Elon Musk is wrong about Tommy Robinson

In one of Elon Musk’s recent and increasingly weird interventions into UK politics, the X owner has called for the release of anti-Islam activist and English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson, who is currently serving an 18-month sentence for breaching a civil injunction. Last week, Musk demanded that UK prime minister Keir Starmer ‘free Tommy Robinson’, who Musk believes is a political prisoner. Like many on X, Musk has convinced himself that Robinson has been unfairly treated for raising the issue of Pakistani grooming gangs.

Ben Habib, who was previously co-deputy leader of Reform UK, agrees with Musk that Robinson is a political prisoner, noting that the ‘contempt’ charge against Robinson was brought by the attorney general, who is a ‘political appointment’. He claims that Robinson is in jail ‘as a result of a civil action’ and said the attorney general’s decision was ‘politically motivated’.

This is nonsense. Robinson is not a political prisoner. He was sentenced in October last year not because the government was trying to silence his activism, although I’m sure officialdom takes a generally dim view of him, but because he admitted to 10 counts of breaching a High Court order against him following a libel action.

The saga began in 2018, when a video went viral online showing a Syrian schoolboy called Jamal Hijazi being attacked by another boy in West Yorkshire. Robinson made a Facebook post claiming that Hijazi was ‘not innocent’ and baselessly accused him of ‘violently attack[ing] young English girls in his school’. As a result, in 2021, Robinson was sued by Hijazi’s family. They won damages, as well as an injunction that prevented Robinson from repeating the claims.

Robinson then breached this injunction in several ways. He repeated the false allegations about Hijazi in online interviews, claiming that he had just sought to ‘tell the truth’ about the incident. He then included the allegations in a documentary called Silenced, which he went on to publish on X and screen to thousands of his supporters in Trafalgar Square in July 2024. Despite being scheduled to appear in court the day after the screening, Robinson left the UK and a warrant was issued for his arrest. At every step of the way, he would have been in no doubt that repeatedly breaching the court order, as he did, would land him in jail.

This is not even the first time that Robinson has been sent to prison for something like this. In 2017, he was charged and convicted of contempt of court after he filmed inside the Canterbury Crown Court building during the proceedings of a rape trial, although he failed to get into the courtroom itself. He also referred to the defendants as ‘Muslim child rapists’ online while the jury was still deliberating the verdict, potentially prejudicing jurors and influencing the outcome of the case. Then, in 2018, he was arrested at Leeds Crown Court for breaching the peace. He was attempting to livestream a video outside the court, during the trial of a Huddersfield grooming gang, thus breaking reporting restrictions that had been put in place. In both instances, Robinson’s actions risked collapsing the trials altogether.

Whether or not you agree with the UK’s libel laws or reporting restrictions (I, for one, think they are far too restrictive and spiked has long criticised them), the law of contempt is central to maintaining the rule of law. If people routinely flouted court orders in the way that Robinson keeps doing, then court orders wouldn’t mean anything at all. If we want to change our libel laws to make them less punitive, or to relax the reporting restrictions on criminal trials, then we should do so through the democratic process – not by encouraging people to simply ignore our courts.

When Robinson broadcast his libellous documentary to thousands of people, he would have known he was headed for jail if he was caught. His prosecution was not political – it was entirely predictable. And one can oppose the censorious approach to figures like him without blindly believing the nonsense he peddles.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.