Western Spring
January 25, 2014
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Shortly after being sentenced to 18 months imprisonment today, at St. Albans Crown Court, thirty-one year old Stephen Yaxley Lennon, otherwise known as Tommy Robinson, the former leader and co-founder of the English Defence League (EDL) is reported to have Tweeted to his followers, “This is a complete stitch up”.
Robinson, who last October shocked EDL supporters by resigning from the organisation amid concerns over the “dangers of far-right extremism”, had appeared in court one month later, pleading guilty to two charges of mortgage fraud, and it was in connection with these charges that Robinson was sentenced today.
Following his surprise exit from the EDL, Robinson announced that he had started working with the Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremism think-tank and pledged to help tackle racism in Britain, and prior to his sentencing had been due to embark on a tour of schools, lecturing pupils on tolerance. Clearly therefore despite pleading guilty to the charges of mortgage fraud in November last year, Robinson did not expect to receive a custodial sentence and his use of the phrase ‘stitch up’, would suggest that he feels he has been ‘duped’ in some way, in expecting something less.
Right up until October of last year, Tommy Robinson had appeared totally committed to the EDL, the organization that he dominated, and their campaign against the Islamisation of Britain. Robinson defied all attempts by the authorities to curtail the powerful street presence of the EDL, he was seen holding his own, and sometimes getting the upper hand in televised interviews with media pundits, the man was a veritable lion while at the head of the EDL and this is why his sudden resignation and complete transformation from fearless and fanatical ‘far-right’, anti-Islamist campaigner to sober advocate of moderation and religious tolerance did not make sense. The claimed transformation was too sudden and too great to be credible to either his EDL followers or to the public, who watched on bewildered.
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Many have speculated that Robinson must have been ‘nobbled’ by the state during his earlier period in jail for using someone else’s passport, and the timing of the prosecutions for mortgage fraud in November 2013 would certainly suggest that Robinson would have been aware of the impending prosecutions some considerable time prior to his dramatic and unexpected resignation from the EDL.
When one considers also that Robinson did not appear to expect a custodial sentence and then issued Tweets that he had been ‘stitched up’ shortly after sentencing yesterday, the course of events, and the timing of them, has left everyone wondering whether these mortgage fraud charges were the mechanism through which Robinson was nobbled?
Was he blackmailed by the establishment into resigning from the EDL, with threats of a much longer sentence if he did not do as instructed? Robinson has claimed that the shunning of him by other parents as he collected his children from school was a significant factor in his Damascene conversion to religious tolerance, think therefore how much more coercive the threat of a five year stretch might have been in the mind of this father of young children?
Was he instructed to resign and led to believe that in agreeing to work with the Quilliam Foundation, and in agreeing to campaign for ‘tolerance’ he would avoid a custodial sentence altogether?
Furthermore, was his eventual custodial sentence today, the final ‘coup de grace’ and betrayal of Robinson’s naïve trust in a venal political establishment who feel they have now got everything they ever wanted from him, have neutralised the threat he and the EDL once posed, and have finally strung him up and hung him out to dry?
Perhaps the answers to these questions will become apparent in about eighteen months time, but whatever the truth, Tommy Robinson and the EDL have indeed been effectively neutralised as a political force by recent events and it is perhaps time for new, more determined and worldly wise leaders to pick up and hold aloft the torch once more.