On 29 July, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was due in court for repeating libellous allegations about Jamal Hijazi, a teenage Syrian refugee who was attacked on a playing field in West Yorkshire. Instead, he was in a hotel in Cyprus.
Following the murder of three girls in Southport that day, Yaxley-Lennon, who uses the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, took to social media to spread misinformation and Islamophobic rhetoric.
As mosques and hotels with asylum seekers inside were targeted, Yaxley-Lennon tried to distance himself from the violence.
“Tommy Robinson has become an avatar for the far right,” Ben Quinn, senior reporter for the Guardian, tells Helen Pidd. Yaxley-Lennon has been a far-right public figure for 20 years. In that time, the movement has become less organised and more splintered.
“What matters these days, particularly in the world of social media, is the ability of particular individuals to reach out to young men, in particular,” Quinn tells Pidd. “And Tommy Robinson is particularly good at that.”
