Source: Medium

The “letter boxes” and “bank robber” comments were not isolated gaffes. When it comes to inflaming public opinion against Muslims, Johnson is a repeat offender.

Boris Johnson’s recent Telegraph article, in which he mocked niqab-wearing women by describing them as looking like letter boxes or bank robbers, has been widely condemned. But this isn’t the first time Johnson has weighed in on the subject of Muslim women’s clothing. Back in 2006 he devoted his Telegraph column to celebrating the defeat of the court case launched by Shabina Begum over her right to wear the jilbab at her school in Luton. Johnson characterised Shabina’s campaign to wear clothing in accordance with her religious beliefs as a demand to “break school rules, and wear a tent”.

So demeaning Muslim women by sneering at their religious dress is nothing new as far as Johnson is concerned.

Indeed, in 2006 he went further, suggesting that Shabina’s legal challenge was part of some sinister Islamic plot to conquer the West. “This case wasn’t even about religion, or conscience, or the dictates of faith,” he wrote. “At least it wasn’t primarily about those things. It was about power. It was about who really runs the schools in this country, and about how far militant Islam could go in bullying the poor, cowed, gelatinous and mentally spongiform apparatus of the British state.”

For Johnson, the court case was yet another of “the disasters of multiculturalism, the system by which too many Muslims have been allowed to grow up in this country with no sense of loyalty to its institutions, and with a sense of complete apartness”.

But this was par for the course with Johnson, who by that point had established an unenviable record of journalistic Islamophobia. In the aftermath of the London transport bombings of 7 July 2005, for example, he similarly blamed the attacks on multiculturalist concessions to Muslims and depicted the terrorists’ acts as directly inspired by Islam.

In his Telegraph column of 14 July, Johnson asserted that the bombers were the product of a multicultural society in which “too many Britons have absolutely no sense of allegiance to this country or its institutions. It is a cultural calamity that will take decades to reverse”. He declared: “We need to acculturate the second-generation Muslim communities to our way of life.” And he continued: “That means the imams will have to change their tune, and it is no use the Muslim Council of Great Britain [sic]endlessly saying that ‘the problem is not Islam’, when it is blindingly obvious that in far too many mosques you can find sermons of hate, and literature glorifying 9/11 and vilifying Jews.”

In the 16 July edition of the Spectator Johnson pursued the theme of the religious roots of terrorism: “The Islamicists last week horribly and irrefutably asserted the supreme importance of that faith, overriding all worldly considerations, and it will take a huge effort of courage and skill to win round the many thousands of British Muslims who are in a similar state of alienation, and to make them see that their faith must be compatible with British values and with loyalty to Britain. That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.”

He continued: “To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia — fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture — to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques — it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers…. we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s mediaeval ass?”

Johnson declared: “It is time that we started to insist that the Muslim Council of Great Britain, and all the preachers in all the mosques, extremist or moderate, began to acculturate themselves more closely to what we think of as British values…. by way of a first gesture the entire Muslim clergy might announce, loud and clear, for the benefit of all Bradford-born chipshop boys, that there is no eternal blessedness for the suicide bombers, there are no 72 virgins, and that the whole thing is a con and a fraud upon impressionable minds. That might be a first step towards what could be called the re-Britannification of Britain.”

Shockingly, Johnson saw fit to to publish these inflammatory articles in the midst of a racist backlash against the Muslim community (see here and here for contemporary reports by the Institute of Race Relations) during which one victim, Kamal Raza Butt, had been beaten to death.

As Spectator editor, Johnson produced issue devoted to threat of Islam

Johnson’s promotion of rabid Islamophobia at the Spectator wasn’t restricted to his own columns but extended to his role as the magazine’s editor. In November 2005, in response to the wave of riots in the French banlieues, mainly involving youth of North African heritage, he produced an entire issue that was devoted to the threat of Islam. The provocative title, “Eurabian nightmare”, referenced a notorious conspiracy theory according to which the European elites have done a deal with the Arab world to allow unrestricted Muslim immigration to the continent and facilitate the submission of the indigenous population to Islam. This paranoid fantasy was popularised by Bat Ye’or in her 2005 book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, which provides the same inspiration for Islamophobes that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does for antisemites.

Johnson commissioned a number of hardline Islamophobic authors — Rod Liddle, Patrick Sookdeo and Mark Steyn — to submit material for that issue of the Spectator. They were only too happy to oblige, even managing to outdo their editor in the anti-Islamic vitriol they produced.

In an article titled “The crescent of fear” Rod Liddle offered the following interpretation of the French riots: “there have been whole legions of pundits wheeled out to offer an explanation. It’s deprivation, a lack of integration, poverty, unemployment, incipient French racism and so on. But the dreaded ‘M’ word has scarcely been mentioned at all; these were ‘young’ rioters or sometimes ‘immigrant’ rioters — they were never Muslim rioters. Islam was almost never mentioned…. It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam which gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d’être.”

Patrick Sookhdeo — a right-wing evangelical Christian who had already been given a platform by Johnson earlier in the year to denounce “The myth of moderate Islam — was brought in to pose the question “Will London burn too?” Sookhdeo thought it probably would. “A book published in 1980 by the Islamic Council of Europe,” he wrote, “gives instructions for how Muslim minorities are to work towards achieving domination of European countries through a policy of concentration in geographical areas.”

He continued: “The Muslim community in France is well on the way to becoming … a state within a state. The only substantive goal still outstanding is the implementation of Islamic law (Shariah) instead of French law. Muslims in France have by and large rejected the concept of the integration of individuals and are working instead for the integration of communities. The same is happening in the UK, where the concept of multiculturalism has long been popular.”

Sookheo explained: “Islam is a territorial religion. Any space once gained is considered sacred and should belong to the umma for ever. Any lost space must be regained — even by force if necessary. Migrant Muslim communities in the West are constantly engaged in sacralising new areas — first the inner private spaces of their homes and mosques, and latterly whole neighbourhoods (e.g., Birmingham) by means of marches and processions. So the ultimate end of sacred space theology is autonomy for Muslims of the UK under Islamic law.”

One Muslim critic rightly described this as “the sort of paranoid conspiracy nonsense which would have its author out of the door of any publication of left or right if Jews were its target”.

Mark Steyn for his part (“It’s the demography, stupid”) predicted that Muslim population growth was preparing the ground for a “Eurabian civil war”. He warned: “One day they’ll even be on the beach at St Trop, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their ‘grievances’.”

Steyn was, however, prepared to concede that not all Muslims are the same: “… it’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest.”

He continued: “And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques — and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims — have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe.”

All of this expressed the same sort of irrational anti-Muslim hatred that inspired Anders Breivik. Yet it here it was, thanks to Johnson’s editorship, in the pages of a mainstream conservative magazine.

Having given further vent to his prejudices against Muslims and multiculturalism in his 2006 Telegraph column on Shabina Begum, Johnson returned to the theme later that year, offering the following advice to the then Labour home secretary John Reid: “Here is the bravest thing he could possibly say. He should say that the real problem in our society, and the reason we have so many disaffected and alienated Muslim youths, is that for a generation he and people like him supported the disastrous multicultural agenda. The reason that 40 per cent of British Muslims would like some form of Sharia law in this country is that the Left has traditionally deprecated British institutions and even the teaching of English. A truly brave John Reid would now publicly grovel to Ray Honeyford, the Bradford head who called for teaching in English and who was vilified and persecuted by the Left.”

Johnson was referring to the controversy over Honeyford’s notorious Salisbury Review article from 1984 in which he claimed to expose “the real educational consequences of the general acceptance of the notion that multi-racial inner cities are not only inevitable but, in some sense, desirable”. Honeyford opined: “‘Cultural enrichment’ is the approved term for the West Indian’s right to create an ear splitting cacophony for most of the night to the detriment of his neighbour’s sanity, or for the Notting Hill Festival [sic]whose success or failure is judged by the level of street crime which accompanies it.” Reporting on a meeting at his school with parents of South Asian heritage, Honeyford wrote: “The hysterical political temperament of the Indian sub-continent became evident — an extraordinary sight in an English School Hall.” He denounced as “totalitarian” the proposals by Black activists that “schoolbooks with a racist content should be scrapped” and that “racist teachers should be dismissed”. This was the man Johnson hailed as a hero.

Unfortunately for Johnson, his promotion of right-wing racist bigotry came back to bite him after his selection as Tory candidate for the 2008 London mayoral election. During the election campaign his Labour rival Ken Livingstone raised Johnson’s response to the 7/7 bombings, to the latter’s considerable embarrassment. During an LBC radio hustings in April 2008 Johnson asserted that, if he had been mayor at the time of the attacks, he would have said “exactly the same” as Ken did in his powerful speech defending London as a multicultural city where different communities lived together in peace and would refuse to be divided by the murderous acts of terrorists.

Ken retorted: “I know what Boris would have said because he wrote it in the Spectator the following week. Very different. I said this is a criminal act by a handful of men. It doesn’t define a faith or an ideology. What you said, Boris, was Islam was the problem…. And the Koran is inherently violent. I actually made certain that we were looking at individuals. You smeared an entire faith.”

Typically, Johnston responded by blustering and lying, angrily accusing Ken of misrepresenting him: “Can I tell you what deep offence I take at that? I think you really traduce what I said. My view is that Islam is a religion of peace and indeed I am very proud to say I have Muslim ancestors. My great-grandfather knew the Koran off by heart, Ken Livingstone, and I really wish you would leave off these kinds of tactics, which demean this race and demean your office.”

Still, Ken’s criticism would have hit home. As would the Standard’s subsequent report that the campaign group Muslims 4 Ken were mobilising their co-religionists to vote against Johnson. The paper warned: “Nearly half a million Muslim voters are being urged to support Ken Livingstone against Boris Johnson in the closing stages of the mayoral election. A year-long strategy to mobilise the Muslim vote for Ken moves into overdrive this week, accompanied by a campaign of vilification aimed at Boris.” The Standard claimed: “A sinister element of the campaign is the effort to portray Boris as a Muslim hater. Websites have been bombarded with selected quotes from his journalism. One, Islamophobia Watch, carries a long list of excerpts from his articles under the heading Back Boris Urges BNP.” It was notable that the Standard made no attempt to deny the accuracy of these quotes.

In the outcome, despite the mobilisation of Muslim voters against him, Johnson did win the 2008 London mayoral election. All the same, he must have realised that belligerent hostility towards Islam and multiculturalism was not a good look in a diverse city with a large Muslim population. As a Tory journalist, Boris had been happy to throw red meat to the right-wing readers of the Spectator and Telegraph by endorsing their prejudices against Muslims. But he was astute enough to recognise that the people of London would never tolerate that sort of behaviour on the part of their mayor.

Johnson suddenly discovers the merits of the city’s multicultural diversity

So in order to consolidate his hold on power Johnson changed tack and for a while presented a much more liberal face to Londoners. He suddenly discovered the merits of the city’s multicultural diversity and made a determined effort to mend fences with the Muslim community. In September 2009 he paid an official mayoral visit to the East London Mosque, where he delivered the following speech:

“Whether it’s in theatre, comedy, sports, music or politics, Muslims are challenging the traditional stereotypes and showing that they are, and want to be, a part of the mainstream community. That’s why I urge people, particularly during Ramadan, to find out more about Islam, increase your understanding and learning, even fast for a day with your Muslim neighbour and break your fast at the local mosque. I would be very surprised if you didn’t find that you share more in common than you thought.

“Muslims are at the heart of every aspect of society. Their contribution is something that all Londoners benefit from. Muslim police officers, doctors, scientists and teachers are an essential part of the fabric of London. Islamic finance is contributing to the economy by changing the way Londoners invest, save, borrow and spend. There are valuable lessons that people of all backgrounds can learn from Islam such as the importance of community spirit, family ties, compassion and helping those less fortunate, all of which lie at the heart of the teachings of Ramadan.”

Some of Johnson’s supporters were not best pleased at this astonishing volte-face. He found himself under attack from Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome who repeated smears from Harry’s Place against the East London Mosque and accused Johnson of consorting with terrorist sympathisers. The following month a now defunct right-wing think tank, the laughably misnamed Centre for Social Cohesion (director Douglas Murray), launched an attack on Johnson over his co-sponsorship of Eid in the Square with the Islam Channel, whose CEO, Tunisian oppositionist Mohamed Ali Harrath, spoke at the event. The CSC sought to misrepresent Harrath as a violent extremist.

Basing himself on material supplied by the CSC, Ted Jeory produced a characteristically Islamophobic piece for the Sunday Express (“Boris’s terror link”), while the CSC’s Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens followed this up with an article for ConservativeHome (“Boris fails to tackle Islamic extremism”). Meleagrou-Hitchens complained that the mayor’s actions were “a huge disappointment to those who voted for Boris Johnson in the hope that it would signal a shift away from Ken Livingstone’s policy of engaging with radicals”.

But what did Johnson care? He was facing re-election in 2012 and was quite prepared to perform an ideological U-turn on Islam in order to defuse a potential revolt by Muslim voters. Needless to say, he saw no need to apologise for his earlier statements or explain this opportunist change of line. Like Groucho Marx, Johnson has his principles and if you don’t like them, he has others.

Following his second mayoral election victory Johnson changed tack yet again. He wasn’t planning to stand for a third term, so there was no longer any need to ingratiate himself with London’s large Muslim electorate. Having raised his own political profile during his time as mayor (even if he achieved little else), Johnson’s sights were now set on a return to national politics and a possible leadership bid. The pressure to present a friendly face to the Muslim community, who comprise less than 5% of the population nationally, was considerably reduced. So the liberal mask was thrown off and he reverted to type.

Still, Johnson could understand that simply resurrecting his old “Islam is the problem” rhetoric would be counterproductive. In his response to the murder of Lee Rigby in 2013 the crude Islamophobic rhetoric of July 2005 was replaced with a rather more sophisticated approach. Johnson told readers of his Telegraph column that “we must be clear in our heads that there is no sense in blaming Islam, a religion that gives consolation and enrichment to the lives of hundreds of millions of peaceful people”. Instead he identified the problem as “Islamism”. According to Johnson:

“This is a sinister political agenda that promotes a sense of grievance and victimhood among a minority of Muslims. The Islamists want universal sharia law, and other mumbo jumbo. Above all, they want power over others: and so they prey on young men who feel in some way rejected by society, and they fill those young men with a horrible and deluded sense of self-importance. They tell these people that they are not alone in suffering injustice; that they belong to a much wider group of victims — the Muslims — and that the only way to avenge these injustices is jihad. These Islamist evangelists have no allegiance to the Western society they live in and whose benefits systems they abuse: far from it — their avowed intent is to create a sexist and homophobic Muslim caliphate.”

The idea that there are many different strands of Islamism, most of which reject terrorist violence, was of course completely lost on Johnson. For him, political Islam in all its shades was the enemy. Not only that, but he went on to suggest that even non-political conservative interpretations of Islam are connected to violent extremism. Taking up a recent moral panic over gender-segregated meetings on campus, he wrote: “The universities need to be much, much tougher in their monitoring of Islamic societies. It is utterly wrong to have segregated meetings in a state-funded centre of learning.”

Johnson’s new hard line went down well with the right-wing press. The Daily Mail (“Boris Johnson has attacked Islamists who want to impose ‘mumbo-jumbo’ sharia law on Britain”) was full of enthusiasm, as was the Telegraph (“Universities should stop pandering to Islamic extremists by allowing segregated lectures, Boris Johnson says today”). Johnson must have been delighted. This was just the sort of publicity he needed to boost his support among the Tory rank and file and position himself for a future leadership challenge.

In March 2014, following the sentencing of Lee Rigby’s killers, Johnson returned to the subject of the Islamist threat. He insisted that “we must be firm to the point of ruthlessness in opposing behaviour that undermines our values”, including “Islamic radicalisation”. Probably taking his inspiration from tabloid hysteria about schoolboy jihadis, Johnson warned that “some young people are now being radicalised at home”. There could, he wrote, be “hundreds of children” whose parents were teaching them “crazy stuff: the kind of mad yearning for murder and death that we heard from Lee Rigby’s killers”. Johnson had a solution: the authorities should dispense with “political correctness” and children considered to be under threat of “radicalisation” by their Muslim parents should be taken into care.

Quite what this had to do with the murder of Lee Rigby was unclear, given that both his killers were Muslim converts who had been brought up in Christian families. But Johnson’s proposal met with the approval of the Daily Mail (“Children of Islamist radicals should be in care, suggests Boris: Mayor of London warns hundreds at risk of being turned into fanatics by extreme parents”) and also the English Defence League. While some EDL supporters took the view that the problem would be more effectively solved by expelling the entire Muslim community from the UK, or killing them, there was considerable agreement with Johnson’s plan (“BORIS FOR PRIME MINISTER!”, “He talks sense”, “Long live Boris!”, “Good on you Boris, we need more of you”).

The Daily Mail rallies the Tory rank and file in support of Johnson

Having re-established his right-wing credentials at the expense of the Muslim community, Johnson then secured his selection as parliamentary candidate for the safe Tory seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. So he would have been well placed to contest the Tory leadership in the event of a poor showing by the party in the 2015 general election. Unfortunately for Johnson, against most predictions the Tories managed to secure an overall parliamentary majority in that election. David Cameron’s position was apparently secure and Johnson’s leadership plans had to be put on hold. Then, when Cameron did resign in 2016 after losing the EU referendum, Johnson’s leadership campaign was torpedoed by his friend and ally Michael Gove. Now, following his own resignation as foreign secretary in protest at the government’s proposals for a softer Brexit than Tory hardliners favour, Johnson’s leadership ambitions are back on track, so it was predictable that he would return to his old right-wing populist rhetoric against Muslims. He has no doubt calculated that a UKIP-lite combination of hard Brexit and Islamophobia will play well with the Tory grassroots.

It is uncertain how all this is going to unravel. The Daily Mail has been rallying the Tory rank and file in support of Johnson, depicting him as the innocent victim of a “witch hunt”, while the bookies now have him vying with Sajid Javid as favourite to become the next Tory party leader. Johnson’s immediate political future hinges on the outcome of the investigation his party is currently conducting in order to establish whether disciplinary action should be taken against him. Fellow Tories who want to see Johnson dealt with appropriately might be advised to draw the party’s attention to his long record of Islamophobia, as detailed in this article. The “letter boxes” and “bank robber” comments were not some isolated gaffe. When it comes to inflaming public opinion against Muslims, Johnson is a repeat offender.

Bob Pitt blogs at https://medium.com/@pitt_bob

Source: Medium

It’s not clear that the Free Tommy Robinson campaign will be able to sustain itself for very long as a narrow protest movement.

In the space of just over a month the far right has organised two very large anti-Muslim demonstrations in London, both of which ended with mass rallies outside Downing Street. The first (pictured above) on 6 May was billed as a “Day for Freedom”, and was called to protest against the imposition of a permanent Twitter ban on former English Defence League leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson). Twitter had taken this action in the aftermath of Darren Osborne’s conviction over the Finsbury Park terror attack, which was inspired by Yaxley-Lennon’s inflammatory online propaganda — although you wouldn’t know that from his supporters’ self-righteous denunciations of the suppression of their hero’s right to “free speech”.

The second demonstration on 9 June was organised under the slogan “Free Tommy Robinson”. It followed Yaxley-Lennon receiving a 13-month prison sentence after he admitted to contempt of court by filming outside a “grooming” trial at Leeds Crown Court as defendants arrived for the hearing. Although Yaxley-Lennon had been given a suspended sentence for the same offence in Canterbury last year, and told explicitly by the judge that he would face jail if he repeated it, he went ahead and did so anyway. (For a detailed examination of the legal basis for the sentence, and a thorough demolition of the nonsense about Yaxley-Lennon being some sort of free speech martyr and a victim of Establishment persecution, see here.)

The Free Tommy Robinson rally in Whitehall was compered by Raheem Kassam, who was until recently editor of Breitbart London and is the author of Enoch Was Right: ‘Rivers of Blood’ 50 Years On. Kassam relayed a message of support from former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Platform speakers included UKIP leader Gerard Batten and former UKIP, now independent, MEP Janice Atkinson. They were joined by Anne Marie Waters, a former contender for the UKIP leadership and now leader of the far-right groupuscule For Britain. A European dimension to the proceedings was provided by Geert Wilders of the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid and Filip Dewinter of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, both of whom are stars of the international counter-jihadist movement, and by Louis Aliot, vice-president of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, who sent a statement of solidarity. The final speaker was Kevin Carroll, cousin of Yaxley-Lennon and co-founder of the English Defence League. In addition to defending Yaxley-Lennon as a political prisoner and demanding his release, the speeches featured angry denunciations of mass immigration and multiculturalism, and emotional appeals to resist the spread of Islam.

Many of the demonstrators appear to have been supporters of the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, an Islamophobic outfit based on football hooligan firms which played a significant role in the Day for Freedom protest (though the leadership of the DFLA reportedly did not mobilise for this second event). Nazi salutes were evident during the demonstration, which was also characterised by outbreaks of violence, with hundreds of protesters attacking the police, throwing metal crowd barriers, bottles and road signs, and injuring five officers. A passing tourist bus was occupied and damaged. Nine arrests were made — with no doubt more to follow after police have examined CCTV footage.

So far, so predictable. What was unprecedented, though, was the numbers involved. Estimates for the size of the crowd ranged from “possibly as many as 10,000” (Hope Not Hate) to “around 15,000” (Stand Up To Racism) — or even up to 20,000 if you’re prepared to believe Yaxley-Lennon’s own supporters (Raheem Kassam and Jihad Watch). It was certainly a big increase on the 5,000 who attended the Day for Freedom a month earlier. In fact you have to go back to the 1930s and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists to find the last time the far right was able to organise a rally on such a scale.

These two big Tommy Robinson protests prompted Andrew Burgin of Left Unity to initiate a discussion of their implications, with an article on the Public Reading Rooms website titled “The rise of the far right — what is to be done? Opening the debate”. He characterised recent developments as follows: “A new political coalition of the right is in formation. It is in its infancy but it is beginning to draw together UKIP, EDL remnants, Trump supporters, Farage, Christian Fundamentalist groups, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, Tommy Robinson and disaffected right-wing Tories. Most of these groups were represented at the ‘Free Speech’ march and rally in May 2018 called after Robinson was banned from twitter. What unites them all are the campaigns ‘against [Islamic] terrorism’ and for ‘free speech’ and for Robinson’s release from prison.”

Anyone familiar with the far right would have wondered what Nigel Farage was doing on that list. The former UKIP leader had not been involved in the Tommy Robinson solidarity movement in any way, yet Farage was accorded a potentially central role in this emerging “new political coalition of the right” by Andrew. In order to “become a more powerful political force”, he wrote, the emergent coalition would require “serious finance of the kind that could be provided by people like Aaron Banks”. (The reference is to Arron Banks, a former major financial backer of UKIP who played a leading role in the Leave.EU campaign.) “Banks and Farage have been discussing for some time how to launch a new political project”, Andrew argued, and the forces brought together in defence of Tommy Robinson have now apparently provided them with an opportunity to implement their scheme.

Fortunately, this is an exercise in political fantasy. Obnoxiously reactionary and xenophobic though his politics may be, Farage is not a stupid man. He has sufficient grip on reality to understand that it is impossible to build an effective political movement on the basis of cooperation with a criminal thug like Tommy Robinson. If there is one thing guaranteed to drive away the “disaffected right-wing Tories” whose support would be necessary for any new political project Farage and Banks might launch, it is involvement with Yaxley-Lennon and his hooligan followers who engage in drunken assaults on the police.

Arron Banks did tweet his support for Yaxley-Lennon, it’s true, but Farage was having none of it. On 30 May he told listeners to his LBC talk show: “Let’s be clear, Tommy Robinson was under a court order not to interfere with the judicial process in any way at all. He chose, for reasons of self-publicity and not to benefit anything that would help society, he chose wilfully to breach that. He was warned that he was in breach of that, decided to continue. Frankly, the judge had almost no choice but to give him a jail sentence. So I think Robinson frankly was out there asking for trouble…. I think for those of you who see Robinson as a hero, well OK, maybe he does stand up for his point of view, but believe you me his imprisonment in this case is not heroic in any way at all.”

UKIP’s current leader Gerard Batten takes a very different view from Farage, of course. Batten was not only a platform speaker at the Free Tommy rally but also at the Day for Freedom event in May, and he hasn’t hesitated to publicise his friendly relations with Yaxley-Lennon, or with continental counter-jihadists like Wilders. Batten’s approach as UKIP leader is very much in line with the hardcore Islamophobia that he has been promoting for many years now, often to the embarrassment of his own party.

When Batten took over the leadership of UKIP in February the party was in a serious crisis. Having by his own account managed to stave off imminent bankruptcy, Batten still had to address his party’s catastrophic loss of political support — UKIP got a derisory 1.9% of the vote in last year’s general election, down from 12.6% in 2015. He has evidently gambled on restoring UKIP’s electoral prospects through a shift to the right based on his own obsessive and deluded hatred of Islam, hence his enthusiasm for publicly associating the party with the movement around Yaxley-Lennon. This looks like a major miscalculation to me.

I don’t have much time for the politics of Hope Not Hate, but an article by Nick Lowles published in the Independent in February hit the nail on the head. He described Batten’s election as interim UKIP leader (subsequently confirmed for a further year in April) as “a disaster for any hope Ukip might have of resurrecting its political fortunes”. By making this choice, Lowles wrote, UKIP members had “sounded the death knell for their party”. He warned that Farage remained a danger because of his high profile and personal popularity. But under the leadership of an extremist crank like Batten, Lowles argued, UKIP itself was doomed. Who could disagree?

Farage has in the past declared UKIP’s opposition to Batten’s extreme Islamophobic views, which he obviously feared would undermine his efforts to move the party from the political fringes into the mainstream. Now, under Batten’s leadership, the party appears set on a course that would reverse that process. Understandably, Farage is not best pleased by this. No sooner had Andrew Burgin’s article appeared than the Guardian reported that Farage and other prominent UKIP members had privately expressed forthright criticisms of Batten’s public endorsement of the Free Tommy Robinson campaign, and that there was even the possibility of UKIP MEPs resigning over the issue. “I think this gets to the heart of not just the positioning of a political party, but of judgment too”, Farage was quoted as telling a meeting of UKIP activists. “And judgment really, really matters. Tommy Robinson is seen to be a hero by many. But actually, what the bloody hell was he doing outside the court?”

In a response to Andrew Burgin’s piece, also posted on the Public Reading Rooms website, Sue Sparks had a rather different take on this. The collapse of UKIP’s vote, she argued, had left many of its former supporters without a political home. Some of them have abandoned UKIP for the Tories or Labour, but others are “there for the picking by forces much further to the right”. She therefore envisaged a development rather different from the Farage-Banks project, which if it ever materialised would presumably position itself slightly to the left of UKIP, or at least the politics pursued by its current leadership, in an attempt to appeal to voters on the more moderate right. But I don’t find Sue Sparks’ scenario any more convincing than Andrew Burgin’s.

There is of course a precedent for a political formation to the right of UKIP attracting some popular support, namely the British National Party during the first decade of this century. At its peak the BNP had over 50 councillors and a member of the London Assembly, and in the 2010 European parliamentary election it managed to acquire two MEPs before tearing itself apart shortly afterwards in an outbreak of political in-fighting. These were modest gains, and the BNP was always marginal to British politics, but its electoral achievements were considerably greater than those of any previous far-right party in the UK. In the 1970s, for example, the National Front had been able to mobilise large street protests but failed to elect a single councillor. In fact the only electoral victories registered by the far right during that decade were the two council seats in Blackburn won by the National Party, a short-lived breakaway from the NF led by its former chairman John Kingsley Read.

The main explanation for the BNP’s relative success was that it renounced the traditional twin-track fascist strategy of combining electoral politics with shows of physical force. This approach had been based on the reasoning that if a far-right party proved it could control the streets and intimidate its opponents, that would increase the party’s appeal to voters, who would recognise it as a strong movement capable of imposing order on society. However, while that may have worked for Mussolini and Hitler in circumstances of extreme crisis in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, it was plainly counterproductive in the very different conditions prevailing in Britain in the late twentieth century. Some influential figures in the BNP quite sensibly concluded that taking to the streets with gangs of shaven-headed hooligans throwing Nazi salutes was going not going to attract voters but repel them. When Nick Griffin replaced John Tyndall as BNP chairman in 1999 he implemented what became known as the “suits not boots” strategy. The party abandoned the old “march and grow” method of attracting publicity and recruits by staging provocative demonstrations and, as Griffin put it, sought to present “an image of moderate reasonableness” to the electorate.

If a party to the right of UKIP is to replace the now moribund BNP by gaining support off the back of the Free Tommy Robinson campaign, the For Britain Movement that Anne Marie Waters launched last year following her failed UKIP leadership bid would be well placed to do this. For Britain has certainly become a pole of attraction for fragments of the far right, and has recruited some quite prominent former BNP members, including Eddy Butler, architect of the “Rights for Whites” campaign that resulted in the election victory of Derek Beacon in Millwall back in 1994. For Britain’s profile with the general public has been raised by the disgraceful comments in support of Waters and her poisonous little group of racists from former Smiths’ singer Morrissey. (“I have been following a new party called For Britain which is led by Anne Marie Waters. It is the first time in my life that I will vote for a political party.”)

But Waters’ unhinged rants against Islam, and her failure to dissociate herself from the violent element within the Tommy Robinson solidarity movement, hardly present the “image of moderate reasonableness” that was crucial to the electoral advances made by the BNP in the noughties. Instead, Waters appears intent on repeating the mistakes of the pre-Griffin BNP. As things stand, For Britain is no more than a tiny and politically irrelevant sect, and if it continues on its present course it will never be anything else. In the May local elections For Britain managed to stand all of 15 candidates, not one of whom came remotely close to winning, with over half finishing last in the wards they contested. In last week’s Lewisham East by-election — where For Britain’s candidate was Waters herself, fresh from her triumphant appearance before the masses at the Free Tommy Robinson rally — the party got just 266 votes (1.2%). When she stood in the same constituency in the 2015 general election, as the UKIP candidate, Waters finished in third place behind Labour and the Tories with 9.1%.

UKIP’s own campaign in the Lewisham East by-election was in line with Batten’s shift to the right. Its “Stop the Khanage” leaflet, which held London mayor Sadiq Khan personally responsible for knife crime in the capital, neatly combined a call for law and order with an attack on a prominent Muslim politician. Unlike For Britain, UKIP is an established political brand with widespread name recognition and possesses at least some residual credibility as an electoral force — its Lewisham East candidate, David Kurten, is one of two UKIP representatives on the London Assembly. If hardline Islamophobic politics were able to attract substantial electoral support, then the beneficiary of such a development would be UKIP itself, rather than an obscure splinter group further to its right. Judging by the result in Lewisham East, however, there is no sign of that happening. Although he finished ahead of Waters, Kurten did very poorly too, receiving only 380 votes (1.7%).

As an example of a far-right party building itself into a significant political force on the basis of Islamophobic street protests, some anti-fascists have pointed to Germany. In another contribution to the Public Reading Rooms debate, Phil Hearse asserted that “the precursor of the hard right AfD (Alliance for Germany) that now has 94 seats in the Bundestag, was the street activist PEGIDA movement”. If anyone concludes from this that the Free Tommy Robinson campaign could play a role in the formation of an AfD-type party in the UK, I think they are mistaken.

For a start, Phil Hearse gets the chronology wrong. The AfD was launched as a eurosceptic party in March 2013 and by the time it held its first convention the next month it had recruited 8,000 members. The new party contested the federal elections in September that year and got more than two million votes, just short of the 5% necessary to win representation in the Bundestag. In the May 2014 European elections the AfD again received over two million votes, which on a lower turnout came to 7% of the total and won them seven MEPs. In August and September that year the party gained seats in the state parliaments of Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, with 10–12% of the vote. By the time PEGIDA was launched in October 2014 the AfD was well established and already making political advances.

During the winter of 2014–15 PEGIDA’s torchlight marches and rallies against the “Islamisation of the West” did attract large numbers in Dresden, with as many as 25,000 attending one demonstration in January 2015. But elsewhere in Germany its sister organisations drew no more support than similar protests by HoGeSa, which like the DFLA had the more specific aim of mobilising football hooligans on the basis of hostility to Muslims. The Dresden marches themselves attracted a hooligan element along with neo-Nazis, who were responsible for some acts of violence, but in that city at least the protests clearly drew on much wider layers of support. The challenge for the AfD, which has experienced sharp internal conflicts over this issue, was how to win over PEGIDA sympathisers without alienating more centrist voters through association with an extremist street movement.

After ousting her more moderate predecessor and taking over the party leadership in 2015, Frauke Petry shifted the party away from its original emphasis on opposing the EU towards a hardline Islamophobic, anti-migrant stance, which obviously appealed to PEGIDA supporters. But even Petry baulked at establishing links with an organisation led by Hitler-imitator Lutz Bachmann, whose criminal record — which includes convictions for burglary, drug-dealing, assault and more recently incitement to racial hatred — is almost as extensive as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s. Under Petry’s leadership, AfD members were in fact banned from speaking or displaying party symbols at PEGIDA events. It was only after Petry’s sidelining and subsequent resignation from the AfD last year that the new more aggressively ethno-nationalist leadership relaxed the ban and moved to establish a closer relationship with PEGIDA. By the time this development took place, the big street protests of 2014–15 had long since subsided.

The history of AfD-PEGIDA relations therefore provides little support for the idea that the Free Tommy Robinson protest movement could serve as the springboard for a similarly successful far-right Islamophobic party in the UK. Particularly so, when you also take into account the different electoral system in Germany, where the Bundestag is elected on the basis of mixed-member proportional representation. The AfD’s electoral breakthrough last September, which gave them their 94 parliamentary seats, was achieved on the basis of just 12.6% of the vote. Coincidentally, this is exactly the same level of support that UKIP attracted here in the 2015 general election. Under our first-past-the-post system, though, that gave UKIP just a single MP.

Some might say this analysis places excessive weight on electoral politics. But it is their success in elections that provides the parties of the continental European far right with their political clout. Take Geert Wilders, who spoke at the Free Tommy Robinson rally. His Partij voor de Vrijheid scored 13% in last year’s Dutch parliamentary elections and won 20 seats, making it the second largest party in the 150-member House of Representatives. This gives the PVV both political credibility and an aura of legitimacy, while also providing Wilders with a platform to promote his rabidly Islamophobic politics. In 2010–12, when the PVV held the balance of power in parliament and the centre-right Rutte administration was dependent on an agreement with Wilders to implement its legislative programme, the PVV was able to directly influence government policy. Even in the absence of such a pact, Wilders can still exercise influence over legislation, as rival parties adopt right-wing anti-migrant, anti-Muslim policies for fear of their voters defecting to the PVV. Cross-party support for the “burqa ban” initiated by Wilders is a case in point.

Tarnished by its association with street hooliganism and blocked from pursuing an electoral road, the “new political coalition of the right” that has come together in defence of Yaxley-Lennon cannot conceivably produce an organisation that would have an impact on British politics comparable to that of the PVV or other far-right parties in Europe. So that threat is pretty much non-existent. It’s not clear that the Free Tommy Robinson campaign will even be able to sustain itself for very long as a narrow protest movement, given that the man himself pleaded guilty to contempt of court and failing a successful appeal against his sentence is not going to be released from prison any time soon, however large and angry the demonstrations demanding his freedom may be. Hopefully a sense of futility will sink in and the movement will eventually fizzle out.

This doesn’t mean that the Tommy Robinson protests pose no threat. However, while the numbers involved are shocking, these demonstrations are just one dramatic and publicly visible aspect a vile campaign to whip up a backward section of the population into a hysterical fury against Muslims. Far more of this campaign is conducted online than on the streets. The incitement of anti-Muslim hatred via social media has real-world consequences, though, as the terrorist attack on the mosque in Finsbury Park last year showed. Not only Yaxley-Lennon but also the far-right group Britain First were implicated in the perpetrator’s turn to violent extremism. The banning of Britain First from both Twitter and Facebook, and the Twitter ban on Yaxley-Lennon himself, were significant blows against online Islamophobia, given the huge number of people they influenced — Yaxley-Lennon’s @TRobinsonNewEra Twitter account had over four hundred thousand followers, while the Britain First Facebook page had more than two million likes. Pressure needs to be put on Twitter and Facebook to apply such bans on far-right hate-speech more widely.

Another important step would be for an incoming Labour government to carry out a review of existing anti-hatred legislation. The current law against religious hatred is largely useless and allows the far right to incite hatred against Muslims in a way that would lead to prosecution under the much more effective racial hatred law if similar rhetoric was directed against Jews. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we need to bring the legal position across the UK into line with that in Northern Ireland, where there is an all-purpose anti-hatred law that provides equal protection against incitement to hatred on the grounds of “religious belief, sexual orientation, disability, colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins”. That law is currently being used to prosecute Jayda Fransen and Paul Golding of Britain First, who have been charged in connection with speeches they made in Belfast last year. The absurdity of the current situation is that speeches like this can lead to criminal charges in Northern Ireland, but speeches like this remain entirely within the law in England. That anomaly needs to be rectified.