I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an sez, ‘We serve no red-coats here’.
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, and Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”,
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play.
Rudyard Kipling, Tommy.
Tommy Robinson – or as the MSM always add, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – has done what Lily Allen could and will never do; he has become a household name. This, of course, is despite rather than because of the media. Robinson has been a ceaseless crusader – and we use the word advisedly – against the more toxic elements of our Mohammedan brothers and – walking ten yards behind – sisters.
You won’t be reading about Tommy in the newspapers this week, or seeing his face on the BBC, and this is because he has achieved something prestigious. Robinson has been awarded the Sappho Prize for free speech. As you would expect in these times of state-approved repression, and even though he received the award in the building housing the Danish government, the event was heavily policed and surrounded by slack-jawed Antifa sock-puppets. Robinson was even escorted by police from the airport to the venue.
Robinson has been harassed by the British police, unjustly imprisoned and kept in solitary confinement for six weeks, able only to eat a tin of tuna and a piece of fruit a day as it was made clear to him that Muslims ran the kitchen and would be likely to poison or contaminate his food, harangued by a Shariah-compliant press, banned from attending public events (football matches), ‘de-platformed’, and called a racist and an Islamophobe – we’re still not clear what one of those is – by any public service employee who wants to keep their job and their pension. But he has been rewarded with a prize for free speech in an area where, in bold contradistinction to the rest of British society, all must not have prizes.
In case you think the Sappho Prize is some skinhead gala, past winners include the late Sir Roger Scruton, journalist Douglas Murray, cartoonist and survivor of an Islamist assassination attempt Lars Westergaard, and veteran Canadian journalist Mark Steyn. These people are titans of free speech. Robinson joins them.
But, for the new Left, that toxic brew of failed Marxists, ‘progressives’, the MSM, the BBC, and all the other ranters and ravers who despise themselves, their colour, and the religion that enabled the society in which they thrive, this award is yet another symptom of racism, xenophobia, oh, fill in the list yourselves.
When the British people tear themselves away from Netflix, X-Box and football, and see that those preoccupations are all they have left, they will view Robinson in a somewhat different light than that in which they are taught now that they must view him. Free speech is much like paradise in Joni Mitchell’s famous song; you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
When we were lads, all scuffed knees and beetles in matchboxes and Tom and Jerry, there was a phrase our parents used to use. They were quite forthright about it too, as when they told you to stop using that kind of language, or get to bed, or stop hitting your brother. They said, I can say what I like. It’s a free country, isn’t it? But the past is another country. They do things differently there.
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