There have been few sustained attempts to understand Tommy Robinson’s movement. Various academic books (by Joel Busher, Nigel Copsey, Simon Winlow and others) have been written about his previous party, the EDL, but their accounts tend to stop before 2016, i.e. with Robinson separated from his former supporters. In the last two years, Robinson has built up a larger street presence than ever before: 15,000 people marched for his release from prison, or around five times more than the EDL ever mobilised. One way to understand Tommy Robinson’s movement is to closely look at his memoir, Enemy of the State (2017). Written during a period of imprisonment for mortgage fraud, and widely read by his supporters, it precedes Robinsons’ elevation to his present celebrity, but it reflects the same sort of relationship to his supporters that you see in Robinson’s more recent social media output.

A personal style of leadership

Robinson’s book is an autobiography. It seeks to establish that its author is much like his readers, if perhaps more politically conscious than they are. An obvious comparison to make is with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, another far-right memoir, and also written in prison. Hitler’s book is longer: at around 1000 pages, it is about four times the length of Robinson’s. This reflects the much greater crisis in post-1918 Germany, the actuality of revolution and the obsession with which the counter-revolutionaries opposed the left, as well as the much greater availability of reactionary ideas in post-war Germany which Hitler could fuse into a more coherent theory.

Adolf Hitler had one basic idea, which was to make “race” a concept in order to transform the state. Races, he insisted, were unequal. This was an absolute law, which both explained all of human history, and gave birth to a detailed, systematic programme for territorial expansion, war and genocide. There is a personal story in Mein Kampf, but it is interspersed with a political manifesto. Reading Mein Kempf is in many places like being stuck in a pub with the worst bore you could imagine, except that Hitler demands your attention not merely for a few hours, but for days or weeks without allowing you a break even to sleep because all this time will be needed if he is going to explain to you how Europe will be transformed as soon as the racial idea dominates. Hitler ends his book by promising that Germany will soon lead the earth.

Tommy Robinson, by contrast, writes as if he has no developed programme other than a general feeling that people like him have been unfairly ignored. Robinson admits that when he joined the English Defence League he didn’t read newspapers on even watch news programmes on television. He describes feeling “belittled” by interviewers when he first started going on television Robinson frequently asserts his ignorance, admits to listening to other right-wing leaders but says that their arguments were beyond him. His book is narrower than Hitler’s, and more personal,. Its ends by asserting a personal project – simply to stay out of jail.

Part of the working class – but running away from it

In the first chapter of Mein Kampf, Hitler tries to show that he was different from many Germans: middle-class and more affluent. “My father,” he writes on the first page, “was a civil servant who fulfilled his duties very consciously.” These passages were not chosen by accident. The NSDAP’s strategy was to recruit suffering members of the middle-classes and convert them into a private army which could be used against the unions and the workers’ movement. Hitler’s life fitted into that project.

By contrast, Robinson insists on his working-class origins. He describes himself as having been born into an Irish family and having a Glaswegian stepfather who worked as a pipe fitter. Robinson grew up in Farley Hill, “the biggest working class community” in Luton and attended his local Junior and High schools. After that, Robinson was employed as an apprentice to be an aeronautical engineer with Britannia Airways, then as a self-employed painter and decorator, and later ran a plumbing business with his stepfather. His closest ally, Kevin Carroll (also Robinson’s cousin), is described as a “first class carpenter, builder and five star bloke”.

While this sounds like an ordinary working-class existence, actually Robinson’s account points somewhere different. Early on, Robinson describes a neighbour who moved into the next door house and raced bikes professionally. The neighbour owned his own Lotus and Ferrari and even leant encouraged in Robinson an interest in trials bikes. But the neighbour turned out to be involved in fraud, on a massive scale, and was caught and imprisoned. Robinson is full of admiration, crediting this friendship for introducing him to the possibility of a “flash” life.

Robinson describes himself as working class, and those he dislikes as middle class. But what he means by class is birth and education rather than trajectory. This is a description of class in which Alan Sugar would be working class (even though he is rich and employs people to work for him) or Donald Trump (even though he was given pocket money amounting to several millions of dollars a year while he was still a young child) because he is “one of us”: white, combative, and showy with money.

Throughout his book, Robinson’s boasts that he has pulled himself up, away from normal working class life. His book was written in 2016, i.e. before Robinson was being paid ‎£8,000 per months by Rebel Media, and before the vast sums he took in donations during his recent imprisonment. Already by this point, he says, he owned seven properties, starting with the freehold on a tanning salon business – and these leases earned him, no doubt, a rental income several times more than the average salary. Indeed Robinson now lives in a £950,000 home in rural Bedfordshire.

Robinson is not saying that only landlords can join his movement; but what he is pitching to a particular segment of working class life. His supporters predominantly have jobs in the private sector, rather than the public sector. They operate on the borders of illegality. They are self-employed. They get on through schemes of personal enrichment rather than through unions or any collective approach.

Women – not wanted

“I’ve always been comfortable,” Robinson writes, “in a bloke-oriented environment,” and it is a feature of his memoir that very few women are mentioned: his mother, his wife (good), his probation officer (bad). He is the sort of writer who can describe himself – without finding this in any way unusual – as “having a bit of a domestic” when describing walking outside his home with his own wife.

A quarter of the way into his book, Robinson recalls his cousin Jeanette, a woman of about his own age. As teenager, Robinson says, Jeanette was “groomed” by a gang of Pakistani men, persuaded by them to acquire a heroin addiction, after which she was “gang-raped by half a dozen Muslim men”. Jeanette apparently returned home, only to escape again. At the end of his story, Jeanette has converted to Islam and married a Muslim. She has six children. The family cannot see her, Robinson complains, even if she was still living in Luton, since even if they were on the same street as her should would be unrecognisable beneath a burka.

There are many reasons to be sceptical. The story is too convenient, it involves too many people doing what Robinson’s politics tell him “ought” to have happened: a female victim, Muslim criminals, the passivity of the incompetent British state.

One further reason for caution is that the story fits over-neatly into older patterns of sexist story-telling. The historian who captures this best is Klaus Theweleit, who for his book Male Fantasies, studied the diaries and memoirs of a previous generation of far-right activists, the 1918-era German Freikorps, the immediate predecessor to Hitler’s Nazis. In their books, Theweleit observed, there were only two sorts of women: “white” (mothers, nurses, nuns) and “red”. The latter were sexually promiscuous and politically pro-Communist. Supporters of the German right were required to murder or rape them, or they might be killed themselves. In Robinson’s story, his cousin Jeanette is a latter-day red woman. She is a race traitor: a willing convert to Islam. She betrays her family. She is sexually active and indifferent to human suffering, even if the suffering is played out on her own body. She expresses, in other words, a recurring far-right fantasy in which an entire class of women – even though they are British and “ought” to be virtuous – are a little less than human. They can become full people only be setting aside their selfish desires and agreeing to put their lives into the hands of their betters: i.e. patriotic white men.

Racism – obsessive and banal

For Hitler, everything was race. In the first pages of Mein Kampf he sets out that the Jews are Germany’s greatest enemy, and that if Germany’s national ambitions are to be allowed (and she will build a colonial empire), the Jews must be defeated. Hitler espoused a racial theory of history, in which every single non-white person had to be classified in terms of how much they would, or would not, assist his plans for a universal white ascendancy. Repeatedly, this lead Hitler to absurd results. He would give no practical assistance, for example, to those anti-Muslim racists and anti-semites who were the forerunners of today’s BJP. Because they were Hindu, they were racial inferiors, and had to be ruled by the British. Even in the depths of the Second World War, Hitler preferred to leave India in the control of the British (with whom he was at war) rather than the people who wanted to ally with him.

A recurring argument of Enemy of the States is that Robinson has no problems with other races but only with Muslims. Islam is “taking over communities, racially victimis[ing] [whites] … ethnically clean[ing] non-Muslim people”.

When talking about Muslims, Robinson comes over as obsessed, paranoid, willing to believe any conspiracy that suits him. When it comes to his dealings with other black people, his approach is different. Repeatedly, Robinson alludes to having black friends. He takes one to a BNP meeting, he invites another to EDL demonstrations. These figures (if they ever actually existed) appear once, and are named, but never appear twice. Robinson seems to think that treating black people as his stage friends proves either that he isn’t a racist, or that his supporters aren’t.

Robinson is trying to lead his supporters towards the adoption of a particular kind of politics: one that is hateful towards Muslims while offering black or Jewish people an Alan Partridge or David Brent sort of racism: exaggerative, inconsistent, ignorant, lurching suddenly from declarations of friendship to hostility.

Distancing himself from the BNP

There is a widely-held view on the British left that Tommy Robinson represents an immediate fascist threat. Writing in Jacobin, Richard Seymour describes Robinson as “a clever fascist”. Meanwhile Socialist Worker calls him, “Nazi Tommy Robinson.” There are indeed a few places when Robinson’s book reads like the sort of memoir that a leader of the National Front or the BNP might have written. “My over-arching crime,” Robinson writes, “has been to be a patriot. I love my country.” Elsewhere he complains, “It still seems perverse to me, the way that taking pride in the cross of St George and the Union Jack suddenly makes you at best a far right bigot”.

Robinson was a member of the BNP – although briefly. He claims they were “the only people talking about the problems with the Muslim community”. He says he attended one meeting where the speaker talked “plain common sense about the whole range of Muslim / Islamic issues” and never renewed his membership.

His account is self-serving. Long ago, Searchlight published a photo of Robinson at a BNP meeting. The speaker was Richard Edmonds. By the time of Robinson joined the BNP, the party’s original leader John Tyndall had been deposed as leader by Nick Griffin, and Griffin was taking the party away from its street fighting roots in the direction of a more respectable Euro-fascism, modelled on the Front National in France. Edmonds was a critic of Griffin’s leadership – he did not speak often at BNP meetings and when he did, it was on a factional basis, to promote a perspective which was even closer to Hitlerian National Socialism than the BNP mainstream. We can assume, therefore, that the speech would have been littered with anti-semitic codewords and other ideas derived from 1930s-style national socialism. If it really struck Robinson as just mere “common sense”, that tells you more about the extent of his politicisation during these pre-EDL years than he likes to admit.

Who, really, is Tommy Robinson?

The figure that emerges from Robinson’s memoir is different from the monsters of classical fascism. The traditional basis under which anti-fascists have justified our politics is by saying that the far right represents an urgent threat, in Leon Trotsky’s phrase, to uproot ‘all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society … whatever has been achieved during three quarters of a century by the social democracy and the trade unions’. Jair Bolsonaro plausibly fits that description: like Hitler, he is promising punitive violence against the left. But the Tommy Robinson of Enemy of the State has a different antagonist – not the left, not reformism or social democracy, not even all racial others, but simply Muslims, politicised or otherwise. The fascists of the 1930s told the majority of people that they too could take part in politics, but the price of their participation was the destruction of the only organizations which provided any chance of popular rule. If Robinson’s programme really was the abolition of democarcy, then he does very little in his memoir to prepare his followers for it.

The strongest impression of Tommy Robinson that emerges from these pages is rather of what an older generation would have considered a spiv: a person who works on the border of legality, who is concerned only with their personal enrichment. A person born into the working class, but doing all in their power to escape from it. Tommy Robinson is the salesman of his own reputation, who finds himself by chance having to incarnate the present moment of post-9/11 politics. He has no programme and little vision, other than the hunch that this is the way to an easy life and nothing else he does will ever be as well remunerated again.

This Thursday, Tommy Robinson will be back in court in his long-running contempt of court trial. He has served two months in prison already, and has won a previous appeal; but the effect of that success has merely been to return his case to the Crown Court where a new judge will have to make a fresh sentencing decision.

I was in court in July for Robinson’s last hearing. We were in the Royal Courts of Justice with their oak paneled walls, the Law Reports stuffed hopelessly on the shelves. The public gallery was full of Robinson’s followers, trying too hard to look smart in tasseled loafers, suits which hadn’t fitted in twenty years.

Ezra Levant from Canada’s Rebel Media, and recently Robinsons employer, was one of the first to arrive. He stood by the door to the gallery, nodding at the members of the public as we walked in. Later, Levant and one of his American friends could be heard reminiscing self-importantly. “Do you remember when I was in that class action, for the American Enterprise Institute? We intervened to prevent a settlement…” Levant was trying to signal to everyone watching that he was in charge, hewas the one who was paying for Robinson’s court fees. In fact, Levant and Robinson had fallen out a year before. The former EDL man was indeed having his lawyers’ fees paid from abroad, but the main funder was not Levant. It was a different foreign Islamophobe, Daniel Pipes of Campus Watch.

Robinson was watching the scenes by video link from Woodhill Prison. Can you see your barrister, the usher asked. “Yeah.” Can you see the judges? “Yeah. Are they supposed to be that small?” Bored, ignored by the lawyers in court, Robinson was “please” and “thank you” and trying hard to look serious. “I’m not nervous before a court case,” he said, “not usually.” Soon enough the sound was switched, off, leaving Robinson picking distractedly at his shirt, like a monkey savouring its fleas.

When they spoke, his lawyers made every effort to present Robinson as a quiet advocate of good relations between different communities. Yes, they accepted, Tommy Robinson’s livestreaming from outside Leeds Crown Court breached an order made on 19 March this year, which banned any person from publishing any report of those proceedings. And yes, Robinson was already subject to a suspended sentence from a similar contempt. But he was sorry. Very sorry.

Robinson was entitled to the protection of Article 6 of the European Convention, his barrister argued. Perhaps we can expect a future demonstration at which Katie Hopkins and their like demonstrate in support of the beloved Human Rights Act?

Robinson had been learning how to be an investigative journalist. He had been trying to better himself for the purpose of challenging extremism. A reliable solicitor’s firm, Kingsely Napley, had apparently trained Robinson and warned him where the line was between legitimate and illegitimate behavior. Which did beg the question of why he had so blatantly crossed it.

Tommy Robinson, his lawyer argued, was a delicate man, the victim of self-doubt. When in prison, he suffers anxiety, butterflies to the stomach. To which there is an answer, of course, that we need a world with more empathy rather than less. And that by organizing a street-fighting army to denounce mosques and ordinary Muslims, Robinson has been more than guilty of the very heartlessness with which he now complains the state has been prosecuting him.

Robinson has not been shy to market himself as at war with the authorities. His memoir is titled “Tommy Robinson, Enemy of the State.” I have sat in court and seen what happens in cases where the state is determined not to lose. There was a post-Occupy trial where the Metropolitan Police sent an assistant commissioner to sit for a whole day in court, in uniform, doing nothing more than signaling by his presence how much importance the police accorded to a successful outcome in the case.

But there weren’t any policeman in uniform to watch Robinson’s appeal, nor even a plain clothes note-taker. And, from the point of view of the judges, the reason Robinson was on trial was not his malice but his stupidity. If there is going to be a second edition of his book then it should be titled, “Tommy Robinson: the man who unwittingly frustrates the trials of Muslims and is therefore a minor inconvenience to the lower judiciary.” But maybe that wouldn’t sell so well on Amazon.

The best thing about Robinson’s successful appeal is that ever since Robinson has been in the hands of capable lawyers they have plainly been warning him (as any lawyer should) of the risk of further custodial sentences. For the time being, he has listened to them and the street protests have stopped.

But Robinson is still the same man he ever was, and he still has the same plan which is to demonstrate again and again for his own rights, and for the subordination of Muslims. This will require him to go back to social media and to say outrageous and offensive things until everyone else notices him. His time in prison brought in a bounty of donations – the equivalent, no doubt of the £100k that Rebel Media was once paying him for a year’s work – but Robinson has expensive tastes and many hangers on. Give it six months and that money will be spent. And, when it is, Robinson will be back on the streets again.

In June, anti-fascists everywhere were shocked by the size of the Free Tommy protest in London, which had 15,000 people on it and was far larger than any comparable protest organised by any of the National Front, the BNP, the EDL or UKIP. The Robinson supporters followed it up with a smaller march a month later, with about 4,000 people taking part. After winning his appeal, Tommy Robinson is now out on bail but again facing a sentencing hearing and no doubt this time his lawyers are begging him to keep low profile (at least until the next hearing). What about afterwards; will Robinson return to the streets – and, if so, what level of support is he likely to sustain?

The first thing to grasp is that we are still in a moment when the far-right is growing faster than any other time since 1945. On the left, when we look back at the 1960s, we think go it as a freewheeling time of countercultural advance when “the movement” would mean at one time a campaign for civil rights, at any other time women’s and gay liberation, when it encompassed huge popular music festivals, campaigns for national liberation, comics, films, songs, conferences, street happenings, election victories. It was a time when somehow all these different types of movement, with all their different demands, seemed to fit together and represent one single process.

The troubling thought is that the post-2016 far right has exactly the same shifting content. To take just one example: one component of the Tommy Robinson movement is a group of football firms – the Football Lads Alliance banner. A year ago, it was solely a conventional single issue campaign only against Islamic terror attacks. But, after that, when there hadn’t been any further outrages and the issue drained out of the news; it became an external faction support a local campaign to expose the supposed connivance of the UK state in the IRA pub bombings. Then, when it became clear that the campaign couldn’t take root outside Birmingham, the FLA became a reluctant part of the Robinson movement. Now, it has changed again, and all the group’s energy is dedicated to supporting a movement of “women and children” (because they’re the same thing, right?) against rape. It relies on the unspoken but real insistence that all rapes in Britain are being carried out by Muslims. And, with the backing of Anne Marie Waters and Pat Buchanan, the FLA is now building itself through a series of further demonstrations in the North East.

A key part of the far right’s ability to reinvent itself has been the refusal of the mainstream right to police its outliers. For seventy years, the mainstream right has known that the key to electoral success has been that it must keep the dangerous elements at arm’s length. So in Britain, the most popular rightwing political between 1945 and 1979 Enoch Powell was publicly sacrificed by the Tory party – not because the Conservatives were nice people but because a purely racist approach to politics would cause the party to lose elections, and they knew that he polarised voters, when a strategy for repeated success relied in presenting Conservatism as a universal virtue, somehow above politics. The same was even true on the electoral far right: Farage built a career by driving out the nationalist element, turning down deals with the BNP and positioning his party as a friend of the Tories and closed to those further to its right.

But in 2018, we have the likely next leader of the Conservatives Boris Johnson taking advice from Steve Bannon and coming up with his racist musings about women in burkas. Or the present leader of UKIP attending pro-Robinson marches and telling the demonstrators that the founder of the Muslim religion was a paedophile and insisting that every racist fantasy they have about Muslims is true.

When Robinson’s movement took a step back in July, I argued that it was facing significant problems in renewing itself. On further reflection, I think the reasons for that were as follows. The Tommy Robinson movement is not best understood a political party but a social movement or even (better still) as what happens when a social media career starts to express itself in real life. The campaign has very few “cadres”, and almost no infrastructure apart from its online presence and a shifting micro-generation of people (Robinson’s former employer, his former secretary) who can claim to speak for Robinson himself. When he was in prison, he had very little access to his allies, he was in a cell 23.5 hours a day with phone access limited to 30 minutes in the early afternoon. He couldn’t make decision for them, and so no decisions were taken – except for just the single agreement that they should have a second demonstration in his support, to copy as closely as possible the one they had just held in June.

Now that Robinson is at large (or at least, once his sentencing appeal is over), those practical difficulties have been resolved.

All the signs are that the far-right is still growing across Europe. The next election to watch will be on 9 September in Sweden and while it no longer looks as if the Swedish Democrats will actually win, they are polling at a steady 20% of the vote, and we should except them to win their highest ever vote. There will be more press headlines in Britain describing the far right as Europe’s coming force.

Here, Brexit continues to poison our politics; there is a convergence between the ways in which the main Brexiteers see the world (Johnson: Brexit was a great idea, but the politicians never allowed me to explain it properly) and the way that the Robinson supporters understand it, as the defeat of the nation by a caste of politicians committed to keeping their cosmopolitan links and working secretly behind the scenes to betray the Brexit vote.

Above all, we need to understand Robinson himself. On his version of events, for ten years he has been trying to have a normal career, as a working class man, supporting his wife and his children. But he couldn’t be a plasterer, he couldn’t have his own business, because every time he tries to live normally, he gets into trouble with the state. Therefore he has no choice but to try to live online. And by turning to social media, by monetising his followers on twitter and youtube, he has the opportunity to live well and to have his ideas about Muslims heard.

Of course Robinson’s version of reality involves him telling lies about the threat he represents to the state. He is not public enemy number one. He has got into trouble because the things he wanted to do – to physically confront his wife, to lie in a mortgage application and pretend that his house was for another person, to disrupt an ongoing court case by filming it to build his social media support – are acts of private selfishness, malice and stupidity which the state repeatedly disciplines without needing to invoking a grand liberal conspiracy against heroic patriots.

But if we get stuck on Robinson’s immense capacity for self deceit, we can miss the more important and troubling dynamic, which is this. Even with all the support Robinson has received, the far-right donors sending him cheques, he still has to live. He needs a regular income. He needs to sustain a lifestyle in which he can pay off six-figure court fines without pausing for breath. The problem with social media is that each grotesque act Robinson does (getting jailed, filming his traumatised children…) only remains newsworthy so long as it a first. He will stay in the public eye only if he does something even more grotesque next time.

In other words, if we take seriously the idea that this current iteration of the far right is – at its core – a strategy for building influence through selective use of social media, then it follows that Robinson will have every incentive when the dust settles to “go again”, to find new ways of winning supporters and outraging the rest of us. And in a world where the right is growing, his audience still wants more outrage and not less.