Douglas Murray on Tommy Robinson

Let's start with something contentious, I suppose. Tammy and I went out on a limb recently and interviewed Tommy Robinson. I saw, I've been watching Tommy for a long time, and he's struck me as particularly interesting. Well, for two reasons. The first reason, I suppose, is because he is a genuine working-class guy, and for better or worse. And second, I haven't seen anyone anywhere who's been more unwavering in his commitment to reveal the atrocities of the grooming gangs in the UK, which are actually organized patterns of activity that are very persuasive, that are so terrible that it's almost impossible to talk about them without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.

So now there's no doubt that there are many things that you could accuse Tommy Robinson of, and many things many of those he would admit to. But to me, and also to my wife, fair enough. But the fact that he's pointed his finger at something that seriously needs to be attended to, and has paid a major price for it, is also not ignorable. It's like, do we expect someone who's brave enough to do that to also be perfect in every regard? That's asking a bit much, given that there are many people who, in principle, have moral characters much more unsullied than Tommy Robinson, who are cowering in silence constantly in the face of this absolute brutal atrocity.

Well, so we interviewed him, and what did I think of Tommy? He's very articulate. He can certainly make a case for himself. And then I thought it was up to the audience to listen and to make their own judgment. Now that was before the recent March that Robinson and his crew organized in London, which, in my estimation—I'm interested in your perspective—went as peacefully and well as the protests in Ottawa, which it was modeled after. So I thought his crew handled that extraordinarily well.

Now, in the aftermath of those protests, of course, all sorts of chaotic hell has broken loose. And, um, well, why don't you... you are much closer to such things than I am, I mean, being a denizen of that country. I'm looking from outside, trying to make sense of it, but my sense at the moment is that the UK is somewhat of a tinderbox. And so, yes, and I wish it hadn't been so predictable.

Um, again, I wrote about this so many years ago, warned about it. The Strange Death of Europe was largely my last ditch attempt to warn my own society and other Western countries not to go down the path that they were precisely going down. And as the former government minister said in The Times a couple of days ago, the thing about my predictions on that was that I made them not with any glee, but in a spirit of deep lamentation about what was about to happen to my society.

And as I see it, there, Tommy Robinson's a very interesting example of this whole thing. But let me just explain how I see it. The whole configuration of recent days started when a 17-year-old went into a Taylor Swift dance class a couple weeks ago now and started hacking at young girls with a knife—killed three girls, nine years old, thereabouts, wounded many others. And the news of that came out, and a very typical modern British, modern European, modern Western thing happened, which was that in the aftermath, people started to suspect something was being kept from them.

Now, wiser heads would wait, but not everyone's a wise head after nine-year-old girls are bludgeoned to death, um, stabbed to death. So false information went out online saying that the attack had arrived on one of the many boats of illegal migrants that come across the English Channel every week—that was untrue. In fact, he was the son of immigrants from Rwanda. But people started to sense that there was a cover-up of some kind, or at least the news was being managed. The police in Britain seem to always think they're being very clever at this, and it's always seemed to me that they exacerbate every problem they put their mind to.

Um, they insisted that the young man was originally from Cardiff, the capital of Wales, and people just sensed, “There's something there, something they're holding from us." Sure enough, um, anyway, the point is, is very unpleasant, ugly. And again, evil forces can get unleashed at such a time, the spirit of revenge. Some protests started peacefully at first, then some violent. A mosque was targeted nearby, and then violence started to spread out to other towns. Then Muslim communities started to arm up, in some cases, literally people turning up with knives to defend their areas.

This is all—maybe it'll die down by the time this podcast has gone out, or maybe it'll get a lot worse. But the one thing you can say with absolute certainty is it's not going to go away because all of this is the consequence of what I call the problem of primary and secondary problems. The primary problem in the UK, as in Europe in recent years, has been the total unwillingness of the political and other classes in the UK to address deep, deep concerns of the public.

When people said in recent days, "How could anyone leap to such a conclusion that the attacker would be...?" And you go, because everyone's seen this before. You know, people don't actually forget very fast. The media class may, but they don't forget very fast. It's only seven years ago that the son of Libyan migrants to the UK went and detonated a suicide bomb at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. They don't forget fast that three people who had no right to be in the UK, including one whose asylum claim had been rejected, but who was nowhere near being deported, went across London Bridge in 2017 hacking at the throats of passersby and shouting "Allahu Akbar."

They don't forget that they notice it, but the British government and others have had this very, very clear policy that they don't really know what to do to tackle that. They don't know what to do, really, to tackle the grooming gangs issue. There was another set of prosecutions the other day and another case is coming to court in the coming weeks. You could say, "Well, they clearly do, they're using the law," but a lot of the public say, "Well, not fast enough and not really." There's an awful lot of rapists still walking around with girls who are their victims in the same towns, and the government knows that the public ascribed this to the government's immigration policies, integration policies.

But the governments can't take responsibility for that because they've made that mistake now. The conservative government that just left power said that they would bring migration down to the tens of thousands a year and left office with net migration of legal migration at almost 340,000 a year, which is, by the way, completely unsustainable. But they just keep doing it anyway.

The interesting thing that Tommy Robinson speaks to and has always spoken to is, um, what are you allowed to do about this or say about this? Now, if you're me, for the time being, you're allowed to write about it sometimes, you're allowed to speak about it sometimes, you're allowed to raise alarms sometimes, you're allowed to speak your mind somewhat. But if you are a Tommy Robinson character, if you grow up in Luton and you haven't had many advantages in life and you've had quite a lot of disadvantages and you're white and working-class, what are you allowed to do about this? What are you allowed to say about any of this?

And the government for decades now has had the attitude: you're not allowed to do anything, you're not allowed to say anything, you can't do anything, because if you do, we'll call you a racist, and we'll call you far-right. And this has all gone on for a very long time. Well, it's an effective epithet. You know, like when I first came across your work—and I've seen this reaction in the depths of my soul to many people—when I first came across your work, which is quite a long time ago now, you know, I was leery of it.

And I think the reason for that is that it's something like this: there are a lot of people in the world, and I'm not going to be able to meet all of them or read all of them or have anything to do with all of them. And now and then, some of them get tarred with some epithet. Well, the cost to me of accepting that tarring is very low on average, because if I don't pay attention to some person, there's a whole bunch of other people I could pay attention to. So it's not like the pool of people to attend to shrinks, right?

So that epithet of far-right is a very effective brand of tarring, and even it's even effective among people who are very skeptical of such things. So I'll give you an example. So I talked to Michael Shellenberger after he released the W Path files when he was investigating the absolute pathological corruption and craven cowardice of the cadre who presented what purport to be the standard guidelines for enlightened care to the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association. And he was appalled at their lack of competence and their ideological possession—it was another bottomless pit.

And I asked him how he became aware of this, and he said, well, one way was that he had listened to Abigail Shrier and I talk about it. I guess it was two years ago when Abigail first put out her book "Irreversible Damage." It was the first podcast I did after I'd been so ill, and I was terrified to do it because it was such a hot topic. And you know, Shellenberger himself said he listened to that podcast, but he really couldn't believe it, you know? And that's another example of the effectiveness of that tarring.

Yes, it's so easy to demolish someone's reputation, and it's especially easy to demolish a reputation for people who do not have, as it were, a backlog of published work. Yeah, I mean, it's relatively easy, but to weigh up someone's views and make an estimation of them if they have seven books to their name as I do, or you know, thousands and thousands of articles. But it can't be the case that only book authors are allowed to say anything about the disintegration of their societies.

It's not like it should only be left to people who write newspaper articles. Yeah, well, God no—not that. Like, maybe least of all. And, but, but then you go to this question, which, as you know, has come up in Canada in recent years and is very live now in Britain, which is what—again, what are people allowed to do? Now, obviously, by the way, and I'm aware, as you always are, of the deep desire of bad faith actors to seize anything I say in this discussion and misrepresent it.

So let me do a very boring piece of throat clearing, if I may. The idea that people's response to any problems in their society should be to go out and commit acts of violence is obviously insane and wrong. What we're seeing on the streets of the British cities, though, raises this question, as I say, of if the public keep saying something to the politicians and the politicians keep not just ignoring them, but insulting them, what are they allowed to do? These people, these are populations that have had every single election, like the rest of the British people for 20 years. They have voted for less immigration. They've been told that they'd get it, and instead, it's just gone up.