THE STATE CAME FOR TOMMY ROBINSON TWICE. WHO CAME FOR THE MEN WHO LET CHILDREN BE RAPED?
THE STATE JAILED TOMMY ROBINSON TWICE AFTER HE READ OUT NINE NAMES THAT WERE ALREADY ONLINE
On 25 May 2018 Tommy Robinson stood outside Leeds Crown Court with a phone, while inside nine men from Huddersfield waited for a jury to come back on charges of raping girls as young as eleven. It was the second of three linked trials, under an order made on 19 March that banned any report of it until the last trial ended.
He broadcast for an hour and a quarter. He read out the nine names from a Huddersfield Examiner report that had been online for a year, with the charges each man faced, saying on camera that there was a reporting restriction on the case, saying he was there because the media would not report it. He walked up to the men as they arrived, filmed their faces, asked one whether he had his prison bag with him, then told his viewers to find that man, to knock on his door. By the following Tuesday three and a half million people had watched it.
He was arrested on the pavement at about 9.45, the police saying it was for a suspected breach of the peace, an offence he was never charged with. By ten he was in front of Judge Marson, who was trying the case, who had watched the video. By the afternoon Marson had found him in contempt, sent him to prison for thirteen months, then made a second order banning anyone from reporting that he had done so. Five hours had passed since he started broadcasting.
twm owen
Marson was the complainant, the prosecutor, the judge, the sentencer, in one sitting. He never put in writing what Robinson was supposed to have done.
His reasons did not say what the breach was, the conduct he relied on included things which could not have been a breach of the order even if they were contempt, the hearing was cut so short that Robinson's barrister could not give his mitigation, and Robinson went to prison that night with three young children at home.
A judge who is sure of his ground writes it down. Marson did not, and I believe that is because he could not.
On 1 August 2018 the Court of Appeal, the Lord Chief Justice presiding, quashed all of it. A case like this, the court said, should never have been dealt with summarily at all, and it would be unusual, to say the least, for a man with three young children to be sent to prison at a first hearing without any inquiry into his family's circumstances.
Robinson walked out after ten weeks. No compensation for those weeks has ever been reported. No sanction against Marson has ever been published, and the body that handles complaints about judges does not look at decisions made in court. He went on sitting.
In March 2019 the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, announced he would prosecute Robinson again for the same broadcast.
His first case was that the video had risked prejudicing the jury, which was the reason the ban existed, the reason the judge had given for jailing him, and which had already failed.
In November 2018 one of the convicted men, Faisal Nadeem, had asked the Court of Appeal to overturn his conviction because of the video, and a judge had refused him, calling the idea that the jury had been prejudiced wholly speculative, with no evidential basis.
So Cox dropped the jury. A prosecutor who follows the evidence stops there. Cox had decided the result and went looking for another route to it.
He found three.
- The first was the order itself: Robinson had read out names that were already online, with charges that were already online, and Cox said that was still a breach, because a postponement order covers a trial whether or not the public already knows the facts.
- The second was what Robinson said about one defendant, find him, follow him, knock on his door. Cox said that put the men in fear and so risked impeding the trial, which is a different thing in law from prejudicing the jury.
- The third was the filming. Camera crews film defendants walking into Crown Courts every morning in this country, nobody is charged, and Robinson's barrister said so. The court's answer was that Robinson had done it to these men on purpose, while they waited for a verdict, in front of an audience he was telling to go after one of them.
On 5 July 2019 the High Court found against him on all three. On 11 July it gave him nine months, six for Leeds and the three suspended from Canterbury, took off the ten weeks he had already served, and sent him back for the nineteen that were left. He came out in September 2019.
Ben Quinn
The same court found that the order Robinson went to prison for breaking was on none of the court's lists, screens or doors two months after it was made, nor on the official court listing website, but on the lawyers' digital case system where the public cannot go.
It called that a regrettable departure from standard practice. Robinson had gone into the building that morning, asked a security officer whether the ban had been lifted, and been told the officer did not know. The court held that was not enough, that he should have asked someone else.
The state arrested a man for an offence it never charged him with, had him in prison within five hours on a committal the Court of Appeal threw out in full, kept him there ten weeks, came back for him with a second prosecution for the same broadcast, dropped the one reason the ban was supposed to exist when a judge called it speculative, found two others, and sent him back to prison for reading out names that were already online, under an order the court itself found was posted nowhere a member of the public could see.
Now set that against what the state did about the twenty men's seven years. The girls were White, aged eleven to seventeen, some in care, drugged, passed from man to man, sometimes to drug dealers in payment for the drugs used on them, and the court heard that many of the men they were passed to have never been identified. At sentencing the court heard that one girl's mother had written to the Prime Minister because she was so afraid for her daughter. In a later trial the prosecution told the court that another mother had tried desperately to stop her daughter going out and had been failed by the inaction of the police and social services.
In June 2019 a review commissioned by Kirklees Council found that fifteen of the twenty-two women who gave evidence had been known to its children's services at the time, that there had been direct intelligence of two sixteen-year-olds being exploited, one of them with learning difficulties, and that it was not followed up. Kirklees apologised.
In November 2018 the West Yorkshire Police and Crime Panel minuted that the CPS had described the behaviour of some West Yorkshire officers and that a review was expected. For West Yorkshire Police, nobody was arrested, nobody was prosecuted, nobody was asked a question in public. The force published twenty mugshots on the day the ban lifted and thanked the victims for their bravery.
Robinson said he was there because the media would not report the trial. The court said he was there to put the men's faces in front of his audience. Both were true, and the trial was invisible either way, because a judge had made it so.
The state put two prosecutions, two judges, the Court of Appeal, the Attorney General and the High Court into punishing him, and nothing into West Yorkshire Police.
The ban did nothing for the men, who were convicted on every count with the video watched by millions. What it did was keep what the police and the council had done out of print for seven months, until the day the force could put out twenty mugshots with a thank-you attached, and the one person who went to prison over it was the man who said the trial was happening.
Over 10,000 of you will read what I publish for free every day.
That matters to me. I want this investigation to reach far beyond the people who can afford to pay. But producing thirty parts across twenty-eight days takes time, research, interviews, documents and complete independence from the institutions I am investigating.
That independence is funded by paid subscribers. Only a handful of readers upgraded yesterday. That is not enough to sustain work on this scale.
I am not asking those who cannot afford it. Keep reading. Keep sharing. Help this reach the people who need to see it. But if you read this publication every day, value the work and can afford to support it, please support me.
PA Reporters
REFORM AND ROBINSON
In January 2025, when Musk said Robinson should be freed, Farage told his East Midlands conference that Robinson was a repeated law breaker, not what Reform needed, who would never be let in, while members in the hall heckled Lee Anderson with "We want Tommy Robinson".
Farage's answer was that people could admire what Robinson had said about the rape gangs so long as they did not ask for him in the party.
On 6 September 2025 Zia Yusuf told the party conference in Birmingham that Robinson had been making the arguments about the rape gangs for years, had been disparaged, had been proven right, deserved credit for it, and would never be allowed to join. On 28 October 2026, the day of the harassment verdict, Farage said Robinson's conduct had been very wrong and that Reform could not police members who support him.
Reform takes Robinson's campaigning, tells its members they may admire it, has its head of policy say in public that he was right all along, and keeps the man himself at arm's length as a law breaker.
Though Reform has MPs in the Commons, there is no record of a Reform MP asking
- why a judge jailed him in five hours on a committal the Court of Appeal threw out
- why the Attorney General came back for him after the jury claim collapsed
- or why the order he went to prison for was posted nowhere the public could see it.
Reform says Robinson was right about the rape gangs. But saying he was wronged by the Crown would mean taking on the Crown, and Reform is a party aiming to win the next general election.
I believe Farage knows exactly what was done to Robinson in Leeds and has decided it is not worth the cost of saying so.
On 25 May 2018 Tommy Robinson stood on a pavement in Leeds and read out nine names from a newspaper, because a judge had made it a crime for anyone else to say the trial was happening. For that the state took five hours to jail him, ten weeks to free him, a year to come back for him, and nineteen weeks to put him away again.
The men he filmed had a fair trial with or without the order. Every court that looked said so.
Kirklees Council had fifteen of the girls on its books while it was happening, the prosecution told a court the police had done nothing for one of them, and nobody from the council or the force has ever been asked a question in public. The girls' evidence was heard in full and printed seven months later, in a paragraph, on the day the force published its mugshots. The order cost the man on the pavement two prison terms. It cost the public seven months in which nobody could ask the force a question.
Reform says he was right about the rape gangs. Reform has MPs who can ask the Attorney General why his office spent two prosecutions on a man who repeated public facts and none on the force. There is no record that any of them has. Why?
My name is Raja Miah MBE. For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.
Now the harder fight begins.
Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.
As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability.
Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.
Despite every effort to stop us, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.
At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.
The pressure to protect a serving Prime Minister will be immense. The institutions that failed these girls will have every incentive to avoid putting the country's most powerful politician under oath. Much of the media will once again find reasons to look the other way.
That is why this campaign cannot slow down now.
For too long this has been a one man operation. It needs to become something much bigger. We need the resources to build a genuinely independent investigative organisation with:
- A professional website capable of reaching far larger audiences.
- Video production that takes our investigations to millions more people.
- Research support so no lead is left unexplored.
- Live events to educate, organise and train others.
- The resources to investigate, travel and expose institutional failure wherever it is found.
Over the last 6 months we have secured over 1,250 paid supporters towards our target of 2,000. That is an incredible achievement. Every new supporter strengthens this campaign, increases our voice and makes it harder for those in power to ignore the evidence.
If you believe the truth should be followed wherever it leads, please stand with us.
If you cannot afford the £3 a month or £30 for the full year, just sign up for free. There are no paywalls to access any of my work. I publish everything for free.
If you can’t commit to a regular subscription, a one-off contribution genuinely helps keep this alive. You can support me using one of these links;
👉 http://BuyMeACoffee.com/recusantnine
👉 http://paypal.me/RecusantNine
Should we succeed, politicians will go to prison. Even if there is only the smallest chance of this happening, isn't it worth your support?
Raja Miah MBE