Radio 4 whitewashes Tommy Robinson

To many onlookers, Tommy Robinson’s march on Whitehall at the weekend was a drunken, coked-up mess, a crowd mostly made up of young and middle-aged men and an expensive policing operation which saw at least 26 officers hurt.

But that’s not what listeners of BBC’s World at One might have thought after listening to Monday’s edition, where it was (ironically) whitewashed as a think tank-style day out chewing over some of the thornier issues confronting everyday Britons, with few actual Tommy Robinson fans and definitely no racism!

The Radio 4 show ran a piece on the march featuring an interview with Spectator columnist Jonathan Sacerdoti and a two-way with the Times’s Trevor Phillips and writer Sunder Katwala (who, not signing up to the narrative, barely got a word in).

Sacerdoti told listeners that rather than it being a ruckus: “The overriding sense was one of pride in British culture but also that the British culture that many people there were proud of was slipping, there was a strength that there should be a restrengthening of the Christian bedrock of British culture, whether religiously or culturally, that there should be a rejection of unassimilated immigration into the UK and that many of these people’s concerns were being ignored, overlooked or much worse, demonised.

“Pretty much everybody I spoke to was at pains to point out that they were not nasty people, they were not trying to be racist, that they were simply people who were proud of their sense of Britishness that they felt was being eroded.”

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Phillips, meanwhile, hit out at the reporting of the march, saying: “A lot of the reporting about how, you know, there was violence and so on and so forth – that was really marginal… for most people – I must have had a dozen conversations in the afternoon/evening – that wasn’t what it was really about. This had more of the feeling of an afternoon football crowd coming away from the match.

“They had a very simple set of themes which I think are… I think I use the phrase metastasising out of the summer’s arguments, which are about migration, freedom of speech and actually the thing that surprised me: Christian revival…. something extraordinary is happening here.”

Given a rare opportunity to speak, Katwala pointed to speakers calling for mosques to be closed, only for Philips to interject: “I didn’t see anybody calling for the closure of mosques.” (Brian Tamaki, leader of New Zealand’s Destiny Church and an official speaker at the event, told the crowds: “Ban any public expression of other religions in our Christian nations. Ban halal. Ban burqas. Ban mosques, temples, shrines — we don’t want those in our countries.” Perhaps he was too nuanced for Phillips.)

The BBC knew exactly what it was getting from its guests. Sacerdoti wrote a batshit column for the Spectator website on Monday in which he made the march sound like Lambeth Country Show (“a varied mix of speeches, patriotic songs, short film clips and a black gospel choir”) and inflated the attendance by 900% (“possibly over a million”) while fawning over Robinson (“it is hard to deny his determination. Again and again, he has faced formidable obstacles. Still, he endures”).

Philips, meanwhile, used his Times column today to claim that “if LS Lowry were to paint the scene on Saturday, his canvas would be called something like ‘Middle Britain on a day out in London’”.

Racism, coked-up thugs and blood streaming from police officers? Nothing to see here!