by Gavin Ashenden on substack
From the Battle of Tours to the Failed Debate in Oxford: How the Defence of Civilisation Became a Forbidden Conversation
One of the most incongruous sights on YouTube is to see Tommy Robinson speaking at the Oxford Union.
He’s done it before in the past amid a great deal of controversy, when much younger. It was an edgy patronising of a working class boy, as they thought.
In fact, Tommy Robinson, (whether you like his views or not) is a vividly intelligent and effectively competent orator. It was not a lack of IQ that kept him out of Oxford (as a student), but the English class system.
Readers from beyond the UK may not realise the degree of public antipathy inflicted on him. For daring to question the multi-cultural liberal narrative, he became the most toxic figure in Britain. In media terms, he found himself as public enemy no 1.
This was in part a tribute to his courage and intelligence. The establishment realised that he posed more danger to the powers that be than any politician or media entertainer.
He is, of course, portrayed as a ‘far-right fascist racist.’ Those are the trigger terms that make most people who crave social acceptability recoil in Pavlovian horror.
It was only when Jordan Peterson gave him a platform to give his own account of himself and his life, that it became obvious to any person with a minimal capacity for fair-minded judgement that this was not true.
Only Jordan Peterson could have provided this platform for potential partial rehabilitation. The episode has had nearly 3 million views since.
Robinson’s main political activity has been to expose the unspeakable horror of the (predominantly ‘Religion of Peace’s) rape gang scandal. His role in this was perpetually misportrayed by media, police and the political establishment, who were terrified that this might prove to be the powder keg that would ignite civil disobedience.
This is how the matter was portrayed in a very recent independent report.