The Weekend Intelligence: Shire folk

0:00Meet Amazon Ads Rising Star, Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow. I walked away from Big Tech to build a luxury brand. In a category that no one was planning attention to, with the help of Amazon Ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences, and competing with the biggest names and men's grooming. We've scaled to over $500,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash Rising-Stars. This intelligence podcast is sponsored by Business Travel on Hotels.com. Does booking business travel feel like another job? Hotels.com makes booking work trips easy and rewarding. It's easy because you can set your preferences once and get results tailored to your business travel needs every time. It's rewarding because with Hotels.com's free rewards program, you can save instantly on your next work trip and earn rewards for future travel. But faster with confidence at Hotels.com, low of team members 18 plus.

1:07The Economist. I'm Rosie Blore, and today on the Weekend Intelligence, we're bringing you the first in a three-part series that my colleague, George Abanjo and Sam Westren have spent months reporting. They've been charting the rise of Tommy Robinson, a British far-right figure who's changing how Britain see their own country and who's now shaping how many Americans do too. If you've ever wondered why a fringe football hooligan from Luton has the support of the world's richest man, well, here's Georgia. It's a little before 9am when I reach Greenville, a town around 50 miles east of Dallas. It's already been a long morning. The drive from the suburbs of Austin takes almost five hours. Driving along the highway, the state begins to change.

2:09The roadside billboards tell the story, churches, fishing tackle, cheap fireworks and pickup trucks. This is rural Texas. Greenville is an old frontier town that made its fortune during the era of cotton, cattle and railroads. It's the kind of place you can imagine a sheriff having a pistol fight way back when. But I'm not here for local history. I'm here for money. So, my name is Brent Money. I am a lawyer. I own a real estate title company. I'm a husband and a father of five children. An active member of my church, a big Dallas sports fan. And I'm happy to be here talking with you today. I'm in the offices of House Representative Brent Money.

3:14It's nice. I represent Hunt Hopkins and Van Zant County, which is about 200,000 people here in the state of Texas. Representative Money is in his late 40s. He's in jeans and a smart shirt. And he's smiling a big smile that makes his eyes squint. He's about to head off to Florida on holiday. But we've convinced him to give us an hour of his time to talk about the UK. He loves it. He's got a brown nabby, father brown, all creatures, great and small, any of the like, like, pole dark. We like stuff from back then. I mean, for my wife, it's the costumes and architecture and the rolling hills and all of that. I mean, she loves all of that. My wife and I are like, when the kids are gone, the countryside. Because that's what, I mean,

4:14you know, where the real people live. If you're American, perhaps you can relate to Brent. Perhaps you also have a soft spot for England, the old country. I just recently got on ancestry.com. And within like, I was probably, I probably worked six, seven, eight hours. But I traced the money family all the way back to 1480 in England. Yes, there was a revelation and all that. But there's a kinship that ties Britain and America. A messy, tangled history. You can feel it in the way Brent talks. There's an old church, and I looked it up on Google Maps. It's right there. It's a little church. But an old little church where one of my, you know, direct paternal, you know, and my dad sighed all the way back. You know, his family kind of built the church, and there's an engraving of him and his wife

5:15and their 18 kids or whatever it was. And it's like, I want to go there. I want to see that. And I don't want there to be a call to prayer. Coming out of it when I, when I arrive, you know. This is what's led me to Texas. Because recently, I've started to notice a darker side to how many Americans perceive Britain. A sense that there isn't just a land of nostalgia. But of dangers. Warnings about Sharia law. No gozones. Grimming gangs. That the country is being lost. Specifically, to Islamic invaders. We're seeing violence. Instigated by, you know, mostly young Islamic men throughout Europe.

6:15But it is a, it's a dangerous place to be. They call it a civilizational jihad. And it's to wipe out the non-believers. You see, Brent doesn't just care about Britain because of his ancestry. He cares. Because like a growing number of others, he sees my country. This continent as a cautionary tale. A tale that a few people have been telling for a very long time. It is only now gaining ground. When you look to Europe, are there only specific, I don't know, leaders, activists, or people that you've looked to, that either are as a kind of social information, or maybe even a sort of inspiration about how you can try and deal with the issues you see. I've talked with some people over there. And I'm not like a geopolitical,

7:15you know, expert of any kind. And I have spoken at an event that Tommy Robinson was at. Tommy Robinson. Depending on where you live, and who you are, that name may either draw a blank, or a very strong reaction. In mainstream Britain, in the world of newspapers, the six o'clock news, and Parliament, Tommy Robinson's a loser. Paul Hooligan turned agitator, marginal, toxic, and still very much to be. The majority of British people don't like him. The majority of British people do not want, I can't speak to Bern. Yet, in another Britain, and the places that look to it, the same man is a hero. A prophet,

8:15punished and censored by the establishment for speaking hidden truths. I follow Tommy Robinson, because no one else seems to have the courage to say the things that I'm thinking. All of this information has been hidden behind a wall, and we finally have it out. And we're realizing that the villains, such as Tommy Robinson, were actually the heroes. Listen to Tommy Robinson. Same man, same island. Two completely different stories about what's happened to Britain. Don't get me wrong. The first Britain is still the dominant one. Britain remains one of the most open and tolerant countries on earth. A place whose official story is of a country made better by arrival. In 2024, the economist put the statue of liberty on the cliffs of Dover on our cover, with the title.

9:15The first Britain is the best place in Europe to be an immigrant. Chikinti Kamisala is still our national dish. Yet the other story about Britain, the immigration is destroying the green and pleasant land of churches, tea shops, and tradition, is growing. That's Brent Money's view. It also happens to be the view of Elon Musk, the world's richest man. He likenes Brits to the Hobbits in the story by J.R.R. Tolkien, simple well-meaning fake, whose idyllic homeland the Shire is under threat. J.R.R. Tolkien based the Hobbits on people he knew in small town England. The reason they've been able to enjoy the Shire is because hard men have protected them from the dangers of the world. Hard men like Tommy Robinson, whose account is in the world. He's a Count of this country. In this parallel world

10:15is now believed by powerful people in Washington and Silicon Valley. I've spent months trying to understand how a perception of this country that seemed to be so fringe is now going global. I'm wondering what happens when those parallel visions start to collide? Because hundreds of thousands of people are now listening to the story. Because hundreds of thousands of people are now listening to Tommy Robinson. Today is the spark of a cultural revolution in Great Britain. They managed to silence us for 20 years with labels. Racist is Lamaphob, far right. They don't work anymore. A dam has well and truly vast.

11:20The silent majority will be silent no longer. I'm George Abanjay. And from the economist, this is Shiafake. The story of how some of the most powerful people in America came to see Britain and Islam through the eyes of a fringe football who ligand. Episode 1. Tommy's town. The story begins in the spring of 2009 in the English town of Luton, some 40 miles north of London. It's the crucible of our story too. I mean that we are coming into this place where the opening part of the story

12:21is that in the fall of the city the story begins in the spring of 2009 in the English town of Luton, some 40 miles north of London. The story is that in March 2009 is in the height of sending troops to Iraq and to Afghanistan. There are YouTube and Facebook videos from that time. Both platforms would only have been a few years old and the videos were as you'd expect. Crunchy sound, but you can clearly make out protesters clashing with other protesters. People spitting, calling each other scum. Some of them fighting the police. These were the ugly scenes that erupted in Luton. Families and friends of soldiers marching through the town reacted in anger to a Muslim protest

13:21against the Iraq war. The British public could only be fed up with it all and they could only be fed up with it all. So they started instituting homecoming prides whereby local regiments could march through their towns from which they were coached. Peter Adams is an interfaith worker in the town. He's walking me through the protest that day. Helping me understand what happened where and why. And our Angling, second Angling regiments were back from Iraq and there were some people from Luton injured and killed out there. 200 soldiers from the second battalion the Royal Angling Regiment marched through the centre of Luton. Welcomeed home by thousands but also along the route of protest. And they came march through Luton on March the 10th. They were just fed. And they just got there. They encountered the people in the town

14:21and they were just fed. Just up there they encountered a group of Muslim men. Muslim demonstrators with placards and anti-war slogans. One chant, British soldiers go to hell. The parade continued but after the soldiers had passed there were more angry scenes as the demonstrators were shouted down. And just up the street here where the band went up there and the downed another one. And the British about 20 of these guys were their banners and the crowd went to attack them. But as he stood in people in the crowd. And the angry protest erupting around them Tommy Robinson is among the organisers along with his cousin Kevin Carroll. Soon there will be more protests. At first

15:21they'll be chaotic and morpheus. But they will soon coalesce into a movement called the English Defence League or EDL. We're not fascists and we're not Nazis. We actually stand up against fascists. We're standing straight in the most fascist race as people. We're the only ones that have got got lost. In one of their first videos a group of masked men burning Nazi flag. But at this stage no one in the UK really knows who he is. What the EDL is or what they stand for. They soon will. You can't understand Tommy Robinson without first understanding Luton. When asked to tell his story which has happened a lot since he first appeared in 2009

16:21he always begins there. I talked to you about Luton. I was born in 1982. When I was born in 1982 we had one mosque. I just want you to understand the demographic of the town. Luton is 30 miles north of London. It's a working class town. It's labelled as probably one of the roughest towns in Britain. Now, increasingly, even directly, it sits at the heart of what Americans like Brent Money think about Britain too. But there is another side of Luton. Completely different to Tommy's. A parallel reality. So over here is our tree of hope from which you will see Ribbon's hanging. Yellow Ribbons on this occasion hung by members of different five groups. Peter isn't just an objective of legal historian. I'm speaking to him because he's also a participant

17:23in the battle over who gets to tell this town's more recent story. He was there on the day of the protest and in the aftermath. He's also a trustee of hope not hate. An organisation which has been one of the most important events since 2009. If Tommy Robinson is the protagonist in his story of Luton, then Peter likes to think of himself as the antagonist. In Peter's Luton, anyone is welcome. We're walking down what would have been the old hat-making centre of the town. The hat is being the name of the football club. But coming from that making tries which was here. Every English town has a thing that was once the best in the world at. Luton's was hats. For the better part of two centuries, it was one of the hat-making capitals of the world. But autism bonnets, waving from straw from this surrounding shy.

18:23Luton is the biggest town in bedfits a typical English county. Really from the age of the train when you could transport your hat-saleswear. Rather than make hats locally. And our straw was the longest so they made the hats here. And the town was very wealthy. Right through until the 60s. It didn't just have hat-making. It had car-making too. Across the town square, a stone straight from the old hat-making district. And right by where the protests erupted in 2009, I meet Councillor Aslam Khan. I arrived in Luton 1981 and my father has lived in this country since 1960. And his uncles came in in 55. So me and my mother we came and joined our father in 1981. So we started from renting a room, all three of us living in one room. My father used to work for

19:23voxel motors. Together, these two industries were the engine of Luton's transformation. The rubbenton was born. The tectonic plates of this town were already shifting. After the Second World War, Britain went looking for workers across its former empire. Britain had partitioned India in 1947. The new border cut straight through the rivers. And to replace the water at last, Pakistan built a dam that put entire towns underwater. And a hundred thousand people were left at their homes. Many were given work vouchers, a fast tractor Britain. Many went to Luton with its factories, steady wages and overtime. Like most of the migrants, there was a view that you would come and work here and go back to your native country. But over the years, you know, most of us have settled down.

20:23Over the decades, families arrived. Children were born. Relatives joined relatives. Whole communities took root in Luton, living peacefully alongside each other. And it sounds great, doesn't it? Diverse, multicultural, harmonious. People come and celebrate Bigifta here, where people come from different communities and come and fast and eat together. Where we have people celebrating the festival colours. For those people who are celebrating Diwali. And ours, the first, for the Christmas, the Muslim centre, who dressed up and I did that for 10 years, celebrating Christmas. And that's what Luton is about. In a lot of ways, this version of Luton is a version of Britain in miniature. It's a story people like to tell themselves. Luton is a wonderfully diverse and special place to live. Britain is a beacon of tolerance.

21:23A success story for multiculturalism and integration. Council in the Khan is the poster child for it. But not everyone thinks of Luton or of Bedfature that way. The process of saying we're a multicultural child becomes very deceptive to yourself. We're all of these with each other. Well actually there's a lot of people who are under these. We both have been marred by Islam. He lost his town, his home, his culture, his heritage, his family, his friends and neighbours to Islam. Luton is gone. And my city was attacked on September 11th. So we both have that of the people who are in the city and who are in the city. And we're all in the city. And we're all in the city. And we're all in the city. So we both have that axed a grind. Gavin McKinnis, the founder of 90s

22:23Maafrik Media by Sneez, is a friend of Tommy Robinson's. I was born in Hitchin. My mom would go get groceries in Luton. And it was a quaint little town back then. So we share that history and I can identify with that. You can tell by the accent that he grew up in Canada. Gavin and Tommy don't know each other at this point. Their paths were cross more than two decades later when their base recruited for a right-wing media platform called Rebel Media. But in the 1980s Gavin was the son of Irish Scottish immigrants living in heart-fisher, the shy and next door. I'm British. I went to Scotland every summer as a kid. I went to England my whole life regularly. I've watched it change. I've watched it go from diverse, which is cool and interesting, to a hostile takeover. From the 1970s onwards,

23:25like much of industrial England, Luton entered a period of slow and steady decline. The fallout in part inspired Aslone Khan to get into local politics. Once we started reducing our industrial base, unfortunately, like most industrial towns are deprived without any jobs and not enough housing. The hat-making disappeared. And Foxill, the car factory, it massively cut back production in 2002 and thousands of jobs were lost. This is the other story of Luton. About a town that sits at the intersection of major transport routes, poverty for the south of England anyway, and the growing web of organised crime. A place where immigrants were marooned when the economic tide went out, leaving many stranded and jobless. The home office was under the impression

24:25that it was a sleepy shy, perhaps they were confused by a shy in the title, but it was absolutely anything but. Catherine Holloway was Bedfordshire's police and crime commissioner in the mid-2010s and lived in the area while all of this was happening. She shares Peter's positive view of multicultural Luton, but she also saw it through the lens of criminality. She had direct contact with Robinson's Luton. Bedfordshire is a place where if you were an organised crime group wanted to set up business, it might look like an ideal choice. It's one in the A1 and the major rail lines, so you can move goods, people, weapons, cash, drugs around very easily. It has an airport which is linked to some of the most fragile states in Eastern Europe, which means that it's easier to encourage people to come to work in the expectation that they're coming here into admin jobs or as nannies,

25:25only to find themselves forced into working brothels, or with gangmasters working illegally on farms or building projects or whatever. So it has a huge number of existing issues, all of the issues of London, but being considerably less well-funded. Up there on the hillside, it's Folly Hill. We're learning to grow up. Robinson was born in 1982 to an Irish immigrant mother. His real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lenin, and he grew up with his mum and his stepdad, a Scottish pipefitter he worked at the voxel car plant for a time, on the Folly Hill estate, then the town's biggest working-class area. It's where Peter first lived when he moved to Luton in 2007.

26:27How would you describe the area? Paul, in 1956, is housing state. Lots of Irish. God bless the Irish built in, brought into building one and everything. But they're marginal and a lot of multi-generational unemployment. Up there. Luton is also where the tape brothers are from. Their estate, think Brutalist concrete high-rises, was the scene of ugly riots in the 90s. There influences in the Manusphere 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 everywhere. It plays into an image of Luton that exists online. A type of town influences depict as a dangerous hellhole.

27:27A no-go-zane. 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. In 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 caused ethnic cleansing. Elderly non-Muslim people being forced out of their homes as one community takes a district over, a street at a time, and a state at a time. Barry Park was always the immigrant part of town. First, it was the Irish. There's a Polish contingent too. It's a Polish contingent too. It's a place where you can eat authentic Caribbean, Afghan, even go to church in Chonna.

28:27But the area has an unmistakable character. There are about ten mosques, each a short walk from the other. Walking around, I noticed the rays of red-brecked Victorian terraced houses. Gardens full of wheelie bins, testament to the multiple generations living under the same reef. And speeding around narrow lanes in their sports cars. It's also where you can find the home ground of Lieuten Town Football Club. Kenna with Raid. Right in the heart of Barry Park. The 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.

29:27Gavin McKinnis' 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 organize 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 went far beyond the 90 minutes on the pitch. They would fight each other in organised roles. 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 at the MIGs. In 2008, the year before the EDL poured onto the streets of Luton,

30:27Ashraf Hopp, an anthropologist, embedded himself in Barry Park. There were black members, white members, Asian members. Eventually there were turf wars and some Muslim gangs took over the drug trade. Or had real pretensions of being the top dogs in 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 fame. 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.

31:29So 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. Stand 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 McKinnis 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.

32:30They'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 and Britain? When everything is moving all at once, your workforce, your tech stack, your business, you don't need more tools. You need one solution. That's why Paylossi built a single platform to connect HR, finance, and IT with AI-driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power what's next. Because when everything comes together in one place, growth comes easy. Experience one place for all your HCM needs. Start now at Paylossi.com slash one.

33:52Powered by AT&T Business, built to work. Get today at business.ATT.com For 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-Mahadjirin were claiming territory of their own. Setting up stalls in the middle of Barry Park, Luton's main Muslim area. And the home of the Hattas, the centre of Robinson's world. Their leader was a man named Anjum Chaudhry. So you had the Al-Mahadjirin and their leader Anjum Chaudhry. They had a daily stall on Dunstable Road where all those paraphernalia, pamphlets and books and literature would be displayed.

34:58Horrible things, antisemitic things, really anti-wimmy. Really unsavory thoughts and concepts and ideas. And 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 went actually from Luton. They pretty much all of Luton's Muslim communities, Al-Mahadjirin were an embarrassment. Most of them have criminal records. Most of them were drug pressures 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 Hyces, ended up in Syria and Iraq and ended up dying. On one side of town, families were mourning soldiers killed fighting Islamist extremists overseas.

35:59On another, a small group of Islamist activists spread hate from the stall in Barry Park. Throwing 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. I message to my young children, we, in this defense, you will test your blinding as our whole father's dignity. You will know this in pursuing you in our press to see all the quiet and palestromatic bright democratic countries, blowing them free. In the early days, the EDR would wear black balaclavas to hide their identities and matching black polo shirts with St. George's crosses stitched onto them.

37:03Right from the start, they tried to distance themselves from the far-right movements of the past. Oswald Moesley's fascist party in the 1930s, the White Supermissus National Front decades later. In the EDR's first video, that one where they bent a Nazi flag, they claimed to be anti-Islam, not racist. Their spokesperson, Stephen Yaxley-Lenin, initially anonymous, began to go by various aliases. For a while, he was Tyrone, after, in his words, the short Fat Geaser from the Sopropa coronation street. But he soon became Tommy Robinson, an alter ego stolen from a fellow football who ligand. Tommy Robinson! Tommy Robinson! Tommy Robinson! You 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.

38:11The EDR marches are organised on Facebook, which, back in 2009, like the EDR is pretty much brand new. Twitter is only a couple of years old. Instagram doesn't exist yet. The EDR 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 chance would be about, you know, ban the mosques, pieces of stuff about Allah. They weren't chatting about radical Islam. They were just chatting about Muslims. For the last 20-20 years, Nick Louse has run an organisation called Hope Not Hate.

39:13The same organisation, Peter, from Luton, is affiliated with it. It runs campaigns and investigations against figures on the far right of British politics. It was probably late 2010. We're in Leicester, and I was out on the street taking pictures with we had a couple of teams out. And there'd been quite a lot of violence, and there'd been, you know, the EDL people had been throwing bricks and bottles at the police, and police were in riot gear, et cetera, et cetera. And this bus pulled alongside us, and they were all gearing in the bus. And then this bloke and 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. This is Nick's first encounter with Tommy. He'll go on to have several.

40:13The litus change have flurry of DMs, go out for lunch. Eventually Tommy will stand on Nick's doorstep and her libby set 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. Now 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 that inspires people. His background in football, he legalism, 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 decentralized, it was clear who the figurehead was. There was an incident, I think, in 2010,

41:15where Muslim against Crusades and offshoot from Al-Majorun were setting fire to pop its enormous distillate down in West London. And across the road there was an EDL protest, and a police keeping them apart, whatever. And literally through the park, he came on his own, running at this Al-Majorun crowd, 60-70 people, and literally dived over the fences into the crowd and started fighting, all on his own. Some of those clashes were really violent, you know, where literally hundreds and hundreds of people would be fighting the police, they'd be smashing police fans. And that was the sort of people it attracted. During this period, for anyone following the news, Tommy Robinson became an infamous household name.

42:19Most people heard about insects, English defences, 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 for a cast 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, News Night. How English defends League? What are you defending England from? Shuaal Law, Islamism, the complete spread of Millet and Islam, which we're seeing in our towns and cities across the country. 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 Shuaal Law. We're seeing people calling for it to be implemented on a daily basis.

43:21The programmes presenter, Jeremy Paxman, was dismissive, skating 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. Angime Trialdry, the man behind the stall, behind the prayed protest that started all this, were going operating in plain sight for years. He never carried out an attack himself, but his followers did. Two men who butchered in Beheaded a soldier named Lee Ridby on the London Street in 2013. The ringleader of the London Bridge attack in 2017, the Fishmonger's Hall attacker in 2019. One of his associates turned up in Syria as an ISIS exocutioner, herded on camera, standing over kneeling prisoners.

44:22Police would eventually link hundreds of people from his network to terrorism. Hundreds more went off to Syria. It 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 Lee Tin, but he was editing it. The gangs, the stall, the worst behaviour of his 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 pit towns into lockdowns. Its events drew white nationalists, neonats, he's ethnonationalists. Men doing stiff arms eludes photographed at the edges of the crowds. In the end, the strongest confirmation came from Robinson himself. In 2013, he walked away.

45:23Saying 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 a 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. But since then, it has become a violent and almost uncontrollable movement, a movement that now seems to have no leadership at all. That might have been the end of our story. The movement collapsed, its leader was disgraced. His 15 minutes of fame seemed to be over.

46:23I grew up in Britain during this time. I remember the English Defence League, the protests, the fight. I was a little bit more than I thought. 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 and then use 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. Last 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.

47:27Marches, beers and 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 rag-tag bunch of hooligans from Luton. This was Central London, Whitehall, Parliament Square. Please say 150,000 people were there. And the star speaker, Elon Musk, talking about appending civil war. When the YouTube fans are not at fans 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 we're the British public, and I'm telling the world that they're ready to fight back. Good. Yes.

48:28Come on, right, Green. On 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 forest gumped style at pivotal moments, ready to take advantage.

49:29He's going to put hundreds of thousands of people out on the street. No other person can do that. And you know, we've got to understand that. Over the next decade, few issues would do more to transform Robinson's influence than the Greening 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 no exposure to the dangers of the world, they don't realize that they're there. Until one day, you know, a thousand people show up when you have a larger 500. I don't know where. And start rafting the kids. It remains one of the darkest scandals in modern British history.

50:34That's next time. Thank 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 podcastsatheconomist.com. We'll be back next Saturday with the second episode. Shire Folk was reported by George Abangio and Sam Westren. The producer is Sam Westren. Our fact checker is Elizabeth Pete. 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 Nuby. See you back here on Monday. If you're looking for something predictable and low friction over the long term, public markets may be a suitable option. But the moment you want different investment characteristics,

51:34it may be time to consider the private markets. See how your wealth can work smarter at creativeplanting.com slash access. Hi, this is Brooke Tivard from Naked Beauty. I am always looking for ways to elevate our daily rituals. And the colder smart toilet is proof that design changes everything. It's the stunning sculptural piece that feels like quiet luxury for your bathroom. It totally transforms your daily ritual into something elevated, with customizable cleansing and touch screen controls. It's functional art that makes your space feel cleaner and more intentional. A modern home deserves a modern toilet. Experience the difference of colder smart toilets. Find more at Kohler.com.