Enemy of the State

Enemy of the State by Tommy Robinson, 1982– Published: 2015 J J J J J I I I I I Table of Contents Dedication Introduction & Chapter 1 … Time on my Hands. Chapter 2 … The Sting. Chapter 3 … Back in the Day. Chapter 4 … Gangland. Chapter 5 … Running Wild. Chapter 6 … September 11, 2001. Chapter 7 … The BNP – Hello, Goodbye. Chapter 8 … The Missing Years. Chapter 9 … The Day That Changed My Life. Chapter 10 … Birth of the EDL. Chapter 11 … We Need to Talk about Kevin Carroll. Chapter 12 … Me and the Media. Chapter 13 … What’s in a Name? Chapter 14 … The EDL – 2. Chapter 15 … Enemy of the State. Chapter 16 … The End of the Line. Chapter 17 … Quilliam. Chapter 18 … The Metropolitan Intelligence Bureau. Chapter 19 … One Last Shot. Chapter 20 … Radicalised. Chapter 21 … What Tommy does next. J J J J J I I I I I Remembering Les Gearty, one of the best and maddest men I‘ve known, who was always by my side no matter what situations we faced. A loyal and faithful friend. We all miss him. Introduction I WAS HOPING to shout out loud ‘three cheers for Tommy Robinson’ on the morning of Thursday July 23 rd , 2015. I say Tommy Robinson. It’s sometimes Stephen Lennon in the media, or occasionally a long-ago name, Stephen Yaxley. Whatever. It was going to be three cheers for me, the founder and former leader, now officially retired, of the English Defence League. It had been a dramatic, often wild six years, of street battles and police stitch- ups, of fearing for my family’s lives and resisting attempts by Scotland Yard to recruit me as some kind of undercover snitch. Six years of mad laughs with the lads, but also of long weeks and months in solitary confinement. Six years of having my life turned upside down and inside out by the state—all for being a British patriot. For trying to wake my fellow countrymen and women up to the dangers of radical Islam. And as of Thursday July 23 rd I would be a free man. I would be able to take my family on holiday, to speak on a public platform without having my collar felt, to go about my business like any other citizen of the United Kingdom. The licence period of an 18-month prison sentence for lending my brother-in- law the deposit on his first house—yes, really—was due to end on Wednesday July 22 nd . Finally I could say without fear of being handcuffed again, ‘Luton and Bedfordshire Probation Service, Scotland Yard and the entire British constabulary—kiss my arse’. I could have shouted as loud as I liked, but no one would have heard. Not while I was locked in yet another concrete box of a solitary confinement cell in the bowels of HMP Peterborough, waiting for someone to tell me what the hell I’d been jailed for this time. Just days before being a free man at last, and thrown in a cell once again on the whim of some sadistic so-and-so just trying to squeeze one more ounce of misery out of me, while they still could. Even the screws in Peterborough nick could hardly believe it—that someone would get recalled to prison just a week or so before their licence was up. I was in solitary confinement, yet again, because despite all of my warnings to the screws, including a note to the prison governor not to do it, they put me on an open wing, two cells away from a Muslim murderer doing 28 years. He promptly put a massive bounty on my head and after I gave a Somali prisoner a slapping—I was told he’d taken the contract to attack me with boiling water—I finally got my wish, the safety and sanctuary of being in solitary. It was only a few days until I was free of the system. I could handle that. But the day and night of July 22 nd came and went, with no explanation. They kept me locked up another 48 hours. It was probably because ‘they’ (whoever is watching, and believe me ‘they’ are) knew that I was due to be making a public appearance at the House of Lords on the 23 rd . ‘They’ were desperate to keep disrupting my life for as long as they possibly could. So for all of you history buffs who celebrated 800 years of the signing of Magna Carta this summer—be my guest and shove your Habeas Corpus up your deluded liberal backsides. There isn’t much ‘justice’ in the British justice system that I’ve come to know and hate. Indeed, for someone who has bent over backwards to avoid trouble in recent months and years, I’ve spent more time in English prisons than some of the Great Train Robbers. If this book-writing gig catches on, my next effort might be a guided tour to the many and varied institutions of HM’s prison service. Still, better late than never. I’m out. No more weekly sermons from the Marxist matron at the probation office, no more messing with mine and my family’s lives just for the hell of it. I’m done with bowing and scraping to busybody do-gooders, to looking over my shoulder for the police every time I tweet something mildly offensive to a Home Counties communist. I’m free of the English Defence League and, mostly, I’m finally free to make my own choices. With my track record, I suspect that will include making plenty more mistakes. I just hope that whatever they are, they don’t involve hearing the clanging door of a jail cell behind me. I’ve had enough of them—fairly or unfairly— for a lifetime. Don’t worry, you’re not going to need a box of Kleenex at your side as you read this. It really isn’t Tommy-does-tearjerking. It’s not a sob story. The trouble I’ve found myself in has been at times clearly self-inflicted. But only at times. You might just learn something about the workings of a British police state that I doubt you believe exists. My over-arching crime, at least in the eyes of the British establishment, has been to be a patriot. I love my country. I think that St George’s Day, April 23 rd , should be a public holiday. I resent the fact that people who hate the country they call ‘home’ are pampered and protected by a state that places their so-called rights above those of young men who risk and sacrifice their lives for British democracy. Oh, and just to make things clear from the outset, I really, really don’t care about the colour of those people’s skin or the nature of their religion. I never have and I still don’t. I’m sorry if that disappoints a few of you. But here’s something else I believe—that if you publicly declare war on me, my family and my country, it’s only to be expected that some of us will offer resistance. Clearly I’m in the minority—or at least so it’s seemed, since this ‘life’ of Tommy Robinson began in 2009. My name will forever be connected with the English Defence League, I know that. But this isn’t a book about the EDL, although it obviously plays a major part in it. Theirs is a different story, perhaps for another day. For now this is my story, my attempt to make sense of a life, and especially a recent past, that even I find barely believable. None of it was planned. But despite everything that I’ve been through, I have no regrets, other than what my family has been put through—and that wasn’t always of my doing. You’ll notice that I don’t name my wife and children in the book. That’s deliberate. They still occasionally pay too heavy a price for having me as a father and husband. Coming home from Peterborough nick, albeit a couple of days late, marked the end of an 18-month prison sentence, all because I lent my brother-in-law £20,000 for a deposit on a house. And he overstated his earnings on a self certification mortgage, which made it ‘criminal’. No one lost a single penny, but having tried and failed on numerous counts to put me away, to silence me, the state finally did. I would argue that they also tried to have me killed in the process, but that’s for you to decide. It had taken the police and the state long enough. It had taken them pretty much every day since a group of angry Luton residents shouted ‘enough’, having watched extremist Muslims being encouraged by the police to scream their hatred at the returning soldiers of the Royal Anglian Regiment in March 2009. But they’d done their worst, I was still standing, and I was free to speak my mind. Finally. Chapter 1 Time on my Hands. WHEN YOU are sent home from prison part-way through a custodial sentence, it’s with many and varied limitations on where you can go, what you can do—even who you can talk to or communicate with via social media. You might have an ankle tag on, a curfew… whatever the state decides. In my case, and although I’d quit the English Defence League more than a year before, when I came home to my wife and kids, one of the stipulations that might see me recalled to prison was not communicating with members of the EDL, either directly or indirectly—which meant by Twitter or social media.

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