Images of Tommy Robinson using his phone while sunbathing in Cyprus as a Rotherham hotel housing asylum seekers was set alight have prompted outrage among those long concerned about his ability to inspire far-right action, even from a distance.
Yet while he has long seemed able to operate with impunity, events may finally be catching up with the man who first rose to prominence in 2009 as the de facto leader of the now defunct English Defence League (EDL).
Far from being powerless to pursue Robinson, new legislation means the authorities may be able to move more easily against those who share damaging information online that they know to be untrue.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is already known to be among those who are being looked at by police for their alleged role in disseminating disinformation.
A former director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald KC, spelled out on Monday how he believed investigators would want to quickly identify individuals who are involved in “online organisation, online incitement and online conspiracies”.
“I think prosecutors will want to have a strategy to identify people who may have been involved in inciting and encouraging these events, and they will want to arrest them and build cases against them. These are, in one sense, the most important people,” Lord Macdonald told BBC Radio 4’s World at One.
While Robinson has been abroad since 28 July, when he fled the UK on the eve of a high court hearing over contempt of court proceedings, he has maintained a near constant commentary on events in the UK since the fatal stabbings of three young girls in Southport on 29 July, sharing claims that police have described as false.
While he has long been a prolific user of multiple social media platforms – benefiting in particular from the return of his X account after Elon Musk bought Twitter – going after him for his online output is not clear-cut.
Dominic Grieve, a former attorney general for England and Wales, told the Guardian: “It is an offence to incite violence on the grounds of race, belief or sexual orientation, and there is incitement to hatred. But it’s a grey area between the right to criticise and incitement to hatred and is a very difficult area to police.
“Quite simply, that’s why it is possible for people to play around with that area. Either you clamp down on it, in which case legitimate freedom of speech gets eliminated and breeds undesirable problems of its own, or you live with it and challenge those views through debate.”
Recent changes in the law open up other possibilities. Since January, an amendment to the Online Safety Act 2023 allows for the prosecution of those who convey information that they know to be false and “if the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience”.
Ashley Fairbrother, a senior prosecutor at the law firm Edmonds Marshall McMahon, said: “This now makes the circulation of damaging and false information online into an offence in its own right.”
Aside from tackling Robinson over his online output, anti-racism activists have long suggested a role for the taxman, given the questions surrounding the seemingly lavish lifestyle enjoyed by Robinson and the often opaque financial arrangements that have underpinned his self-styled reinvention as a “journalist” in recent years.
Hope Not Hate, which campaigns against racism and fascism, called on HMRC to investigate the business affairs of Robinson, who declared himself bankrupt in a high court trial in 2021 in which he was ordered to pay £100,000 in libel damages to a Syrian schoolboy he defamed online.
Robinson has periodically had to overcome challenges in maintaining funding. He was banned from using PayPal in 2018 and Facebook also took action after it was alerted to how he was using donation tools designed for charities to raise funds for his activism.
But he has also been able to maintain and cultivate international ties, not least with rightwingers in the US and Canada. The Guardian previously revealed how he has relied on an international network of wealthy backers and receives donations from across the globe.
These days, Robinson claims to be an employee of Urban Scoop, which styles itself as an independent media company but which heavily promotes his political worldview. It asks for direct donations through its website and via multiple methods of cryptocurrency.
On Monday Robinson was also “sacked” by his British Muslim tax adviser after she accused him of instigating far-right riots, the Daily Mail reported.
Jesminara Rahman, a former HMRC tax inspector, told Robinson that she no longer wanted his money, as he was “destroying” the country. She said: “I don’t want to work with him any more. His deposit has been returned.”
Joe Mulhall, the director of research at Hope Not Hate, said: “We have known for many years that Stephen Lennon has received potentially millions of pounds in donations, fed through a dizzying array of companies, none of which appear to have filed tax returns.
“As well as using this money to organise events and spread his hateful politics, it has funded an extraordinarily lavish lifestyle. Despite declaring himself bankrupt after admitting to squandering vast sums on gambling, drinking and partying, he continues to live a life of luxury in a variety of expensive villas and top-end hotels. We have been calling for Lennon’s finances to be investigated for some time and now.”
• This article was amended on 6 August 2024. An earlier version said that Tommy Robinson relied on an international network of wealthy “bankers” for funding; this should have said backers.
