Simon Tomlin is a far-right has-been. The former BNP apparatchik is stricken with Crohn’s disease and is facing major surgery for the inflammatory bowel condition. But the ailing, aging white nationalist still craves relevance and has set himself a final quest: to take down Tommy Robinson.
Robinson is the UK’s undisputed far-right heavyweight: a savvy self-publicist with millions of social media followers, public name recognition, and lucrative contacts in the USA and Trumpworld.
But there is a cohort of small-time far-right operators – Tomlin’s following for his Daily Agenda YouTube channel is a modest 13,000, for example – who loathe Robinson’s fame and influence, believing he is a crook, a fraud who is “pumped and promoted by the Jewish money power”, according to Tomlin.
The Peter Lynch tapes
In a rerun of the classic far-right rats-in-a-sack story, Tomlin, a former BNP activist who served as the Midlands Elections Officer during the party’s peak years, dreams of sabotaging the UK’s most high-profile anti-Muslim hatemonger by getting his hands on the Kryptonite to expose Robinson – ‘The Peter Lynch tapes’.
Peter Lynch was a 61-year-old man who took part in the Rotherham riot outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in August 2024. He pleaded guilty to violent disorder and was sent to prison for two years and eight months. A couple of months later, he died in custody at HMP Moorland.
The cause of death has not been finally determined, but an early inquest hearing was told he was believed to have killed himself.
After his death, Tommy Robinson and his supporters began exploiting Lynch’s name as a symbol at rallies. Robinson was seen wearing an “I am Peter Lynch” shirt, presenting Lynch as a martyr figure for the movement.
The controversy centres on money raised in Lynch’s name, believed to be tens of thousands of pounds.
At one of Robinson’s marches, supporters reportedly donated money to help Lynch’s family.
‘Pocketed by Robinson’s circle’
Later reports alleged that none of that money reached the family and that it was pocketed by Robinson’s circle.
‘The Peter Lynch tapes’ are said to be a secret recording in which the dead man’s niece reveals that his family did not receive a penny from the Robinson-led appeal. The incriminating recording, Tomlin believes, is in the hands of a Robinson-aligned far-right influencer.
To this end, Tomlin has been obsessed with making this gotcha moment public, because once they had been made public, “There’d be no protecting Tommy Robinson from the bloody awful truth”, he said in a YouTube post, last week.
The ‘Tommytards’
He has upped the ante and self-published a book in April, “Scamodrama: Inside Tommy Robinson’s grifting operations”.
The timing of Tomlin’s one-man mission appears to be an attempt to undermine Robinson’s upcoming marquee event, the Unite the Kingdom march in London on May 16, that Tomlin calls “Unite the Cringedom. Unite the Griff Fest”.
Meanwhile, Tomlin’s recent social media postings include taped telephone conversations with far-right activists who supposedly can help expose the Lynch tapes. They can’t, but the hours of recordings do offer insight into the braggadocio and paranoia that define the far-right’s sordid politics.
In a flurry of long-winded videos posted on YouTube and Rumble in recent days, Tomlin has promoted his book and driven home the message that Tommy Robinson is the leader of “an OCG (organised crime group)” enabled by the sycophants – the ‘Tommytards’ – who surround him.
“I have said in the book that this is not a political movement. This is an organized criminal gang. And their product is Tommy. And their product is a manufactured division.
“So, they’re going to act like an OCG would. Either try to intimidate you or buy you off. That’s their two plays, isn’t it? Violence or money”, said Tomlin.
Lumpen oafs and half-wits
On social media, Tomlin comes across as a pompous know-it-all who never misses a chance to further inflate his bloated ego. For example, he tells one credulous collaborator, “I know this for a fact. If I got hold of the BNP again, I could transform it into an organization that would exceed its 1.1 million votes in 2009 because the market is totally right for it”.
Indeed, he characterise himself as a brilliant political operator surrounded by lumpen oafs and half-wits. But he is also quick to remind anyone who is listening that he is a tough guy who has served three prison sentences.
At one point, he says: “I’m an Odinist, not a weak little Christian. I don’t love my enemies. I destroy them. That’s my policy on enemies”.
Civil war
As for his enemies, he pays lip service to the neo-Nazi archetype: The Jews, but his visceral beef is with a rogues gallery of Robinson allies, far-right rage-baiters and competing fascist plotters.
He calls Robinson’s right-hand man, Richard Inman, “sub-normal sink estate trash”. Paul Thorpe is a “pantomime character…with Turkey teeth, a fake tan”. Ex-Homeland party cadre Steve Laws and Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett are a “festering neo-Nazi problem,” and the mud-slinging list goes on and on.
Quoting a comment from one of his followers, Tomlin states, “I used to believe that the civil war, when it came, would be between the right and the left. Now I’m convinced it will be ethnationalists against the ‘Tommtards’.”
We live in hope.
