Progressive activists should be careful what they wish for
Tommy Robinson is a paradox: he is a brave and enormously successful activist-journalist with a mean right hook. At the same time, he’s prone to sentimentality, sensitive to criticism and sees himself as a victim, tethering his own private troubles — mortgage fraud, travelling to the US on a false passport and an upcoming contempt of court case to name just a few — to the political grievances of the white working class he claims to represent. His greatest contradiction, though, is that while he’s a trenchant critic of identity politics, mercilessly mocking the whiny victimhood of Black Lives Matter, the transgender movement and shady Islamists, he’s also an unmistakable product of that politics, weaponising the language of tribal resentment and self-pity for his own personal and political purposes.
