The state of affairs in neighbourhoods across the UK is the subject of much study by historians of all kinds.
Yet the current events of politics has brought out some of it for us to see.
This is who we are.
We are spectators in a developing, evolving story on the English landscape.
It’s happening everywhere.
Some of our worst adversaries are seeing the same things, but these are not interconnected.
Who goes there?
The story of Tommy Robinson is not something that’s easy to understand, and this is what locals in Luton attest to themselves.
There’s a lot of detail to it.
However, it’s possible to know more if the person himself is subject to contemporary scrutiny.
It’s clear that he’s agitated by the state of things. He doesn’t like how some people fall out of prosperity.
He doesn’t like ‘new’ things, and this is said by former friends and some former school girlfriends.
“He’s a person who likes his life sorted,” one said to me, thinking about how it was to date him before he became famous.
He’s also not someone to hide his identity or to be disingenuous about his real intentions.
The troublemaker
The thing is, Tommy Robinson is like a lot of people in the UK. Many people follow his trend of activism in Scotland, for example.
However, his is a sort that has taken its unction from many more English things than personal.
His movements have been centred on assets here in the UK, but more particular things he’s known from youth, like the Army.
He’s not necessarily a racist at heart, but he is, like many others, haphazard in the way he puts the world together.
It’s the same in his personal life, where his business dealings are the subject of much scrutiny.
The roots
The root of Robinson’s anger go far back into his family past, and only some of it is in his life.
It’s not possible to note all of it here but it comes out occasionally.
It’s a fact that English activism has a particular way about it, and it usually fits together coherently.
To understand Tommy Robinson is to seek to explore more of it. It’s not right, but it’s not leaving.