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Britain has experienced its worst far-right riots in living memory. They first erupted in Southport, then spread like wildfire to Rotherham, Tamworth, Middlesbrough, Hull, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Bolton, Blackpool, Sunderland, Plymouth, Hartlepool, Belfast, and beyond.
Targeted mostly against Muslims, mosques, asylum seekers and people of colour, the country – and, indeed, the world – has watched in shock at images of rioters destroying shops, libraries, cars and hotels, while seeking out ethnic minority citizens for harassment and violence.
At the centre of the maelstrom is ‘Tommy Robinson’ – the far-right convicted fraudster who played a leading role in whipping up the unprecedented racist violence, and whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
But the violence which has racked the streets of Britain has been in the making for more than a decade.
This exclusive investigation by Byline Times shows how it has been enabled by a network of technology platforms and far-right organisations, with close ties to the Trump campaign, and especially to individuals who supported the January 6 riots, aimed at reversing Trump’s presidential election loss in 2020 – some of whom maintain direct ties to the Russian Government.
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Tommy Robinson and ‘Silenced’
On 27 July 2024, Tommy Robinson screened a banned film in London’s Trafalgar Square to thousands of followers. The rally quickly turned violent, resulting in nine arrests.
Silenced was created to support his false and defamatory claims against Jamal Hijazi, a 16-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy who was receiving racist bullying. Robinson claimed that he had been “violently attacking” his female classmates and threatening to stab another schoolboy.
Much of the film is based on the disproven claims of Bailey McLaren, the boy who was caught on video assaulting Hijazi by waterboarding him – and whose family reportedly has a history of racist far-right activism.
Hijazi eventually sued Robinson for libel. Three years ago, Robinson lost the case, and the High Court warned that he would be jailed if he continued to ignore the court and repeat his libellous claims against the boy.
“I’ll be jailed for two years for showing the inconceivable truth,” Robinson wrote to his followers, urging them to share the film.
Two days after the screening, the killings of three children at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport provoked shock and anger around the country. That same day, Robinson fled the country to avoid a contempt of court hearing. On his way out, he was arrested and interrogated under anti-terror laws before he was let go.
From a five-star hotel in Cyprus, Robinson swiftly began ramping up anger among his followers about the Southport attack on Elon Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter), which he blamed on mass migration and Muslims, while calling for mass deportations.
As the riots laid waste to property and terrorised ordinary people, Musk amplified Robinson’s posts on X by questioning his arrest under anti-terror laws and allowing Robinson’s banned documentary to receive more than 33 million views via the platform.
As a result, Robinson’s posts were seen up to 1.2 billion times. According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “almost everyone” it interviewed at protests outside Downing Street “mentioned Tommy Robinson”.
Musk not only amplified Robinson, but systematically boosted a range of far-right influencers promoting disinformation around the riots. In response to incendiary footage of the unrest, he tweeted that “civil war is inevitable” – criticising Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s promise of support for Muslim communities by writing: “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on all communities?”
But the infrastructure for Tommy Robinson’s stoking of violent race riots across Britain did not come out of the blue.
The Alt-Reich Comes For Britain
That infrastructure has been carefully nurtured during the past few years by a transatlantic network of far-right conspiracy theorists and ‘alt-tech’ platforms with intimate ties to both the Trump campaign and the Russian Government.
Byline Times can reveal that, as part of this infrastructure, Tommy Robinson is being backed by some of the most influential supporters of the January 6 insurrection, during which a mob of thousands rioted, vandalised, and looted the US Capitol Building to derail the 2020 Presidential Election result, which Donald Trump had lost.
One of Robinson’s financial supporters is an American multi-millionaire Trump ally, Patrick Michael Byrne, who encouraged Trump to overturn the 2020 Election, spoke at the January 6 rally, and maintains ties with a Russian intelligence agent sanctioned by the West for promoting disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine.
Another of Robinson’s supporters, Byline Times can reveal, is a far-right Danish politician, Morten Messerschmidt, who is close friends with Reform UK Leader and MP Nigel Farage. As the riots were escalating, Farage posted a video in which he questioned “whether the truth is being withheld from us” about the Southport murders. This was despite the fact that the only reason the suspect’s identity was originally withheld was because he was a minor in law.
Neil Basu, the former counter-terrorism chief at the Metropolitan Police, accused Farage of inciting the riots by “undermining the police, creating conspiracy theories, and giving a false basis for the attacks on the police”.
Messerschmidt has a long history of racism and making anti-Muslim remarks – including warning in 2009 of the inevitability of race wars in Europe that would require Europeans to participate in a violent uprising. Yet, this is a man with whom Farage has seemingly developed a friendship – having worked with him in the European Parliament, and most recently providing him a personal endorsement for the leadership of the Danish People’s Party.
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Robinson’s connections with Byrne and Messerschmidt, and the amplification of his false claims via key technology platforms controlled by Trump donors, suggest that Britain’s far-right riots were orchestrated by an international far-right network.
To acknowledge legitimate concerns around the riots, this reality – and the grave threat it poses to British national security and communit