Tommy Robinson Free Speech Falls Flat

[Update at end of post]

After the UK authorities decided they could get on fine without the likes of Martin Sellner, Brittany Pettibone and Lauren Southern, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson, declared that he would travel today to London to give the speech Sellner would have given, and at Speaker’s Corner. By doing this, he would, he claimed, be “reclaiming free speech”, although from whom was not told.

Sadly, the whole exercise did not go according to plan: Lennon was intending that Lutz Bachmann, founder of Pegida, would be there at the event to read out the mythical speech in its original German. But the UK Border Agency, having been told very loudly and very clearly that Bachmann was intending to enter the country, stopped him at Stansted Airport and he was deported this morning back to Germany.

Lennon was not downhearted, though: he kept on advertising the event, reminding his followers that he would still give the speech at 1500 hours, and that the nearest Tube station was Marble Arch. And so it came to pass that he stepped up to give the speech, and the considerable Police presence standing between him and his pal Caolan Robertson prevented anyone tuning in to hear a word that he said.

Robertson vainly tried to connect a microphone; this, too, failed. All that could be heard was noises off from the crowd, people reminding one another which former politicians were definitely paedophiles, others calling for Lennon to speak up, and finally, after Robertson confirmed that the speech had indeed been delivered, loud but brief chanting in support of whatever it was that had been delivered.

Was that it? Well, Robertson did try and over-dramatically pretend he was being pursued by “Antifa” and “Far left demonstrators” as he left the scene. But the faithful were assured that the speech would be uploaded to YouTube. Which could have been done without going to Speaker’s Corner, or indeed without wasting the time and resources of an already overstretched Metropolitan Police to deal with the crowds - and the fighting.

And as Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate pointed out, “it's a bit rich of Tommy Robinson to present himself as a defender of free speech after he's spent last 9 yrs not affording same rights to Muslims. He's called for Muslims to be blocked from speaking, new mosques banned and Muslim immigration halted … The only rights he seems to care about are for anti-Muslim haters and German and American racists”.

He also noted that Bachmann is, among other things, a convicted drug dealer. Perhaps Lennon will be going mob-handed to have one of his “polite conversations” with him, or perhaps not. There has been no assault on free speech in barring a quartet of far-right shit stirrers from the UK, no-one prevented Sellner’s speech being delivered, it could have been just put online anyway, and all that we have seen is another publicity stunt.

Many of Stephen Yaxley Lennon’s adoring followers will carry on believing otherwise, and that the Scary Muslims (tm) and Rotten Lefties (tm) are out to get them. More fool them.

[UPDATE 1820 hours: for those who have already claimed this post is lying (yawn), I include two Tweets from someone who was not only there, but very close to where Lennon was speaking.

As can be seen, the person otherwise known as Far Right Watch (Twitter feed HERE) echoed what I posted, telling "As for his speech, his microphone was broken and with lots of chanting, no-one heard a word. But they cheered at the end of whatever it was he might have said".

They added "Apparently it'll be uploaded to YouTube but I couldn't hear him from 6 feet away, so good luck with that. The camera could barely see him".

As I said previously, a publicity stunt. Nothing more, nothing less]