The Weekend Intelligence: Shire folk

26:53Luton is also where the Tate brothers are from. Their estate, think brutalist concrete high-risers, was the scene of ugly riots in the 90s. They're influencers in the manosphere world, currently under arrest for sex trafficking and sexual assault. And they both talk about Luton too, and make YouTube videos about it. Luton is a failed city, completely failed in every way. It plays into an image of Luton that exists online, a type of town influencers depict as a dangerous hellhole, a no-go zone. Videos with titles like, I spent 24 hours in Britain's worst town. In the comments, users trying to help Americans understand Luton usually compare it to Detroit.

27:42In his autobiography, Robinson recalls growing up following waves of immigration in the 60s and 70s. He describes how certain parts of town would be taken over in what he calls ethnic cleansing. Elderly non-Muslim people being forced out of their homes as one community takes a district over, a street at a time, an estate at a time.

28:12Bury Park was always the immigrant part of town. First, it was the Irish. There's a Polish contingent too. It's a place where you can eat authentic Caribbean, Afghan, even go to church in Chona. But the area has an unmistakable character. There are about ten mosques, each a short walk from the other. Walking around, I notice the rows of red-bricked Victorian terraced houses, Gardens full of wheelie bins, testament to the multiple generations living under the same roof. Young men speeding around narrow lanes in their sports cars. It's also where you can find the home ground of Luton Town Football Club, Kenilwith Road, right in the heart of Bury Park.

29:00The interesting thing about Tommy is the Yabo hooligan background. Hooliganism is a sport. It is a mutual combat activity with no knives allowed and everyone voluntarily spars. It's a boxing gym. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Robinson was one of those hard men Elon Musk referred to. The ones he thinks were protecting the shires. Gavin McInnes' take on it is that his mate Tommy's toughness was forged in the very British culture of football hooliganism. And I think that gave him the background to organise and get people together. Back in the 80s and 90s, when Tommy was growing up, every club had its firm, organised groups of supporters whose rivalries weren't far beyond the 90 minutes on the pitch.

29:54They would fight each other in organised brawls. It was its own form of sport. It was violent and often criminal. But for the men involved, it also created powerful bonds built on loyalty and reputation. A common cause to defend your turf. Luton's firm was called the Men in Gear. There was a particular gang that Tommy Robinson references and claims to have friends in called Men in Gear, the MIGs. In 2008, the year before the EDL poured onto the streets of Luton, Ashraf Hock, an anthropologist, embedded himself in Bury Park. There were black members, white members, Asian members. Eventually there were turf wars and some Muslim gangs took over the drug trade.

30:43Or had real pretensions of being the top dogs, you know, the kingpins of the area. Ashraf sees Luton very differently than Tommy does. So it's interesting to hear him describe a key turning point in the town's criminal underworld in a similar way. In the 1990s, a Kashmiri Pakistani gang took over Luton's crime world. Drugs, prostitution, fraud, robbing. Robinson claims that one group of Muslim boys stole his Nokia phone. A good one at that. Ashraf worked with people who were involved at the time. Muslim gangs really did take over the drug trade. Dealers used their family networks to pull in their cousins as runners.

31:28So there's definitely a drug problem in Luton, for sure. And there's definitely the participation of a lot of Muslims, but not exclusively, in that drug trade. And Tommy Robinson definitely knew a lot of these people and was aware of these gangs and the turf wars that happened.

31:58Stand where Robinson stood, and you'd see another Britain in miniature. Not one of tolerance and understanding, but rivalry, power struggles, and winner-takes-all battles for territory. And crucially, a hometown fast-changing beyond recognition. Illustrated perfectly for Gavin McInnes at a Hatter's game in 2019. At the Luton game, it was all expats from Luton. No one in the stands lived in Luton. They'd all moved from Luton. They were mostly white. And no one from Luton, the Muslims, were at the game. I mean, does that tell you everything about the evolution of Luton in Britain?

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34:10For all the changes happening in Luton, it's easy to forget that another force was reshaping the world. The War on Terror. In Luton, the War on Terror wasn't just abstract media and foreign policy talk. Local lads were doing the fighting. At the same time, a radical Islamist fringe group called Al-Mahajarun were claiming territory of their own, setting out stalls in the middle of Bury Park, Luton's main Muslim area, and the home of the Hatties, the centre of Robinson's world. Their leader was a man named Anjum Chowdhury. So you had the Al-Muhajirun and their leader, Anjum Chowdhury. They had a daily stall on Dunstable Road where all their paraphernalia, their pamphlets and books and literature would be displayed, horrible things, anti-Semitic things, really, you know, anti-women, you know, really unsavoury thoughts and concepts and ideas.

35:13And there would be a bunch of them speaking, debating, like Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. As Ashraf Hock explained to me, many of the people involved in this group weren't actually from Luton. For pretty much all of Luton's Muslim communities, El-Mahajarin were an embarrassment. Most of them have criminal records. Most of them were drug pushers who became reformed and didn't go down the quietest route, rather became more politicised, militant jihadists. They believe in an Islamic state. And some of these people that I came across in Luton actually ended up in ISIS, ended up in Syria and Iraq and ended up dying.

35:58On one side of town, families were mourning soldiers killed fighting Islamist extremists overseas. On another, a small group of Islamist activists spread hate from a stall in Bury Park. Throw in a global financial crisis, the demographic change, the turf wars, and the tension. It was an explosive combination. and on the 10th of March 2009, it finally ignited. The town's two stories, the idea of a tolerant multicultural existence and the gangs, the wars, the years of economic pressure, they all collided in this moment. A message to Anjan children. We English Defence League who will test your climate as our forefathers did.

36:48We're ledously pursuing you in our quest to see all the Shariah palates from our great democratic country. Long live the free.

36:59In the early days, the EDL would wear black balaclavas to hide their identities, a matching black polo shirt with St George's crosses stitched onto them. Right from the start, they tried to distance themselves from the far-right movements of the past. Oswald Mosley's fascist party in the 1930s, the white supremacist National Front decades later. In the EDL's first video, that one where they bent a Nazi flag, they claimed to be anti-Islam, not racist. Their spokesperson, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, initially anonymous, began to go by various aliases. For a while, he was Tyrone after, in his words, the short fat geezer from the soap opera Coronation Street.

37:47But he soon became Tommy Robinson, an alter ego stolen from a fellow football hooligan.

37:59You can say Luton is in harmony. You can write Luton is in harmony. You can keep on telling everyone Luton is in harmony. It is not in harmony.

38:16The EDL marches are organised on Facebook, which, back in 2009, like the EDL, is pretty much brand new. Twitter is only a couple of years old. Instagram doesn't exist yet.

38:34The EDL never pretended to be a political party and didn't want to be one It was, plain and simple a grassroots protest movement They would do marches in towns and cities up and down the country He would try to dress it up that they were opposing radical Islam but for most of his supporters it was just about Muslims. And, you know, the chants would be about, you know, ban the mosques, a piece of stuff about Allah. They weren't chanting about radical Islam, they were just chanting about Muslims. For the last 22 years, Nick Lowes has run an organisation called Hope Not Hate, the same organisation Peter from Luton is affiliated with.

39:25It runs campaigns and investigations against figures on the far right of British politics. It was probably late 2010. We were in Leicester and I was out on the street taking pictures. We had a couple of teams out. And there'd been quite a lot of violence and there'd been, you know, EDL people had been throwing bricks and bottles at the police and police were in riot gear, etc, etc. And this bus pulled alongside us and they were all jeering in the bus. and then this bloke in a kind of green bomber jacket literally ripped open the doors and led a charge out to try to attack us and that was Tommy Robinson and I remember him kind of leaning through the police lines to me saying I know where you live, I know who you are.

40:14This is Nick's first encounter with Tommy. He'll go on to have several. They'll exchange a flurry of DMs, go out for lunch. Eventually Tommy will stand on Nick's doorstep and hurl a beast at him. Nick will make documentaries about Tommy. Tommy about Nick. But we'll come to that later. For now, he is watching a nemesis emerge. And that was the first time I saw him face to face. He's a small bloke. And yet, I think from that day, and there have been other instances, you can see why he's a leader in that crowd. He's got a charisma and he's got a way that he both goes from the front and, you know, that inspires people.

41:01His background in football hooliganism informed how he ran the EDL with local networks, local rivalries, a coach, a pub, a march. All he had to do was turn up. And even though it was decentralised, it was clear who the figurehead was. There was an incident, I think back in 2010, where Muslim Against Crusades, an offshoot from Al-Majirun, were setting fire to poppies on Armistice Day down in West London. And across the road, there was an EDL protest and the police keeping them apart or whatever. and literally through the park he came on his own running at this al-Majirun crowd, 60, 70 people and literally dived over the fences into the crowd and started fighting all on his own.

41:56Some of those clashes were really violent where literally hundreds and hundreds of people would be fighting the police they'd be smashing police vans and that was the sort of people he attracted. During this period, for anyone following the news, Tommy Robinson became an infamous household name.

42:25Most people heard about English Defence League through documentaries, through the media, through the only way we get our voice out there is from that. Back then, if you wanted to reach the British public, there was still, essentially, only one route. Broadcast news. A handful of channels, commissioning editors, producers, all deciding who gets to speak and under what terms. Robinson knew he needed to invite news crews to speeches and marches and take any opportunity to get his message out. In 2011, Robinson appeared on the BBC's most famous current affairs show, Newsnight. English Defence League, what are you defending England from?

43:10Shiawala law, Islamism, the complete spread of militant Islam, which we're seeing in our towns and cities across the country. Do you believe that this country is in serious danger of being taken over and put under Sharia law? I believe that towns and cities have got the spread of Sharia law. We're seeing people calling for it to be implemented on a daily basis. The programme's presenter, Jeremy Paxman, was dismissive, scathing even, his usual trademark style. Still, watching it back now, it's unsettling, because not everything Robinson was saying should have been dismissed. Call it our first sliding doors moment in the Tommy Robinson story.

43:51Anjum Trowdhury, the man behind the stall, behind the parade protests that started all this, would go on operating in plain sight for years. He never carried out an attack himself, but his followers did. Two men who butchered and beheaded a soldier named Lee Rigby on the London street in 2013. The ringleader of the London Bridge attack in 2017. the Fishmongers Hall attacker in 2019. One of his associates turned up in Syria as an ISIS executioner, hooded, on camera, standing over kneeling prisoners. Police would eventually link hundreds of people from his network to terrorism. Hundreds more went off to Syria.

44:36It wasn't until 15 years after the EDL march in 2009 that a court finally named what he was doing, Directing a terrorist organisation. Robinson wasn't inventing Luton, but he was editing it. The gangs, the stall, the worst behaviour of a small number of men, and nothing else in the frame. But the British media weren't imagining things either. The EDL was violent. Its marches put towns into lockdowns. Its events drew white nationalists, neo-Nazis, ethno-nationalists, men doing stiff-arm salutes photographed at the edges of the crowds. In the end, the strongest confirmation came from Robinson himself.

45:25In 2013, he walked away, saying the movement he'd built had become the very thing its critics always said it was. When some moron lifts up his top and he's got the picture of a mosque saying boom, and it's all over the national newspapers, it's me. It's when I pick up my kids from school, the parents are looking at me, judging me on that. And that's not what I've stood for. And my decision to do is to be true to what I stand for. And whilst I want to lead a revolution against Islamist ideology, I don't want to lead a revolution against Muslims. When it started on these estates in Luton, the EDL tapped into genuine concerns about Islamic extremism.

46:05But since then it has become a violent and almost uncontrollable movement, a movement that now seems to have no leadership at all.

46:27That might have been the end of our story. The movement collapsed. Its leader was disgraced. His 15 minutes of fame seemed to be over. I grew up in Britain during this time. I remember the English Defence League, the protests, the fight. But I have to admit, over the next 12 years that followed, I didn't think about Robinson. Not really. He'd pop up in the news very occasionally, a seemingly endless stream of court cases, a failed attempt to run for European Parliament after Brexit. He always seemed to be something of a joke. Until, that is, fairly recently.

47:15Last September, I was in central London to do some shopping. I'd just got engaged. We were going to buy the ring. It was a lovely sunny day. Perfect picnic weather. Coming out of the tube station, I was suddenly surrounded by families draped in Union Jacks. Marchers, beers in hand, spilling out at the Riverside pubs, holding St George's flags. Signs reading, we want our country back. Tommy Robinson was holding a march. But this wasn't the same old ragtag bunch of hooligans from Luton. This was central London. Whitehall. Parliament Square. Police say 150 ,000 people were there. And the star speaker?

48:04Elon Musk, talking about a pending civil war. Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die. And that's the truth. today Elon I think the British public are telling the world that they're ready to fight back good yes come on Raybrian

48:48On the cheap home, I watched black and brown people shrink into their seats, making themselves smaller to avoid attention from those who would not want them there. Perhaps I was projecting, but I felt then that Britain had changed. and something else was changing too so I wanted to know how was a pariah suddenly summoning a crowd the size of a small city onto the streets with the richest man on earth in his corner and why did he keep popping up everywhere America Russia Israel turning up Forrest Gump style at pivotal moments ready to take advantage. He's going to put hundreds of thousands of people out on the street.

49:40No other person can do that. And, you know, we've got to understand that.

49:50Over the next decade, few issues would do more to transform Robinson's influence than the grooming gang scandal and his claim that Britain's political and media elites had chosen silence over the truth. For Elon Musk, it would become proof that the Shire had been invaded. Since they have almost no exposure to the dangers of the world, they don't realise that they're there. Until one day, you know, a thousand people show up in your village of 500. Out of nowhere. And start raving the kids.

50:33It remains one of the darkest scandals in modern British history. That's next time.

50:48Thank you for listening to the first episode of Shire Folk. If you liked it, please tell lots of people about it. and tell us what you think at podcasts at economist.com. We'll be back next Saturday with the second episode. Shire Folk was reported by Georgia Banjo and Sam Westron. The producer is Sam Westron. Our fact checker is Elizabeth Peet. Sound design is by Nico Rofast and the music was composed by Darren Ung with additional tracks from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. The series editor is Gemma Newby. See you back here on Monday.

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