Elon Musk’s Wrongheaded Campaign against Nigel Farage

E lon Musk has recently clashed with Nigel Farage, the leader of right-populist Reform UK, with Musk even calling for Nigel Farage to resign. The spat was unexpected considering the previous friendship between the two and Musk’s outspoken support for Reform UK. At the center is a man known as Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), a controversial political activist who is serving a prison sentence since October last year. Musk’s call to release Robinson has caused a spat with Farage and is sadly indicative of the limitations of Musk’s political judgment and instinct.

Who is Tommy Robinson? Born in 1982, Robinson first cut his teeth politically in his 20s as a member of the British National Party, before founding the English Defence League in 2009, serving as its president over the next four years. The EDL was largely, at least initially, made up of football hooligans, and while its goals of preventing the Islamization of British society were shared by many mainstream conservatives, its methods were not: The EDL distinguished itself by utilizing direct action, frequently holding protests outside of mosques. One such protest, ultimately quelled by riot police, was held in 2013 after the murder of a British soldier by a jihadist. No proof ever connected the mosque to the attack.

Whereas mainstream conservatives have aimed their fire at the increasing political influence of supremacist Islam, the EDL campaigned more broadly against Islam itself and in favor of restricting the Muslim community. In 2011, the EDL launched a nationwide “No New Mosques” campaign and held infamous demonstrations against the opening of new mosques.

In a speech in 2011, Robinson explicitly addressed “every single Muslim,” warning that his organization had a nationwide network and that the Islamic community would feel the “full force of the English Defence League” if any British citizen was killed or maimed or hurt again by jihadists.

While Tommy Robinson and his followers were protesting mosques, Nigel Farage was working to end the U.K.’s membership in the European Union. Farage is frequently described as far-right, but the party he led — the UK Independence Party — had a strong policy in place specifically to prevent far-right infiltration. Under UKIP’s membership policy, no person who had ever been a member of the British National Party or the English Defence League was allowed to join.

UKIP still exists as a party, though it is a shell of its former self. Since Nigel Farage resigned the leadership in 2016, UKIP has gone through eight party leaders. One of these leaders, Gerard Batten, brought in Tommy Robinson as an adviser despite the latter’s connection to the EDL. This caused Nigel Farage to leave and publicly disown the party that he had once led. Soon after, Farage formed the Brexit Party, which, after the U.K. finally left the EU, was renamed Reform UK. Like UKIP under Farage’s leadership, Reform UK bars former members of the EDL and several other far-right organizations from joining the party.

Nigel Farage has stood firm even under pressure from Musk and many of his own supporters. From a cynical perspective, it may appear that Farage is simply unable to share the spotlight with anyone else. UKIP was always a one-man band, which is why it fell apart when Farage left. Yet Nigel Farage’s rebukes of Tommy Robinson are well founded.

Tommy Robinson has had several run-ins with the law. His first was in 2005, when he was convicted of assaulting an off-duty police officer. Ironically, given his views on immigration, Robinson was subsequently jailed in 2013 for illegally entering the United States, having used a friend’s passport. The year after, he was again sentenced to prison, this time for committing mortgage fraud. In between these prison sentences, Robinson also received a restraining order for stalking a female journalist and her partner.

Contrary to Elon Musk’s assertions, Tommy Robinson’s latest conviction, for which he is currently serving time, has nothing to do with telling the truth about the infamous rape gangs. Robinson was convicted of libel against Jamal Hijazi after claiming that Hijazi, a Syrian migrant who had been attacked outside his school, was not an innocent victim but was targeted because he had assaulted and bullied fellow students. The amount (£100,000, or about $122,000) that Robinson was ordered to pay was eye-catching; but just days before the judgment was to be handed down, Robinson recorded a video in which he promised that he would continue to assert that his claims about Hijazi were true. He also promised in the video that he would provide “the total evidence and proof” of what Jamal Hijazi had done. This provocation no doubt influenced the judge’s ruling, and the court issued an injunction forbidding Robinson from repeating his claims.

Robinson nonetheless repeated the claims at a protest, after which he fled the U.K. Upon his return, he admitted to contempt of court, and it is for this that he is now serving an 18-month sentence. Even supposing that Robinson was speaking the truth, court records show that he did not at any point allege that Hijazi was a member of a rape gang. Robinson was jailed in 2019 after he interfered with the trial of a rape gang by live-streaming to Facebook outside the court room, revealing the identities of the defendants, but his current imprisonment is not related to this or to the wider rape-gang scandal.

Elon Musk appears to be under the impression that Robinson played a significant, perhaps even decisive, role in unveiling the rape gangs that for decades abused and trafficked thousands of underage white British girls. This is not the case. The EDL did hold protests in towns and cities affected by rape gangs, most infamously Rotherham, but they did not uncover the existence of these gangs. Andrew Norfolk, working for the Times, authored a series of articles in 2011 detailing the abuse and the authorities’ lax response to it. Norfolk had been tipped off by a local Labour MP, who had raised concerns as early as 2002. Subsequent inquiries revealed the problem to be far greater in scale than early reports had suggested, and they also revealed that authorities had actively covered up the crimes in order not to incite Islamophobia or racial conflict.

There is no doubt that the cover-up and tacit acceptance of the rape gangs is one of the worst scandals in British history. Even after the initial reports in the early 2010s, such as that by the Times, authorities were slow to act, when they acted at all, and equally slow to recognize the racist aspect of the Pakistani grooming gangs, who specifically targeted white, non-Muslim victims. To date, the authorities continue to resist calls for a nationwide investigation. That Keir Starmer is refusing to order a national inquiry into the scandal, even as reports emerge that rape gangs may be an ongoing problem, give reason to suspect that he, as former director of public prosecution, or his close allies within the party might be implicated in a cover-up.

By turning the focus to Tommy Robinson at this time, Elon Musk risks derailing a crucial conversation about anti-British attitudes and violence among certain minorities, as well as the equally important question of what the prime minister knew and when he knew it. On balance, Robinson’s actions have done more harm than good. If anything, his football-hooligan-style anti-Muslim protests, last seen this past summer, may wrongly confirm in the minds of police and civil servants that they were right to cover up these horrible crimes in order to protect the Muslim minority from violent, racist outbursts.

Nigel Farage’s refusal to embrace Robinson, even under pressure from Elon Musk, suggests that he is serious about one day becoming the U.K.’s prime minister, and serious about getting justice for the victims of the rape gangs. If Elon Musk is too, he ought to follow Farage’s lead and stop defending Tommy Robinson.