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 , made himself rich and famous as the chief tribune of the English 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.
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