Imagine someone born in the 1980s in a blue-collar city with a 10 percent Muslim population that's grown to 25 percent today. In that time, it's been transformed from a one-mosque town to 45 of them currently, plus it has a reputation, based on facts, as a nexus for Islamist terrorist attacks.
Would that person, who’s seen his friends go into prison as non-believers and emerge radicalized and ready to commit Islamist terrorism, have the right—even an obligation—to speak out over what government-condoned mass immigration has done to his hometown in such a short period of time without being condemned as both a racist and an Islamophobe, a meaningless word used to discredit critics of the ideology of Islam. That's not the way it works in the U.K.
The person in question is English anti-mass-immigration activist/citizen journalist Tommy Robinson, born in Luton, England, which has become a hub of terrorism in Europe, and now has 45 mosques.
Robinson comes from the working class, which has felt the brunt of the UK’s ongoing, reckless mass-immigration policy. Separated from the day-to-day consequences, London’s power brokers have always expected the blue collars to carry on like good soldiers. Diversity is the creed of the educated British upper-crust, even if it's someone else’s burden to carry.
Robinson’s outspokenness has made him into a pariah among half of the U.K. population. The mere mention of his name triggers a visceral reaction among metropolitan-class progressives similar to what Trump's name does in this country. And like TDS sufferers, many have just accepted boilerplate media reports on their bête noir from outlets like the discredited BBC, although they'd be hard pressed to name anything racist Robinson’s ever said. The negative reactions to Robinson at this point are mostly Pavlovian.
Still, there's support for him, just as there is for Trump. Both have their uncouth side, but the roughness is part of what makes them special in the eyes of their base.
One person’s social leper is another's truth teller. Robinson’s popularity in polls is under-counted, just like Trump's. People find it hard to admit certain feelings deemed socially unacceptable, even if they're voiced anonymously.
Elon Musk started talking about the U.K. grooming gang scandal about a year ago. Seven years ago, I wrote about Tommy Robinson's public statements on the topic for Splice Today. He said the gangs are mostly made up of Pakistani immigrants in Rotherham and other cities, only to be labeled a bigot in response. The gangs were raping and pimping out non-Muslim girls as young as 13, only to be met with indifference from both the cops and the social workers in the streets, and the grandees in London’s halls of power.
Regardless of the plight of the victimized girls, some who were tortured and fed drugs, nothing was considered worse than acting on, or even acknowledging, Robinson's warnings of crimes and coverups. And this craven spinelessness got worse. Plenty of “responsible citizens” in the position to do something blamed the girls for their own abuse.
One documented case involves a girl who was groomed and abused by organized offenders from about 14, only to get arrested and questioned by Greater Manchester Police and accused of being a “madam.” A formal inspection of policing in England and Wales found that some officers investigating exploited children claimed they had a “general proclivity with older men.” In at least one case, a child and her friend were initially arrested before recognized as victims.
Tommy Robinson’s been a marked man for years. Between 2005-2025, he served five prison terms during which he suffered attacks by Muslim prisoners. He's been called a “jailhouse grifter,” a “laughingstock,” a “thug,” and a “far-right provocateur.”
But nothing’s slowed him down, and now he's being publicly vindicated despite the years-long concerted effort to sweep a horrible scandal under the rug. In 2025, the U.K. government commissioned an official National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, led by Baroness Louise Casey. Her report exposed that thousands of children had been abused while police, councils, and social services failed to intervene effectively. What was once labeled a moral panic has become documented reality as institutional failures were laid bare. Victims as young as 10—some of them children with learning or physical disabilities—were singled out for grooming precisely because of their vulnerability.
Still, perpetrators have walked free because no one bothered to connect the dots, or because the law ended up protecting them instead of their victims.
The Casey report exposed deep-rooted institutional failures stretching back decades, but it stopped short of stating one thing about the grooming gangs (now also referred to as “rape gangs”) that Tommy Robinson has long said is true—that they're mostly made up of Pakistani immigrants at the national level. It does point out the deliberate oversight that enabled such ongoing denial—that authorities have failed to collect complete ethnicity data on two-thirds of perpetrators. However, Casey’s findings revealed that local data that was available from three police force areas (Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and South Yorkshire) indicates there was evidence of disproportionate numbers of Asian men (in the U.K., “Asian” means people from India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh) and Pakistani‑heritage backgrounds among suspects in group‑based child sexual exploitation cases.
Robinson’s countless warnings, ignored for so long, are now recognized with statutory inquiries, expanded policing, reopened cases, and political debate. That the issue of child sexual exploitation and “grooming gangs” was long treated as a fringe topic outside the political mainstream is an indication of the decline in long-held standards that’s currently afflicting British society.
The U.K. has lost its way, and with wishy-washy leaders like Prime Minister Keir Starmer, finding its way back will be a challenge. In June 2025, Starmer announced a full statutory national inquiry into grooming gangs, accepting all 12 of Casey's recommendations. But that's only because he'd been put into a corner.
As former Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013, a job similar to that of the U.S. Attorney General, Starmer opposed efforts to identify the ethnicity of offenders, and after Labour's 2024 election win, he resisted calls for a fresh national inquiry into grooming gangs until he was forced into it. It sure took “Captain Hindsight,” as former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson called him, a long time to hear what Tommy Robinson has been saying for years.