I felt that it was only a matter of time before the mainstream media embarked on a series of major hit pieces against Tommy Robinson, such as we have seen in yesterday’s issue of The Sunday Times in an article written by Andrew Gilligan. The strength of feeling engendered in ordinary people by his unjust gaoling by a judge at Leeds Crown Court, has without doubt frightened a government and a governing class that is mired in Islamophilia and which probably hopes Mr Robinson and all that he stands for will go away. Unfortunately for those who rule us, this has not happened. The release of Mr Robinson from imprisonment by none other than the Lord Chief Justice, and the Appeal Court’s decision to order a re-hearing of Mr Robinson’s contempt case in front of the most senior judge at the Old Bailey, has kept the case alive in the public’s mind and has brought many more people into the nationalist, most notably the non-racist civic nationalist cause.

The furore over Mr Robinson’s imprisonment and what is increasingly being seen by the public as Mr Robinson’s adverse treatment whilst in gaol, has also stoked the fires of anger among Britons. For example, I’m noticing far more people, including people who would not normally be vocally political, speaking up not just for Tommy Robinson, but also speaking up in disgust at some of the problems brought to Britain by Orthodox Islam. The issue of the Islamic Rape Gangs that scar dozens upon dozens of British towns and cities has come into the open partly due to the work of Mr Robinson and his various organisations and political vehicles.

Therefore it was almost inevitable that the mainstream media would, possibly because of government pressure or because many British journalists live and work in a left-leaning bubble, go after Tommy Robinson in a big way. Evidence of a major push to discredit Mr Robinson and by extension the various campaigns to alleviate the problems that Islam has brought to Britain comes in the form of the full page article in yesterday’s Sunday Times.

The article, unfortunately hidden behind a pay wall, is an attempt to paint Tommy Robinson as some sort of scam artist beholden to shady ‘far right’ figures from overseas and who is emotionally manipulating his social media viewers into sending him money. Like the mendacious grievance mongering taqiyya artists of Tell Mama and some of the far leftists at places like Urban 75, the Sunday Times article makes great use of Mr Robinson’s connections in the United States and in Canada, namely David Horowitz, Ezra Levant and Robert Shillman. The article attempts to paint Messers Horowitz, Levant and Shillman as dangerous far rightists, an impression that would rapidly be dispelled by those reading as much of the stuff produced by these people as I have. I see little there that would trigger me to think that any of these people were ‘far right’. Back in the day, the early 1980s to be a bit more precise, I marched alongside my Black and Asian mates against the genuinely racist far right that had that time taken the form of the National Front. I know what neo-Nazi’s look like and two Jews and an Israel supporter, which Messers Horowitz, Levant and Shillman are, doesn’t look that ‘far right’ to me. These people are conservatives and in my opinion definitely not neo-Nazis.

Apart from the use of the names of those who have contributed to the funding of Tommy Robinson’s counterjihad and human rights work in order to make them feel more sinister, the Sunday Times piece was in large part built from information from a single source, Lucy Brown a former employee of Tommy Robinson. Lucy Brown, who was sacked by Mr Robinson after she invited to the huge A Day For Freedom demonstration in May, a Muslim, Ali Dawah, who had been allegedly linked to death threats to Mr Robinson’s family. Quite rightly in my opinion, Mr Robinson may have thought that there should be no place at an event calling for the restoration of peaceful free speech in Britain for someone who had allegedly threatened violence to one of the organisers. There was an altercation between Mr Robinson and Lucy Brown over this issue and the result of this was that Tommy Robinson sacked Lucy Brown.

When reading the Sunday Times article it’s probably a good idea to keep in mind that because Mr Robinson fired Lucy Brown over something like the Ali Dawah incident therefore Ms Brown and her perceived grievance against Tommy Robinson has become something that can be quite readily exploited by the mainstream media. This Sunday Times story is built on a single source and therefore is a personal account of life within the Tommy Robinson camp.

Lucy Brown, who is I believe someone who describes herself as a former Leftist, paints a picture of life working with Tommy Robinson in a wholly negative light. Lucy Brown claims life working with the Tommy Robinson as ‘chaotic’ and she also alleges that those involved with the Tommy Robinson organisation are more concerned with social media traffic levels than with campaigning.

I’ve little doubt that there was some element of chaos in the Tommy Robinson circle, this is because when it comes to doing any sort of activism there is very rarely a defined time table nor set hours. Some parts of life, whether campaigning or newsgathering by necessity involve a certain amount of chaos. Lucy Brown makes a lot of noise about having to suddenly go overseas but this is normal when events are fast moving. I’ve done both newsgathering and campaigning over the years and her complaint that she and others had to sleep in their car because the trip had been arranged so suddenly is to my mind a bit weak. We’ve all had to up sticks quickly sometimes to get to a story or to a protest or to a meeting, it goes with the territory and as for sleeping in the car, some of us, for the above reasons, have become experts at it. On various ‘doorstepping’ jobs I did over the years, myself and the reporters whom I’ve have worked with, probably slept in more cars outside more prisons, factories, offices and the homes of sleazy politicians than Ms Brown will probably ever manage. Sleeping in the car is sometimes part of the job.

Lucy Brown is also trying to give the impression that there is financial mismanagement within the Tommy Robinson organisation and this is something that Tommy and those around him need to address as soon as possible. There’s been what looks like some very selective quoting by the Sunday Times of Ms Brown’s words and the paper is using her claim of boasts about the levels of donations by Caolan Robertson and George Llewellyn-John, two more of Mr Robinson’s employees, to make it look as if the campaigns are primarily set up for financial gain. This, along with the idea that the ‘far right’ is little more than a money-making scam, is incidentally a similar line of attack that I’ve seen used by both Tell Mama and by far Leftists.

These claims of mismanagement and bad faith action are, we need to remember, coming from someone who was removed from Mr Robinson’s employ for something that might reasonably be described as gross misconduct and this may well have coloured Lucy Brown’s story. However, issues of financial transparency in the Robinson organisation should be tackled so that there can be no question of this issue being exploited by opponents in the future. Being clear and public about financial activities would not leave a weapon in the hands of either the Left, the Government or the mainstream media. I would suggest that Mr Robinson’s next hire for his organisation should be an accountant/financial manager.

The Sunday Times article was also very very selective in the descriptions of the content of the videos that Tommy has made both whilst he was employed at Rebel Media and since he went independent. The two stories that the Sunday Times chose to comment on were Mr Robinson’s involvement in the Justice for Our Boys campaign and his video made following the Manchester Islamic bombing that took the lives of 22 innocent people. The paper said that Mr Robinson had called those living in a Muslim area of Manchester ‘enemy combatants’ but did not bother to give any context to this phrase. Those of us who have watched this particular video know that he was referring to those who did and said nothing about the extremist mosque that was attended occasionally by the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi. He was also speaking about the large numbers of Islamic terrorists that have emerged from this particular Islamised area of Manchester. It was, I believe, therefore fair of Mr Robinson to say that a small area that had produced over a dozen Islamic terrorists was full of ‘enemy combatants’.

The second example of Tommy Robinson’s output that the Sunday Times and Lucy Brown chose to criticise was the Justice for our Boys campaign and this is the aspect of the Sunday Times story which I believe could be the most damaging to Tommy’s hard won reputation as a non-racist nationalist. The Sunday Times attempted to paint this campaign as being motivated primarily by racism because the driver of the vehicle that killed three teenagers in Hayes West London earlier this year had a Hindu Asian name. The Sunday Times is attempting to portray the Justice for Our Boys campaign as being a bit ‘tin foil hat’ and are trying to give the impression that the Justice for Our Boys campaign is little more than a groundless conspiracy theory. However, there are suggestions made by the families of the teenagers who were killed that the police did not investigate this case as thoroughly as they could have done and I personally believe that there are enough grounds to at least re-open some aspects of this investigation into these killings.

Unfortunately the Justice for Our Boys campaign has not done itself any favours in building a wide support base for their cause because of some of the people that, if you believe Luke Nash-Jones of the Make Britain Great Again group, the Justice for Our Boys campaign have chosen to associate with. The Justice For Our Boys campaign by choosing to share a platform with fanboys of Nick Griffin etc has not only probably holed its campaign below the waterline, but is also being used by the media as a stick to beat Tommy Robinson with. Although I believe that the Justice For Our Boys campaign has a degree of both legal and ethical merit, because of the activities of some of those involved in the campaign, I think it would be politic for both Mr Robinson and those associated with him to draw back somewhat from supporting the Justice For Our Boys campaign. The last thing that Mr Robinson or the wider counterjihad community needs at the moment is being involved with high profile campaigns which refuse to drop an association with those who are both aggressive and divisive, such as some of those who have been invited to speak at Justice For Our Boys demonstrations.

Lucy Brown also included in her a lot of personal attacks on Tommy Robinson and pushing the idea that he is a lazy journalist who doesn’t gather and marshal facts but instead spends all his time on Twitter. Tommy Robinson does indeed spend a lot of time on social media but that is to be expected for a campaign that has used social media highly effectively to put out a message that challenges the happy clappy multicultural narrative put out by government and the mainstream media. I think anybody who is involved in any sort of campaigning in the modern age is bound to spend an inordinate amount of time on social media building links with people, gathering stories and and promoting the cause.

I thought that Mr Shillman and Mr Levant did the right thing in not commenting when approached by the Sunday Times for comment on the allegations made by Ms Brown about finance matters in the Tommy Robinson organisation. Although the Sunday Times made the attempt to make these people look shifty because of their no comment stance, the situation would have been far worse had they made comments to the Sunday Times journalists which would without doubt have been twisted to fit the anti-Tommy narrative of this piece.

Lucy Brown is using the Sunday Times piece to promote the narrative that she is some sort of whistle-blower and someone who wanted to get out of the Tommy Robinson organisation before it turned people, in her words, ‘to dark places’. Personally I don’t altogether buy this narrative. Firstly because not everyone who claims to be a whistle-blower is playing a coherent tune or notes that are true. Secondly, there are questions to ask about the motivations of Lucy Brown because these allegations are coming from someone who was removed from Tommy Robinson’s organisation and is obviously miffed for having this happen to her. There are without doubt some problems with some of the campaigns that Tommy Robinson has become involved in, namely the Justice For Our Boys campaign, but it cannot be denied that Mr Robinson has been consistent in both decrying racism and in keeping the focus on the damage being done to our society by the ideology of Islam.

Does this Sunday Times article make me less of a Tommy Robinson supporter? No it does not. There may be organisational issues that Mr Robinson needs to deal with urgently on his return from his well deserved break with his family, but at the end of the day, Mr Robinson has not just talked the talk about Britain’s Islam problems, he’s also walked the walk and has had the prison time to show for it.

The Sunday Times piece is not something that we should think is unexpected. It was bound to happen that mainstream media and government will exploit whatever they can to stop the rise in numbers of those who see the ideology of Islam for the threat that it is. If there are lessons to be learned from this incident it is that we should be careful whom we trust and also take care not to leave a weapon on the tabletop that can be picked up and used against us by our enemies. Maybe the best thing to do from now on in is to ignore Lucy Brown as best we can and leave her to enjoy what she may have got for her part in this story, whether that be thirty pieces of silver or some well paid shifts at Uncle Rupert’s newspapers. I don’t think that this ‘expose’ will damage Mr Robinson or the counter jihad campaign in the long run but it does show the lengths that the media and the state will go to to shut down alternative views.