As a recruitment advert for the English Defence League the latest Tommy Robinson arrest video is hard to beat. It shows the leader of England’s foremost street protest movement attempting a two-man charity walk through the heavily Muslim London borough of Tower Hamlets then being assaulted and then arrested by police.

As the attacker is allowed to walk away unhindered through the police ranks Tommy and his colleague are handcuffed and bundled into the back of a police van shouting. “You are enforcing Sharia law”

Two things are obvious from this unedifying scene. One is that Britain’s slide into a multicultural police state has gone so far they do not even pretend to be attempting impartial policing. The second is that it is blatantly obvious that Tommy Robinson has come out on top yet again.

For this embarrassing video is only the latest in series of incidents which have establish him as not only a genuine voice of the marginalised, but helped win the grudging admiration of many beyond the public housing estates which provides his grassroots support.

As a result, no-one in the UK dissident anti-immigration sphere has come closer than Tommy Robinson to breaking out of the media stranglehold that our PC state has imposed on all media discussion of immigration and Sharia law, and articulating the voice of the majority on immigration.

The British media may have preferred to focus on that weekend’s London Gay Pride March, but within hours of being posted the arrest video had clocked up well over 400,000 views on Youtube. “I don’t agree with everything that he says but you have to admit he stands for what he believes in and that arrest was scandalous” ran a typical posting.

“Make no mistake. He is worth ten thousand keyboard warriors,” said another blogger. Maybe it is because he is obviously genuine or maybe the natural admiration that most will feel for the physical courage of one man — only 5’6” tall — who keeps coming back there is no doubt he has struck a chord with many who have been driven to the end of their tether.

Even his nervous and occasionally tongue-tied TV performances work in his favour as viewers warm to this plainly well-intentioned working class man struggling against the sneering condescension of BBC presenters.

It has been a dizzying roller coaster ride. Since he launched the EDL four years ago he has taken everything the British establishment can throw at him still he keeps coming back.

He has been frequently battered and hospitalised and survived many vicious street battles at marches and rallies. Daily death threats mean he has to wear a bullet proof vest constantly while his family is now under 24 hour—reluctant—police guard.

Only last month a group of Muslims were jailed for a total of more than 100 years for planning to assassinate him during what could have been a massive terrorist bombing attack at an EDL rally in Dewsbury last year.

The spark that launched the EDL took place in Tommy’s home town of Luton in Bedfordshire in 2009 when dozens of screaming Muslims disrupted a homecoming parade of Royal Anglian Regiment troops returning from Afghanistan. The disruption was organised by the Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun in which many of the UK’s home grown terrorists were incubated.

For many young working-class men especially, it was the last straw. They had watched their towns being turned into effective Muslim ghettoes run on Sharia law.

They had seen how young white girls were groomed, raped and turned into sex slaves by Muslim gangs.

Their neighbourhoods were disfigured by mass immigration about which they had never been asked and which pressed housing, health and education services to breaking point.

The man who decided to do something about it is called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon who adopted the name of Tommy Robinson as a “nomme de geurre” in a futile attempt to protect his identity. His co-organiser is his cousin Kevin Carroll.

The English Defence League exploded onto the national scene with rallies and marches that usually ended in violent confrontations with Muslims and the union-backed state-sponsored pseudo-gang Unite Against Fascism. From the outset the EDL answered a need to express the growing anger amongst working class young men at the state’s connivance in radical Islam.

The timing was crucial, for by 2009 it was apparent that the media, police and local authorities across many northern towns were colluding to ignore or cover up the epidemic of Muslim grooming and child rape gangs.

But if Muslim and left-wing violence was constant, then the intimidation from the establishment, media has been no less intense. He’s been arrested by the police on numerous trumped up charges and been bailed by the court at least six times. He’s seen his pregnant wife arrested, his bank accounts seized and his businesses shut down and even his parents’ home turned upside down in a search.

In April a gang of armed Muslims led by a White convert attacked his home in Luton and when the Bedfordshire police eventually did arrive, they responded by arresting Tommy and two colleagues and allowing the attackers to leave unhindered and unsearched.

An even more sinister attack took place when he was nearly kicked to death in a late night lay-by ambush last year and would probably have died but for one brave onlooker who intervened. As it was, the attack left him hospitalised for days with severe bruising to the brain.

Then he was detained for passport irregularities last year. Britain is effectively an open borders jurisdiction these days and high-status Muslim travellers such as Imams have been able to come and go from the UK unhindered. Irregular passports, even forged passports, do not seem to hinder their movements.

But Tommy’s passport irregularities resulted in him being held in custody without trial for months on end. It was blatant internment without trial that in the seventies would have had Guardian journalists screaming from the rooftops when imposed on IRA terrorists.

Needless to say this time there was a veritable news blackout. Eventually he was sentenced to ten months imprisonment, and in Wandsworth prison he was moved into a cell in a wing run by Muslim gangs where death threats were screamed at him day and night.

The outrageous and blatant nature of all this backfired. International Free Tommy vigils were held by sympathetic groups at the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin, at the memorial to the victims of the Gestapo in Vienna, in Paris, Hamburg and Dusseldorf, and it was only when hundreds of EDL supporters gathered outside Wandsworth prison that the authorities backed down and he was moved out of danger and into solitary.

The rise of the EDL has had another interesting side effect in that it has exposed to view the loathing that the UK’s ruling class feel for the White people beneath them. From the outset the ranks of the EDL were filled overwhelmingly by the Wrong Kind of White Man — working class White youth, often with a background in “casuals” —football firms who would often sing the former anthem of Millwall FC, “Nobody likes us — we don’t care”.

In Britain hatred towards working class Whites is usually veiled, but the rise of the EDL brought it bubbling to the surface in the shape of demented and unhinged abuse in the media, in Parliament, from the public sector aristocracy and everywhere else.

To them the EDL were “irredeemable filth” and “unutterable scum” who should crawl back into the holes they have come from. Any psychology PhD student seeking to examine the idea that anti-racism was merely a status-ploy by upper class White people to prove their moral superiority over other Whites would have had a lot of material here.

The contrast with the attitudes towards the young Blacks who took part in the 2011 race riots could not have been greater. As shops were burned and people murdered Britain’s left bent over backwards to paint the offenders as the victims of racism, poverty and alienation.

But Tommy’s single minded focus on Islam frustrates some supporters who would like to seem him take a step back and make a more sophisticated analysis.

He is so focused on the threat of Islam and Sharia law that questions about who so assiduously worked for mass immigration and why, don’t seem to interest him at all.

He insists to the media that he is not a racist, hates Nazis and is as color blind as the most liberal politician.

The EDL is nothing if not diverse. There are Black members, a Jewish division, and a Sikh division and there was even an attempt to set up a gay division until this proved too much for the lads from the soccer terraces.

There have been solidarity demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy and Tommy reportedly refused to join in the barracking of a left-wing Antifas in Brighton because there was no Islamic dimension. Israeli flags fly at every march and rally.

And it would not be true to say that the EDL is without any friends in high places.

Two prominent well-connected neoconservative bloggers and writers, Pam Gellar of “Atlas Unshrugged” and Robert Spencer of “Jihad Watch”, have lent much support and were both even banned from entering Britain by the Home Secretary when they were due to speak at a rally for the murdered soldier Lee Rigby.

Pam Geller especially has been a moving force helping to fly Tommy Robinson to speaking engagements in New York and on mainland Europe and providing financial support to his family when he was in prison over Christmas.

From its very inception neocons — Jewish and non-Jewish — have played a driving force at the heart of the English Defence League. Crucially their expertise and financial assistance helped launch of the EDL’s slick web presence with its professional graphics, well-organised forums and T-shirt and cap merchandise.

The International Free Press Society has played a pivotal role. A former board member of the IFPS James Cohen heads up the Jewish division of the EDL and runs its Facebook page from his home in Canada.

Another IFPS figure is Christine Brim who works for Frank Gaffney’s Centre for Security Policy and also sat on the board of yet another neocon group called Centre for Vigilant Freedom alongside a key EDL founding figure Chris Knowles from Leeds. The CVF appears to be funded or supported by the Center for Security Policy.

In a reported comment in a November, 2007 article in Israeli paper Ha’aretz Christine Brim was quite explicit about strategy to make European far-right parties support Israel.

She wrote “We suggest looking for the possible movement of Le Pen’s political party Front National towards the center-right, as they may change their platform to pro-active support to improve the situations of European Jews and Israel. The same trend is happening in Austria, and with the BNP in the UK. If such parties specifically state pro-Israel positions, and take real actions opposing anti-semitism and disavowing previous positions — and reach out to Jewish constituents and encourage Jewish participation in party positions — these are real actions to observe, and to approve. They have not done this yet — but are starting.” (no link available – this was a comment in response to an article)

To some the involvement of Jewish activists who share concerns about the Islamification of Europe is a good thing and the way to go in the future — a model for possible future partnerships across the continent.

For some old-school hard-liners, however, it is a bridge too far. Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, has been a blistering critic of the EDL since its inception.

He has said “To them (neocons) Stephen Lennon is just another stupid goy to be manipulated, used then tossed aside once he has done what they want which is to wind up British Muslims to behaving even more badly than they otherwise would. Because the Zionists and neocons want young Brits to hate them so much that they queue up to go fight in the wars for oil and greater Israel”.

For Tommy Robinson the roller coaster goes on. He has this week been invited to speak at the Oxford Union and many more media ambushes and appearances are certain. One thing is for sure — the EDL is not going away.

Maybe Kipling had a few lines that are fitting: