Tommy Robinson

Tommy Robinson (born November 27, 1982, Luton, Bedfordshire, England) is one of Great Britain’s most prominent far-right activists and Internet personalities. Since he rose to prominence in the late 2000s, most of his public actions have been devoted to stoking resentment toward immigrants in general and Muslims in particular.

Early life and education

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, was born in 1982 in Luton, England. His father was English, and his mother, Rita Carroll, was an Irish immigrant. His parents divorced when he was young. He grew up with Carroll, who worked in a bakery, and her second husband, Thomas Lennon, who worked at the local Vauxhall car plant.

In his youth Yaxley-Lennon took to watching matches at the Luton Town Football Club, which was a key social hub. “You find your identity in it,” he later told The Huffington Post (now HuffPost), referring to the sport. “It’s a culture. All the lads I’ve become friends with were at football. All the lads I relied on were at football.”

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Yaxley-Lennon said he did well in his classes but often got into fights with Muslim students. He left school at age 16 and landed an apprenticeship at London Luton Airport, studying aircraft engineering. In 2003 he completed a five-year apprenticeship and qualified as an aircraft engineer. But he lost his job after being convicted of assaulting an off-duty police officer. The security measures that had been imposed after the September 11 attacks meant that Yaxley-Lennon’s criminal conviction made him ineligible to work at airports.

Adoption of the “Tommy Robinson” pseudonym

In 2004 Yaxley-Lennon helped organize a demonstration against local Muslims, who he said were recruiting men to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan. He formed a group called Ban the Luton Taliban. In 2009 it grew into a national group, the English Defence League, which began orchestrating protests across the country and received significant news coverage. In the wake of a series of violent English Defense League actions, The Telegraph wrote that Yaxley-Lennon was “the most controversial—and the most hated—far right figure in Britain.”

As his profile rose, he adopted the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, named for a football hooligan from Luton who had written two books about his experiences. Yaxley-Lennon said a “poisonous uncle” urged him to use the name. In 2013 Yaxley-Lennon announced he was quitting the English Defence League, telling the BBC that there were extremist strains in the organization that he could no longer control. He said street demonstrations were “no longer productive” and explained that his fight was against “Islamic ideology”—but not “against Muslims.”

Since then, however, Yaxley-Lennon has continued driving animosity toward Muslim immigrants, both by posting online and by creating spectacles in person. In the 2010s he also wrote and self-published two books: the autobiography Enemy of the State in 2015 and Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam (with Peter McLoughlin) in 2017.

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Imprisonment for contempt and other legal issues

One of Yaxley-Lennon’s more controversial episodes began in 2018, after a Syrian teenager named Jamal Hijazi was attacked at his school in West Yorkshire. Yaxley-Lennon posted a video online in which he claimed that Hijazi was a violent thug. The claim was false, but the video led to death threats against Hijazi and his family. Hijazi sued Yaxley-Lennon for defamation, and in 2021 Hijazi won £100,000 in damages. The judge ordered Yaxley-Lennon not to repeat his lies, but in 2023 he started circulating them again, outlining the accusations in an online video that was reported to have received at least 47 million views. The judge ultimately sentenced him to 18 months in prison for contempt of court. While Yaxley-Lennon was serving his sentence, tech billionaire Elon Musk called for his release, saying the provocateur had been imprisoned “for telling the truth.” Yaxley-Lennon was released in May 2025, after seven months.

That same month he was charged with harassing two Daily Mail journalists. Yaxley-Lennon allegedly told one reporter, “I’m coming to get you,” and he threatened another with “I’ll be knocking at your door.” He was also accused of doxing the families of the journalists. In October 2026 Yaxley-Lennon was found guilty of harassment and faced a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

In both cases Yaxley-Lennon’s legal defense was reportedly funded by Musk.

Anti-immigrant actions and “Unite the Kingdom”

Over the years Yaxley-Lennon has tried, in various ways, to build a political movement. In 2020 he cofounded an organization called Hearts of Oak, which centered on such issues as “strong borders, immigration and national identity,” but the group never gained much traction.

He has also been involved in electoral politics. In August 2025, for example, he announced that he was joining the Advance UK party. Advance had been established by a former co-deputy leader of Reform UK, Ben Habib, who said that Reform wasn’t hard-line enough on immigration. Yaxley-Lennon claimed that Reform leader Nigel Farage only wanted to “make peace with Islam.”

In September 2025 Yaxley-Lennon organized an anti-immigrant “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London that drew as many as 150,000 people. Musk addressed the crowd by video. Twenty-six police officers were injured while trying to control the crowd. In early 2026 Yaxley-Lennon endorsed Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate for a parliamentary election in Manchester. In response, a Reform spokesman told reporters that Yaxley-Lennon was not welcome in the party. In May 2026, at a second “Unite the Kingdom” rally, Yaxley-Lennon told a crowd of 60,000 to prepare for the “battle of Britain.”

Yaxley-Lennon self-published a third book, Manifesto: Free Speech, Real Democracy, Peaceful Disobedience (with Peter McLoughlin), in 2024, and it briefly topped Amazon UK’s bestseller list. The book advances a version of the great replacement, a racist conspiracy theory that suggests nonwhite immigrants are carrying out an elaborate plan to replace white Europeans in Western countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.

Yaxley-Lennon was married for 10 years but divorced in 2021. He has three children.