no doubt that […] “Tommy Robinson is playing a very important role in these far-right protests,” a spokesperson for the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate told The Independent.
It must be said that the strike force is considerable. The Briton has 908,000 subscribers on his X account – formerly Twitter. However, the latter had been suspended in 2018 due to the extremism of his remarks. But the arrival of Elon Musk at the head of the platform allowed Robinson to return to business. Regarding the riots that are spreading like wildfire across the country, we can read on his account: “The police are hiding from Muslim gangs. They have given up our streets.”
Violence in the body
“The resurgence of far-right violence in the UK is partly a consequence of Elon Musk’s decision to allow figures like Tommy Robinson to return to the platform,” he wrote on August 3, The Guardian (left) in an article he titled: “The far right has migrated to the Internet, where its voice is more dangerous than ever.” The Tesla founder – a supporter of Donald Trump and champion of libertarianism – has distinguished himself by his positions on British news, stating that “civil war was inevitable.”
Far-right violence is not new to the United Kingdom. Often associated with skinhead culture, it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The British National Party found its genesis there, before gaining popularity in the 2000s with the emergence of Tommy Robinson’s ELD and the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative in its wake. On July 27, the fugitive managed to gather 20,000 people at a demonstration in London that he wanted to be “the biggest patriotic gathering this country has ever seen”. While there is a clear lineage between the far-right of the 1960s and 1970s and that of today, the current one has its own specificities.
Internet, refuge for provocateurs
In the columns of the GuardianJacob Davey – a fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) – says that the UK, like the rest of the world – has an “increasingly decentralised far-right movement”. “There were household names at the rallies, including outspoken neo-Nazis, but also concerned locals and hooligans,” describes the director of research and policy on far-right movements at the ISD, before concluding that “all these people are linked by these loose online networks, stimulated by cynicism from actors often outside the country and galvanised by viral online disinformation from unknown and untrustworthy sources”.
The question then arises of stopping these threats, which are physically elusive. “None fact-checking or no correction was likely to be able to lower the temperature of these demonstrations,” deplores Milo Comerford – head of research at the ISD – to AFP. The GuardianStephan Lewandowsky, professor at the University of Bristol suggests a modification of the algorithms used by social networks to favor the promotion of “quality information” rather than that which causes “scandal”.
He also advocates for account suspensions. “If you kick someone off a platform, their influence diminishes and the people who followed them also go elsewhere,” notes Stephan Lewandowsky. But now, simple messages like “Nottingham is rising up, we’ll be there at 3pm Saturday” posted on a Telegram loop – a Russian social network known for protecting the identity of its users – are enough to create disorder and “no one has any idea who it is,” laments Joe Mulhall, research director at Hope not Hate.