Former EDL leader jailed again

Chickens coming home to roost!

Few people will have sympathy for the former leader of the English Defence League, Stephen Lennon aka Stephen Robinson who was jailed for 18 months earlier this week for fraud.

He was convicted of two counts of conspiring with others to obtain a mortgage by misrepresentation. The fraud amounted to 160k over a six month period.

In October 2013 Robinson, alongside co-leader Kevin Carroll, left the EDL after lengthy discussions with the counter-extremism think tank, Quilliam head Maajid Nawaz. Robinson cited that his organisations had been infiltrated by violent extremists. However, most people believe his abandonment of EDL has less to do with relinquishing race/Muslim hatred and more to do with losing control of his violent associates.

Indeed his barrister Charles Sherrard QC argued that Robinson would now face danger in prison not only by those violent criminals who were once his political allies, but also by elements of the al-Shabaab Somali group who viewed Robinson as one of their political targets. Stephen Robinson, a man who built a fragile edifice of hate that sought to pit one community against the other is now facing retribution from both sides. One side see him as a traitor, the other as a race hate bigot.

That old adage; ‘the chickens are coming home to roost’ springs to mind. We must hope that violence does not beset Robinson.

That desire would make us as bad as him, but his story can be a lesson for others that the path of hatred and violence becomes all consuming, and difficult to escape once you’ve become defined by it.

Simon Woolley