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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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The OG Tommy Robinson was the leader of the Luton MIGs, who were the football (soccer for Yanks) hooligan firm in Yaxley-Lennon's hometown of Luton. Organised football hooliganism was not explicitly political, but there was (and still is - there have now been two cases where an anti-terrorist have-a-go heroes in London turned out to have learned to fight with the Millwall Bushwhackers, and the traditionally rival Millwall and Charlton firms joined forces to defend businesses on Eltham High Street in the 2011 London riots) a sufficiently large overlap between organised hooliganism and willingness to engage in political violence in defence of your traditional community that both the far right (I'm talking about the BNP and Combat 18 for those who care about details, not UKIP) and the establishment left saw organised football hooliganism as far-right adjacent.

So using "Tommy Robinson" as a nom de guerre is Yaxley-Lemon's attempt to place himself and the EDL in the native British tradition of organised football hooliganism and Combat 18.

The irony in all this is that Luton is now Islamized (37% "Asian", which in practice means South Asian Muslim, and only 33% British) and the MIGs did not in fact fight this, or even try to. The MIGs main rivals were the Hell's Angels and the Millwall Bushwhackers, both of which are also all-white groups of hardmen. If white nationalist political violence was a Thing in the UK (it wasn't and isn't) then those groups would all be allies.