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Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as ‘Tommy Robinson’ – the serial criminally convicted fraudster, thug, stalker and far-right activist who founded the English Defence League in 2009 – has spent more than a decade insisting his politics target a religion rather than a race. He hosts non-white supporters at his rallies and told the High Court under oath in April 2021, during the Jamal Hijazi libel trial: “I am not racist, and I am certainly not anti-Muslim.”
However, a Byline Times investigation has established that this denial is merely the public alibi for a vocabulary that, across Robinson’s own posts, amounts to white supremacist anti-black racism in code – the politics he was schooled in as a 2004 British National Party member, repackaged for delivery to his 1.9 million followers.
The investigation analysed a non-exhaustive corps of more than 140 posts on Robinson’s @TRobinsonNewEra X account between January 2024 and May 2026 which were found to have used coded, racially-charged language.
The vocabulary works through consistent substitution. “Native” stands for white people – a substitution Robinson confirms himself in a keystone June 2024 post defining “native” as “white”.
“Invader” is ascribed exclusively to non-white populations, 43 times in the sample. “Modern London” refers in derogatory fashion to footage of non-white people in British public space. “African” appears as a racial proxy paired with crime across its eight uses.
“Somali” targets a population that is both black and Muslim, fusing both race and religion in a single term. And “Remigration” – the white nationalist programme for the removal of non-white citizens from European countries – is repeatedly recommended as the policy solution.
Across the sample, Robinson endorses the in-group 31 times (11 “white people”, 20 “natives”); applies “invader” to non-white origins 43 times; references black people as a racial category in 46 separate posts (21 direct, eight “African”, 17 Somali); and has used or endorsed the white supremacist term “Remigration” at least 14 times on his own account.
The In-Group
Thirty-one posts in the sample name the in-group whose interests Robinson defends: 11 using the explicit term “white people” and a further 20 using the coded equivalent “native(s)” – a marker Robinson himself defines as white.
In one post on 6 June 2024 about diversity policy in British institutions, Robinson wrote that the agenda was making “the native population a minority” in commentary on a post about “an attack on white people” – treating the two terms as interchangeable. In his vocabulary, “native” now means a white person born in Britain; the non-white British-born population, by implication, is something else.
The same claim recurs in 10 further posts across the period. Across the spring and summer of 2024, Robinson called the First Minister of Scotland “anti-white” (29 April); posted that a public event was open to all “except white children” (17 May); amplified a claim that anti-white discrimination was being “normalised” in the West (11 July); and wrote that white children were being “picked on” in schools (4 August).
Through early 2026 he returned to the theme: calling for “anti white organizations” to be “dismantled” (15 February); describing an agenda as “demoralising… lives of white people in their own countries” (17 March); and reposting a claim that a named individual “hates white people” (11 May).
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The Out-Group
Forty-three posts in the sample examined by Byline Times apply the mirror term “invader”. Combined with the 20 “native(s)” posts analysed above, they form a sustained two-sided racial binary that operates across multiple posts a week for 28 months.
Of the nationality-tagged uses, 10 describe Afghans, nine Sudanese, three Eritreans, three Moroccans, and the remainder North Africans, Kurds and Somalis. The word attaches exclusively to non-white origins; the corpus contains no American, Polish, French, Australian or Irish “invaders”.
On 26 August 2025, in a post viewed 1.6 million times, Robinson wrote: “A legacy media demonizing the native at every given turn, in favour of the invader, all under the guise of ‘tolerance’.” He returned to the framing on 2 October 2025: “Hate speech laws are only used against natives to silence them whilst our country is flooded & raped.”
“Modern London”
A frequent framing phrase in Robinson’s everyday posts is “Modern London”, with its variant “Modern England”.
Documented examples include a 14 July 2024 scene captioned “new normal in Sadiq Khan’s Modern London”; a 10 December 2024 post describing “disgusting scenes” as the boxer Floyd Mayweather was “confronted by a gang of islamists as he shopped in Sadiq Khan’s Modern London”; a 7 August 2025 post on “12 days of migrants in ‘Modern England’”; and a 15 January 2026 post captioned “just another new normal evening in Modern London”.
The phrase delivers a message in two words: a racially mixed city has become a different country.
The Anti-Black Corpus
The first category – 21 direct references to “black people” as a racial group – opens with a post of 18 January 2024, eighteen days into Robinson’s first full year back on X, asking what a viral incident “tells you about the mindset of some black people”.
Four further posts construct “Black on White violence” as a coherent racial taxonomy, including a 10 September 2025 framing of “black youth” attacking a lone white girl. The corpus contains no equivalent category of “White on Black violence”.
Five posts mock or attack the Black Lives Matter movement, while two posts make the white-grievance frame explicit on racial terms. A 19 July 2024 post complains that free food is provided to people who are “black or Asian” but not to people who are white.
A 20 July 2025 post asks whether the authorities would have applied a given action to “a Muslim” or “a black man” – naming, in a single sentence, two categories as the objects of his opposition: a religion and a race.
Eight further posts deploy “African” as a negative racial proxy. Seven of them pair the word directly with “invader”; every one of the eight refers to a crime, fraud or violent incident.
Three of the eight cluster in a 36-hour window in July 2025 around the Spanish town of Torre-Pacheco. One 12 July 2025 post, which accumulated 1.2 million views, called for “Mass deportations ASAP” in response to alleged actions by “North African invaders” and tagged Spain’s far-right Vox party as the political solution.
A companion post earlier the same day named Vox as the only party that “will mass deport them”, followed by a third 12 July post. Multi-day street violence between Spanish residents and North African migrants followed in Torre-Pacheco within 48 hours.
A continent of 1.4 billion people encompassing 54 nations appears is described by Robinson purely as a demographic threat: criminal, parasitic and sexually violent.
Seventeen further posts target Somali identity. Somalia is approximately 99% Muslim and approximately 100% black African. Targeting Somalis as a group therefore means targeting them on both racial and religious axes at once – and Robinson’s vocabulary repeatedly does so by ethnic name.
Four posts deploy “Somali invader” as a standing label. The most viewed, posted on 31 August 2025, identified an asylum seeker by name, by ethnicity “from Somalia”, and accommodation. Five similar posts apply collective-criminality framing, including a post on the 29 April 2026 Golders Green attack focusing on the attacker’s ethnic identity as “Somalian”.
In a 9 January 2026 post, Robinson framed Somalis as drains on the British state, days after US House Oversight Committee hearings citing claims that 81% of Somali-headed households in Minnesota received welfare benefits and a US Treasury press conference on Somali-targeted fraud investigations.
Four further posts pursue a territorial-takeover theme – calling Minnesota the “Somali capital” of the United States and attacking the Somali mayor of Sheffield for switching on Ramadan lights. Two more use the “Somali Pirate” label.
None of the 17 posts describes a Somali achievement, contribution, sporting moment or routine event. This derogatory pattern holds across all 46 anti-black posts in the corpus.
Some 21 direct posts on “black people” and eight on “Africans” by Robinson also contain no Muslim component at all. The unifying variable in his targeting across many of these posts is race.
The same framing extends to ordinary moments in black British life. A 25 August 2024 post framed the Notting Hill Carnival – Britain’s largest annual black cultural celebration, which has no Muslim element – with imagery of boarded-up shops.
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Great Replacement and Remigration
Robinson named his policy programme for the first time in late 2024 and has since endorsed it well over a dozen times on his own X account. His 1 January 2026 post on the year ahead read “Mass deportations 2026”. On 21 January 2026 he wrote: “We are the natives… claim it back through Remigration.” His May 2026 posts combined the word with “parasites”, “natives” and “de-islamisation”.
“Remigration” is a term repurposed in the 2010s by former neo-Nazi Martin Sellner, founder of the pan-European white nationalist Identitarian Movement.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism describes remigration as “a white supremacist policy concept that calls for the forced removal of immigrants, refugees, and their descendants – including legal residents and citizens – based on race, ethnicity, culture, being perceived as ‘non-white,’ or a failure to ‘assimilate.’”
It is proposed as a policy solution to the baseless far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that white populations are being intentionally replaced by non-white migrants.
Robinson has repeatedly endorsed this conspiracy theory. On 5 October 2024, he announced the publication of his book Manifesto with the words: “This book is a game changer. 5 years of research, detailing the great replacement through mass migration. We deleve into the origins, the plan, the orchestraters and how to stop it.”
Applied to the UK, remigration entails the removal of British residents and citizens of non-white origin, including those born in Britain.
In early May 2026, Robinson posted footage from riots in the distinct of Schveningen in The Hague, Netherlands, with the comment: “Millions of parasites that care nothing of our nations, openly show it, destroying the lives of natives.” He called for “Remigration and de-islamisation”: four words containing a dehumanising metaphor for non-whites, a racial in-group, a religious target, and an ethnic cleansing programme. A week later he posted again about “invaders and their offspring” attacking “our people in Europe”, once again demanding “Remigration and de-islamisation”.
On 13 September 2025 Robinson marched at the head of about 150,000 people in central London behind a banner bearing the word ‘REMIGRATION NOW’.
Tokenisation
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Robinson deploys a sophisticated inoculation device, “tokenisation”, to justify his focus on white people. This involves attempting to distract from racially-charged language by proclaiming his opposition to racism.
He has frequently posted video of non-white supporters – from “Black University Students who Support Tommy Robinson” outside Westminster to a “random black lady” meme – and has conducted public outreach to Hindu and Sikh communities for at least a decade.
On 30 December 2024, Robinson asserted that “Tackling anti white racism and the issues of demography and immigration doesn’t need a blanket hatred of non white people” – effectively permitting white supremacist politics while pre-empting the charge that such politics are racist.
The outreach to multiple ethnic and faith groups operates on the same logic: its shared platform is opposition to Muslims, a population overwhelmingly drawn in Britain from South Asian and African origins and homogenised in racial terms.
Twenty two years ago, Robinson joined the neo-Nazi British National Party. He left after some two years in 2005, claiming he had not realised the party held racist views. The BNP was chaired throughout his membership by the Holocaust denier Nick Griffin, and its formal whites-only membership rule remained in place until a court ruling forced its removal in 2010. Its 2005 manifesto, published during Robinson’s tenure, proposed “voluntary resettlement” of immigrants and their descendants – what Robinson now calls Remigration.
The English Defence League Robinson founded in 2009 substituted “Muslim” for the racial categories the BNP had used openly, permitting alliances with non-white supporters. His post-EDL activism deploys the same tactic to mainstream a white supremacist, anti-black ideology that has changed little over the past decades.
Robinson did not respond to request for comment.