Book Review by Anthony C Green
(with a postscript on Unite the Kingdom and the Slaying of Charlie Kirk)
It’s probably not difficult to write a damning indictment of Mr. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known to the world as Tommy Robinson. No doubt, it’s already been done in the book ‘Tommy’ by Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate. I haven’t read it, and have no intention of doing so. Because it’s by Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate, and a book from that source on anyone to the Right of Keir Starmer is never going to be anything but a ‘damning indictment.’
From the off, Lucy Brown makes it clear that her book is not a narrative of redemption by someone who was radicalised by the Far-Right, but was young and naïve and now realises the error of her ways and sees how much our society has been enriched by multiculturalism, and that Diversity truly is our Greatest strength.
It’s not that kind of book at all, and all the better for it.
Lucy’s failure to prostrate herself before the liberal establishment probably explains why Hate Club hasn’t received much media attention.
Although the Tommy who emerges through the pages of her book is one whose failings as a human being are many, she appears to feel no hatred towards him. Her sympathies, as far as I can tell, remain firmly with the Right.
Her failure to repent makes her testimony all the more powerful, despite the resultant lack of publicity and its likely negative impact on sales.
That it is also a well-written, humorous and entertaining read is a bonus.
She worked for Robinson in a variety of roles for a two-year period beginning in 2017: Her duties included the production of increasingly professionalised publicity videos, the management of his online content, the general management of his public appearances and public affairs, and often as a reluctant apologist and provider of excuses.
The book’s timeline begins and ends several years after Robinson first became a public figure of both hate and adoration through his leadership of the EDL, the English Defence League, a period of his life for which he often seems to feel a sense of nostalgia and a keenness to recreate.
But we first meet Lucy shortly before that, as a privately educated, young and attractive but troubled and searching young woman who was still embroiled in a middle-class leftist milieu embittered by the traumatic experience of the 2016 Brexit vote, delivered, in their eyes, by uneducated, unwashed ‘gammon.’
We follow the author as she attends radical feminist groups and Black Lives Matter meetings before BLM became all too well known following the death and subsequent elevation to sainthood of lifelong criminal and drug addict George Floyd.
It was at these meetings that she began to question some of the ‘truths’ that were self-evident to most of her friends and work colleagues: were all men really potential rapists? Should she really feel guilty simply because of her skin colour and the colonial sins of her ancestors? Wasn’t this hatred of all things white itself racist? Was there nothing to be proud of about being British? Was the Brexit vote necessarily a bad thing, and even if it was, shouldn’t the democratic wishes of the British people be respected? Was the Pakistani grooming/rape gang issue really exaggerated or non-existent and little more than a ‘racist dog-whistle’?
The next stage of her journey was the online rabbit hole of Right-Wing influencers, a journey that soon led her to first the periphery, and then the centre of Planet Tommy.
The contempt for the Left (or the version of the Left that existed in Lucy’s world. Other varieties are available) seems well-justified, with much of her ire aimed at Hope Not Hate, an organisation that comes across as much more Hate than Hope.
Lucy makes it clear that she had many good times during her period of working for Tommy. Humorous anecdotes are legion, but I’ll leave the reader to discover and enjoy these for themselves.
Her relationship with Robinson was complex: part employee, sometimes paid, often not, part friend, near one-night-stand drunken lover, another tale that needs to be heard in Lucy’s own words, and part caretaker.
Despite Lucy’s lack of malice, the ‘damning indictment’ thing is certainly there, up front and writ large.
True, there’s nothing we didn’t already know, or at least suspect. What Lucy does is provide detail, and it rings true in a way that a book by the likes of Nick Lowles never could, because she was there and she isn’t writing from a perspective of polarised ideological disdain.
The Tommy of Hate Club is allegedly:
- A heavy-drinking cocaine addict who craves the limelight and will champion any cause that’s palatable to his fan base, if it helps him to maintain his position in the public eye.
- A man who will claim responsibility for, or at least exaggerate his role in, exposing issues like the Pakistani rape gangs, which many others, both publicly and privately, played an important role in exposing.
- Who has sought to involve himself in causes where it’s been made clear he is not welcome, for instance, in the fall-out to the brutal Lee Rigby murder.
- He has indeed faced some of the state censorship and persecution that takes centre stage in his self-told Hero’s Journey. But at least some of his jail time and online cancellation have happened because of his own stupidity, because of his tendency to act without thinking, a trait common among users of cocaine and other stimulants.
- Tommy lived/lives an extravagant, luxurious lifestyle, dripping in bling, replete with flash cars, numerous foreign holidays and a succession of houses far out of the reach of his overwhelmingly working-class followers.
- Lucy does not outright state that this lifestyle was/is funded by the regular appeals for donations he seeks and receives from his supporters, and this may or may not be true. But what is clear from the pages of the book is that, at least during the period covered, no real accounting and auditing system existed for how these donations were used, and I suspect that this remains the case today.
- Not only was his lifestyle at odds with his public ‘Man of the People’ persona, but so was his claim to be a dedicated family man. In reality, he was an inveterate womaniser who once used the excuse of a ‘sick daughter’ as a means of bailing on an important public engagement, when the truth was that he was driving to Newcastle for a sexual encounter with a woman he barely knew, and didn’t even find particularly attractive.
As with Coke and the opportunity of another moment in the glare of the public spotlight, the offer of sex was something Robinson had great difficulty in refusing.
Unsurprisingly, he is now separated from his wife.
- He was also incapable of taking responsibility when decisions he had made went wrong, and was quite prepared to throw employees and friends under a bus rather than to do so.
In fact, that’s how Lucy’s involvement with Tommy came to an end, but that’s another story best heard in her own words.
I was going to draw my review to a conclusion here, but because of recent, fast-moving events, I’ve decided to bring matters up to date with an extended postscript.
…
Tommy is now more high-profile and more popular than ever before. He’s been accepted as a member of former Reform UK Deputy Leader Ben Habib’s new Advance UK party, having previously been given a wide berth by Farage’s, Reform, and I’m writing this a week on from his latest big London gathering, the Unite the Kingdom event in London, which included Habib and, by video link, Elon Musk among the speakers.
Musk’s appearance confirmed what’s obvious from anyone who follows such things on his social media platform ‘X’, that Tommy has reached almost the level of a free speech folk-hero among the American Right, most of whom, I think it’s safe to say, have little knowledge of his history.
The police estimated the numbers attending the London march and rally at 110,000. I’ve attended many big demonstrations in my time, and a good rule of thumb is that if you split the difference between the organiser’s claimed attendance and the police’s estimate, you get something approaching reality. From the various online sources I accessed, Unite the Kingdom appeared to be much bigger than the figure claimed by the police, even if Tommy’s figure of three million seemed a tad grandiose.
I doubt that one million would be a wild over-estimation.
But where does Tommy go from here?
He’s already talking about the next major and similar event. But this type of demonstration/’Festival’ is of a similar character to those described in Lucy’s time as one of his chief organisers, the last of which included the incident that finally led her to walk.
He’d also mobilised decent, if considerably smaller and more yobbish numbers, in his time as leader of the EDL.
But people soon tire of marching around London with their flags, listening to a dozen or so speakers, and then going home. It’s the law of diminishing returns, and in the end, these events, in and of themselves, achieve little.
Arguably, the migrant hotel protests have had more real and likely lasting impact, precisely because they have been localised affairs. Those attending may chant Tommy’s name, but he has played no part in their organisation.
As mentioned earlier, Robinson lacks any ideology beyond his hatred of Islam. But, as valid as many of his concerns are, this isn’t enough to sustain or build a movement. I’ve watched a few interviews with him recently, and he’s struggled noticeably if the tone has gone beyond allowing him to retell anecdotes of his own heroism and persecution, and his reiteration of the evils of Islam.
In one, he seemed to have adopted the position advocated by open Ethno-Nationalists such as Mark Collett of Patriotic Alternative, of re-establishing a 90- 95% White majority in Britain. But he was soon back to claiming the mantle of ‘diversity’ for himself, embracing all cultures (especially Sikhs, Tommy loves Sikhs), apart from Muslims.
He had no real answer when one interviewer pointed out that illegal immigration from non-Muslims, often from nominally Christian African countries, has now almost caught up with that from Islamic sources.
When it comes to legal immigration, the biggest growth area, via Starmer’s Indian trade deal, is going to be from Hindu Indians, with whom Tommy has professed to have no quarrel. They do, after all, have their own problems with Islam.
We’ve already had a big legal influx, including here in Liverpool, of Hong Kong Chinese, another group Tommy has been conciliatory about.
The point being that if you wished to achieve a white ‘super-majority’, your reach for deportations would need to extend far beyond the Muslim community (and not forgetting that Islam is a religion, not a race. Many of them are also white, as Malcolm X long ago realised. Some are even white British converts.)
We’ll see how matters unfold. I doubt many of the issues with Tommy Lucy highlights are in the past, even if he is now claiming to be a Christian. Despite a definite swing to the Right nationally, I can’t see Robinson being much of an electoral asset to Habib.
Also, at the time of writing, we are in the aftermath of the public assassination of the thirty-one-year-old American conservative ‘influencer’ Charlie Kirk, about which much was made at the big London event, even though it’s doubtful many of those attending were even aware of Kirk, and those that were, only barely, before his public slaying. That includes Robinson.
The official narrative is linking the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, to ‘Far Left’, Antifa extremism, with the added and helpful element of a ‘trans’ lover.
The murder is being used by the Trump administration as an opportunity for a clampdown on the Left, with the promise of the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organisation, though, as no centralised ‘Antifa’ organisation exists, this might prove more difficult to do than to promise.
We’re also likely to see attempts to criminalise opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere. This is something we’ve already seen the beginnings of here, with Starmer’s outright proscription of one organisation, though, here too, intent is one thing, and implementation quite another.
I’ve been following developments in the Kirk investigation closely (some might say, obsessively. The only gun I’ve ever held is a 2.2 air rifle bought for me by my dad when I was fifteen. But I now know how long it takes to disassemble a ‘Mauser 98’) and believe there are a lot of issues with the mainstream narrative, as does his close friend and fellow American Christian conservative Candace Owens. But I’ll leave that aside and conclude with a personal anecdote that, in a very minor way, adds credence to the official narrative.
About a month ago, I attended a protest outside a migrant hotel here in Liverpool, partly because I believe the concerns of the protesters to be legitimate, and partly to see for myself how both the demonstrators and counter-demonstrators conducted themselves.
A protest the following week, in the city centre, erupted in violence, if fairly low-level violence, which, as far as I could tell from the coverage on YouTube, seemed to arise largely from the failure of the police to keep the two groups apart.
But the hotel protest I attended in person was well policed, with a solid line of mostly good-humoured officers separating demonstrators and counter-demonstrators, while still allowing passers-by and individuals like me who didn’t look like they were out to cause trouble to pass between the two groups, and to take photographs and video footage, both of which I did.
My observation, and I’m aware that appearances can be deceptive, was that those on what I will call the patriots side were largely good-natured, humorous, normal-seeming types. They were mostly middle-aged, but with a smattering of young people and children, and probably majority female.
On the other side, chanting ‘Nazi Scum Off Our Streets’ at the very un-Nazi looking people facing them, were 90% young ‘studenty’ types, with the usual array of ‘Refugees Welcome’ and, rather irrelevantly, ‘Trans Rights Now’ banners and placards.
I had two overriding thoughts about this. One was that I knew some of the counter-demonstrators, at least by sight, from the regular Sunday marches in support of the Palestinian cause. I found it depressing that the Palestinian flag, many of which were also plentiful amongst the ‘antifa’, is now seen, through a process of guilt by association, as synonymous with the people calling them Nazis.
This has led to a reaction that even goes to the extreme of flying a foreign flag, the flag of Israel, on supposedly patriotic demonstrations, presumably on the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. There were none on this particular demonstration in Liverpool (perhaps due to Scouse exceptionalism?), though I spotted a few in the coverage of Saturday’s London event. I gather a Palestinian flag was even ripped up on stage, though at least one speaker, to his credit, condemned this.
Robinson’s own committed Zionism and his focus on Islam is partly to blame for this. In reality, not all Palestinians are Muslims, anyway, and Israel has ‘accidentally’ bombed churches in Gaza, and Israeli ‘Settlers’ have deliberately torched churches on the West Bank. For me, there is no contradiction in supporting the Palestinian people and supporting the anti-migrant protests. Unfortunately, I doubt many on either side would see it this way if I were to carry an English flag in one hand and the Palestinian flag in the other.
My other primary reflection was how far from the type of serious Marxist analysis I was once schooled in the Left, or at least the type of ‘Left’ that attends this type of counter-demonstration has descended.
In my youthful days in Militant, and not quite so youthful, and much shorter period in the Communist Party of Britain, we could distinguish between different strands of Right-Wing thought, between outright Nazis and Fascists, and for instance, Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell, the precursors of the likes of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib today.
Or, for that matter, Tommy Robinson. Lucy Brown doesn’t directly address the question in Hate Club, but in all of her many criticisms of Robinson, nowhere does she give reason to believe that his primary motivation is racial hatred. To call him, as supposedly right-wing ‘Talk’ presenter Julie Hartley-Brewer recently did, a ‘White Supremacist’, is based on precisely zero evidence.
The failure to make distinctions between ideologies is dangerous, and it’s entirely possible, setting aside any problems with the official narrative, that an ideological co-thinker of the Liverpool counter-demonstrators across the pond, where guns are much more prevalent, and where President Trump has been called a ‘literal Nazi’ by even mainstream Democrats, and has himself been the subject of two assassination attempts, could believe that Christian conservative Charlie Kirk was a hateful fascist’ who deserved to die.
The online celebrations that took place almost as soon as the news that he’d been shot hit the internet confirm this hate-filled mindset.
This is not to say that even those who really are Fascists or Nazis should be randomly assassinated or attacked. But the tale of how we’ve moved incrementally from ‘No Platform for Fascists’, which I never supported, anyway, to ‘Punch a Nazi’, to where we are now, which can be summarised as ‘Kill all Nazis and anyone who disagrees with us on anything, be it immigration or trans rights, is a Nazi’, is a long and complex one, and I’ve digressed way too-long already.
To conclude, Tommy Robinson is clearly a deeply flawed human being, and Hate Club does a superb job in capturing the essence of his failings at a particular moment in time, which, as I’ve said, I doubt has much changed. It’s an enjoyable read and, having watched Lucy on a recent podcast appearance, where she came across as likeable, genuine, and humble, I’d guess her personal memoir captures her own essence as much as and as well as she does that of Mr Yaxley-Lennon.
A Five Star recommendation.
Anthony C Green, September 2025
#lucybrown #tommyrobinson #hateclub
