Opposition is growing in Oxford after the Union’s disgraceful invitation to racist thug Tommy Robinson. The convicted criminal and notorious grifter is due to appear at the Oxford Union on 28th May to “debate” the motion, “This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam”.
Following our report on 2 May and strong campaigning journalism within Oxford by several student newspapers, it’s emerged that the other two speakers on Robinson’s side of the debate are also crude Islamophobes: the failed actor Laurence Fox and serially-sacked priest Calvin Robinson.
Free speech bastion
Founded in 1823, the Oxford Union promotes itself as a prestigious bastion of “free speech”. Its bicentenary celebration in 2023 was attended by political luminaries including several of its former Presidents such as former Prime Minister Theresa May, former Deputy PM Michael Heseltine, and former Australian PM Tony Abbott.
Though for the past half-century it’s struggled to shake off a reputation for elitism, the Union has hosted many truly memorable debates. Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange wrote in his autobiography that his Oxford Union speech in 1985 – opposing the Reaganite televangelist and “Moral Majority” leader Jerry Falwell and supporting the motion that “nuclear weapons are morally indefensible” – was the high point of his career.
That reputation has been badly sullied by cheap sensationalist antics – or what’s known online as “ragebait” – employed by several recent presidents.
This term’s incumbent Arwa Elrayess has turned out to be one of the worst of these cynical careerists, deliberately stoking racist and Islamophobic controversy in an effort to drawn attention to herself. Like several of her predecessors, Ms Elrayess believes she can enhance her future earnings by playing the “free speech” card and fanning the flames of hatred.
Someone with the educational advantages of an Oxford Union President shouldn’t need reminding of Tommy Robinson’s appalling record.
Incessant grifting
In 2009 he co-founded the English Defence League, and it’s as EDL leader that he’s best known. The EDL was one of the most notorious and violent far-right organisations of the 21st century. It was essentially an alliance of racist football hooligan firms, and its local organisers were typically men with long records of football violence, fascist politics, or drug dealing – sometimes all three.
Even within the far right, Tommy Robinson is now widely hated for his incessant grifting, which has been facilitated once before by the Oxford Union in 2014.
Oxford platform
Now the ex-EDL boss is set to be given another Oxford platform, which he will again use to boost his flagging reputation among his target audience.
That target audience is not mainly (in fact hardly at all) among Oxford Union members. Tommy Robinson has no interest in exchanging ideas. His aim is to strike a truculent pose and win applause and crucially donations from knuckle-dragging race-baiters.
In 2018 he explicitly stated that he “doesn’t care” if his conduct “incites fear” among British Muslims.
Tommy Robinson’s trademark is threatening his opponents, not debating with them.
He flouts every convention that normally governs “free speech”, deliberately defaming individual Muslims and repeatedly committing contempt of court, for which he eventually earned an 18-month jail sentence – one of his five prison terms for offences including fraud and assault.
His first jail term was for kicking an off-duty police officer in the head after the officer had intervened in a violent argument between Robinson and his then girlfriend.
The Oxford Union President has invited Robinson not despite this disgusting record of violent crime and racism, but precisely because of his notoriety.
She believes that the “edginess” of a vicious Islamophobe will help her careerist drive for publicity.
Kept invitation secret
And Ms Elrayess knew perfectly well that even some of her fellow Union officers as well as the wider membership would be disgusted by this invitation. That’s why she kept it secret until the news leaked at the start of this month. To their great credit, not only the Union’s customary critics on Oxford’s left, but several of its own leading officers, have spoken out.
Oxford Union Vice President Prajwal Pandey emphasised that inviting the ex-EDL leader represents a “genuine risk to the safety of members” and hit out at the President and her cronies for a “far-right pandering media grift” in their courting of GB News and the Telegraph.
Betrayal of core values
Vice President Pandey and all four of the recent candidates in a repoll for next term’s Union presidency have pointed out that the incessant pursuit of “spectacle, provocation or entertainment value”, ahead of serious intellectual and educational purpose, is a betrayal of what ought to be the Union’s core values.
Alex Evans, the Oxford Union’s LGBTQIA+ officer, issued an open letter condemning the invitation and pointing out that Tommy Robinson “has previously spoken of Muslims as ‘enemy combatants who want to kill [White Britons]’, thus calling for violence against them.
Incitement
The expectation is that he will engage in similar incitement, and in fact I argue was invited precisely because he will engage in this incitement. I have heard much talk of ‘chamber-filling’ – essentially provocation and a willingness to endanger public safety in order to obtain publicity and fill seats.”
Evans revealed that several other Oxford Union committee members shared these concerns privately, “but are afraid of speaking out.” Astonishingly, the open letter went on to reveal that Evans “was personally prevented by an aforementioned disgraced member of committee from inviting speakers from Plaid Cymru and the SNP on the grounds they were too divisive.
“If Welsh and Scottish independence are beyond the pale of free speech, but calling for war against British Muslims and leading an organisation engaging in violent attacks against them is not, then it is not a matter of free speech, but the desire for publicity, controversy, and shock value which is being placed above public safety and reasoned debate.”
Pandering to the far right
It’s been mentioned many times (but still largely unknown outside Oxford) that the Oxford Union is a private members’ club, not a student union in the usual sense. Quite a large number of undergraduates and postgraduates (especially politically ambitious ones) are members, but the majority aren’t.
After half a century of hostility and suspicion, Oxford’s Student Union has recently built a working relationship with the Oxford Union, but this has again been threatened by the irresponsibility of President Elrayess and her deliberate pandering to the far right.
Shermar Pryce (a postgraduate and a sabbatical President of the Student Union) served on the Union’s Consultative Committee as an SU liaison but has resigned. In his resignation letter he wrote of a “blatantly deliberate decision to obfuscate” concerning the secret invitation to Robinson.
Pryce singled out several named individuals who he said had a “well-known history of racist comments and abuse towards individuals”, including abuse directed at Pryce himself. But such people are (Pryce wrote) still in a position of power and influence in and around the Union committee.
Insane comparison
Pryce also claimed that when discussing the emerging scandal over the Robinson invitation, the Union’s Director of Finance had made an “absolutely idiotic and frankly insane comparison” between Tommy Robinson and Nelson Mandela.
He concluded: “No sensible justification for this decision-making has been provided. The decision to invite a violent criminal to the Union, appealing to malformed conceptions of ‘free speech’, was callous. To not rethink this invite, after members of all backgrounds and dispositions have expressed their concerns and fears, borders on malicious.”
Lucy Pollock, covering the scandal for the independent university newspaper The Oxford Blue, explained that the Oxford Union’s frequent claim to be championing “free speech” is a charade: “Essentially what the Union cares about is sensationalism. …It’s little more than an advanced version of ragebait.”
She added: “No matter who is President, the Union continues to invite speakers who preach hate, and they call it free speech, because that drives engagement, and engagement inflates their egos.”
Notorious Islamophobes
During the past 24 hours this deliberate encouragement of hatemongers was underlined when another Oxford newspaper, The Oxford Student, confirmed that Tommy Robinson’s fellow speakers at the planned “debate” are also notorious Islamophobes.
Once again, the identity of these speakers proves that the Oxford Union isn’t interested in serious debate. There are many people with controversial views on Islam who would be capable and willing to discuss the issues seriously. Instead, the Union has chosen marginal extremists who are interested only in stirring up hate and attracting publicity.
One of the proposed speakers is the actor Laurence Fox, who since 2020 has nominally led an Islamophobic and conspiracy-theorist political party called Reclaim. After his humiliating sixth place with 1.9% at the London mayoral election in 2021, and an even more embarrassing 0.6% at the London Assembly election in 2024, Fox seems to have found elections too much like hard work.
He lives off financial backing from a wealthy expat donor, and the Oxford Union’s invitation will no doubt enable Fox to keep his grift going for a while longer.
Marginalised
A third Islamophobe on the panel is former UKIP official Calvin Robinson, who has been a frequent ally of Fox and Tommy Robinson. He was twice a Tory council candidate and was then involved with the Brexit Party and several other right-wing causes.
By 2024 the increasingly marginalised Robinson was appointed ‘Lead Spokesman’ by the dying UKIP, having been sacked by GB News the previous year. He is still listed in UKIP’s leadership team, despite now living in the US.
Like Tommy Robinson, Calvin Robinson has occasionally flirted with pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian propaganda. He moved to the USA in 2024 and has been involved in several fringe churches, but his taste for controversy and what one of his churches called “online trolling” led to his removal as a priest of the “Anglican Catholic Church” in January 2025, after he mimicked what was described as a “pro-Nazi salute” during a conference speech in Washington.
Four months later Calvin Robinson was sacked by his next choice of denomination, the “Reformed Episcopal Church”. But while he is too extreme and irresponsible for fringe conservative churches, Calvin Robinson seems to be a welcome guest at the Oxford Union.
Online provocateur
This “debate” on Islam isn’t the only example of President Elrayess deliberately inviting hatemongers. She had planned to host Carl Benjamin (the online provocateur known as “Sargon of Akkad”) but the invitation was withdrawn at the eleventh hour after campaigners pointed out his well-known history of threatening sexual violence against Labour MP Jess Phillips.
As Lucy Pollock pointed out in her Oxford Blue article, it shouldn’t have needed feminist and other campaigners to bring Benjamin’s record to the Union’s attention: “Either, the Union knowingly invited a man who argued that modern feminism was to blame for misogynistic killings or they did not even bother to google the person they were inviting.
“Perhaps the Union were too dazzled by Benjamin’s 965k YouTube subscribers to care.”
One of the most disturbing aspects of this latest Oxford Union scandal is what it tells us about the attitude of the Union’s trustees. It’s quite understandable that the trustees of OLDUT (a registered charity that has oversight of the Union, its property and finances) opt not to intervene too readily in its day-to-day affairs, especially on matters of politics.
Nevertheless, OLDUT’s recent behaviour suggests that their approach is applied inconsistently.
There is ongoing controversy (including legal action) over “censorship” of a speech at the Union in 2024 by a Palestinian author, Susan Abulhawa. At Searchlight we don’t know the precise details of what was said and what was censored in this debate.
Inflaming bitter situation
Our concern as anti-racists and anti-fascists is that the Oxford Union and its trustees are inflaming what is already a bitterly divisive situation. We haven’t hesitated in the past to point out occasions when pro-Palestinian activists have indulged antisemites and nazis, but equally we have no hesitation in denouncing pro-Israel activists who indulge racists and Islamophobes.
One problem with the Oxford Union’s behaviour – especially that of its trustees – is that they presently give the impression that some types of racism are tolerable on “free speech” grounds, but others aren’t. Again, we don’t know whether Susan Abulhawa’s comments about Israel were justified or not, though from what we have seen nothing in her speech contained anything resembling the antisemitism or Holocaust denial that we have too often seen at some pro-Palestinian events.
Failure of the trustees
What is obvious, however, and has already been pointed out by several campaigners in Oxford, is that the Union’s trustees were “trigger happy” in insisting that the online record of Abulhawa’s speech was censored, but have done absolutely nothing to discourage this term’s Union President from inviting vile misogynists and Islamophobic extremists, including the convicted violent thug Tommy Robinson.
Whatever their motives, the Union’s trustees are doing a disservice to the Jewish community as well as to the Muslim and BAME communities. They are giving the impression that the Union cares about Jewish sensibilities more than others. Especially at a moment when Jews are under attack on British streets, this is a disastrous mistake, certain to fuel suspicions and undermine community relations.
Not too late
It’s not too late for the trustees to act, nor for the Union’s own committee to see sense and overrule President Elrayess. If this disgraceful “debate” is allowed to go ahead, Searchlight will continue to support every effort by Oxford’s coalition of brave anti-racists and anti-fascists to oppose Tommy Robinson’s politics of hate and to expose the Oxford Union’s cynical encouragement of Islamophobia.
