The rise of English far-right activist Tommy Robinson to that of global "cult" status has now been cemented with news that he is likely to be made a millionaire thanks to support from well-heeled, like-minded extremists across the Atlantic.
While his entry to the country is still being discouraged by US authorities, his fame at both the "grassroots" level, and with those high up in the right-wing political food chain, is well-established. As part of Steve Bannon's grand scheme ("The Movement"), Robinson is now central to Bannon's plans for a co-ordinated effort to bring together Populist movements across Europe. In spite of the fact that Bannon's plans are illegal in many of the countries he's targeting, this has had no effect on Bannon's overall plan, and the central role that Robinson can be seen to play in it.
Robinson's notoriety was established with the high-profile events organized when he led the English Defence League (EDL). This group's agenda was openly Islamophobic. While its adherents would claim that their ire was not aimed as Muslims as a whole but rather its extremist elements, in practical terms the group's followers have openly Islamophobic views. It is clear that large numbers of the EDL's followers see Islam as a cultural threat to British identity, and therefore see Muslims as an inherent "threat" to them.
By focusing in particular on the cases of Child Abuse "rings" in various Pakistani communities that have come to light in recent years, the EDL have seen their cause as a kind of moral mission. Comparisons to how in the early years of the Nazi Party, their "brownshirts" would target Jews and Communists as a plague on German culture, are plain to see.
Robinson himself claimed to have become disgusted with the EDL's lurch into blatant prejudice, which caused the end to his association with the group. However, by then becoming involved with other similar movements like the British offshoot of "PEGIDA" in Germany, his motivations became hard to miss.
Robinson was "reinventing" himself as a kind of social justice warrior. His notoriety continued with his violent conduct involving brushes with the law, while at the same time he was now claiming himself to be a victim of police harassment and a supporter of free speech. This then culminated in his prosecution and imprisonment for contempt, which played directly into his narrative as a victim of the establishment's curtailment of free speech.
It was this that gave him international "cult" status, and cemented his high-profile reputation with people like Steve Bannon. Since then, Robinson's popularity has been shown to include serving members of the armed forces (no surprise there). More significantly, he has attracted the support of UKIP's leader, Gerald Batten.
This is significant for a few reasons. While UKIP had become largely an irrelevance since Theresa May stole many of their clothes after the EU referendum two years ago, the way in which she has managed to turn almost everyone in her party against her "deal" can only be a boon for UKIP.
If May's deal gets though parliament, those in the Tory right would accuse her of betrayal. This will naturally lead to a surge among the grassroots back towards UKIP as the "natural" party of Euroscepticism and nativism, as it was before 2016. On the other hand, if we get a "no deal" scenario, UKIP are likely to prosper in the longer-run as they can claim that it was through trusting the Tories that caused the situation to become so chaotic - so the accusation of "betrayal" can be used again. Finally, if somehow the end result is that Britain remains in the EU for wont of any better alternative, UKIP can again blame the Tories for making the issue so toxic, leaving their party as the last "honorable" bastion of English nationalism.
Batten's strategy of bringing Robinson under his wing might be cynical, but it makes a fair amount of political sense in some ways. Nigel Farage, the original charisma behind UKIP's rise, has savaged Batten's strategy of allowing UKIP to flirt with the far-right. But Farage himself may well be misreading how the political climate has changed since the referendum.
This is partly Farage's own fault. The author recently read a report into UKIP's electoral strategy from twenty years ago, when Farage was advocating for the party to make a breakthrough in Westminster. Farage's strategy was to focus on getting UKIP MPs elected into the British parliament. As a strategy, it was a complete failure. Meanwhile, from 1998 onward, UKIP's representation in the EU parliament went from strength to strength, leading to them becoming the largest UK party in Brussels in 2014. And while this surge in EU representation was happening, UKIP's representation in Westminster only ever came to two MPs out of more than six hundred (both of whom were Tory defectors).
In this way, we can see that Farage's strategic understanding of the reality of British politics is weak. By misunderstanding the correct method to bring about UKIP's success all those years ago, today he misunderstands the motivations for people now supporting UKIP.
Farage took UKIP in the direction towards being a Libertarian party. While this is a simplification (and there were many inconsistencies), Farage's motivation seemed to be about making UKIP support a broadly Libertarian agenda, very similar to that supported by the "Brexiteers" in the Conservative Party (e.g. the ERG) today. This explained the overlap in much of their ideology.
The inconsistency was about marrying this with the inevitable "nativist" rhetoric than underlined the English nationalism of UKIP's core message. This was why UKIP attracted a range of support, from right-wing Libertarians that wanted Britain to become a "free trade paradise" outside the EU, to traditional cultural Conservatives from places as eclectic as Clacton, Keighley and Camarthen. This was how UKIP was able to bridge the class divide, by appealing to the innate petty prejudices of the "common man". This was how Farage created his "people's army".
Those "petty prejudices" are the core root of Populism. Its ideology, almost by definition, is about appealing to people's petty prejudices. UKIP grew in strength on the back of explaining events like the migration crisis, growing domestic inequality and the Conservative government's austerity agenda through the prism of prejudice. By arguing that the government were more interested in housing and financially supporting Europeans and migrants, UKIP fed into a toxic atmosphere, culminating in the referendum result of 2016.
A "natural" alliance?
By this point, Farage seems to have been unaware (or delusional) about the nature of the monster he had created.
Farage seems to have believed he had made UKIP a Libertarian party, while in reality it had only grown in mass support by using Populist rhetoric. So when he stepped down after the referendum, he left a party that was Populist in nature. Meanwhile, with Theresa May turning the governing Conservative Party into one that simply copied wholesale much of UKIP's pre-referendum agenda, Farage's party had nowhere else to go but further to the right. Jeremy Corbyn has done much the same with the Labour Party, taking the party of the official opposition into territory that was once filled by George Galloway's hard-left "Respect" Party.
The logical conclusion of UKIP's shift to the Populist right is Gerald Batten now endorsing Tommy Robinson. As mentioned earlier, Farage misunderstands the motivations of those that now support UKIP, because the party now represents more than a mere Libertarian fantasy; it now represents the Populist mood that is more cultural than political. Farage's disgust at what is happening to UKIP feels more like private self-loathing at the monster he belatedly realizes he created.
Robinson's place in this as a "social justice warrior" is that UKIP are exploiting the cultural overlap between his Islamophobic agenda and UKIP's own agenda of base Populism. With the issue of Brexit now reaching a point where many of its supporters are bound to feel a sense of betrayal, Batten's strategy seems to be to ensure the party are well-placed to hoover up those disillusioned with the Conservative Party's bungling of Brexit. With the mood towards immigrants and "the other" hardening since the referendum, Batten's strategy may well be to follow this poisonous mood to its logical conclusion. He has seen the direction that the national mood has taken, and sees UKIP as being in the primary position to take advantage when the time comes.
Whether UKIP will ever reach the levels of support they had before the referendum is pure speculation at this point; it depends on what the actual outcome of Brexit will be. But Theresa May's own cynical strategy of copying UKIP's agenda after the referendum forced UKIP further to the right. With her then doing such a disastrous job of the Brexit negotiations, there are bound to be a lot of angry people: the end result may well be the eventual resurgence of UKIP as a far-right party. In the febrile climate of Britain post-Brexit, who can say how radicalized the political landscape could become? This is what Gerald Batten's alliance with Tommy Robinson seems to foresee.
In this way, Britain could currently be called one of the most unstable democracies in the developed world. The alliance of Tommy Robinson with Gerald Batten, under the wider tutelage of Steve Bannon, might seem like a fringe movement at the moment, but it's clear that these people are also biding their time, planning their strategy, and waiting for the right moment. Their "moment" may well come.
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