Crivvens! Jings! And Help Ma Boab! We’ve just ploughed through the recent video message to the troops from Mr Tommy of the English Defence League and whit a mess he is! To save you the bother (and, to be honest, to avoid doing some other work we were meant to be doing) we offer a wee insight into mind of the boy Tommy!

‘My Life Is A Panto!’ (Oh no it’s not! )

Mr Tommy comes across as a very twitchy man indeed as he speaks without notes but with much wailing and gnashing of teeth and it does not take much for him to get into a right wee tizz at the slightest provocation, all swearing and shouting. As this is the deputy chairman of the fluffy fascist British Freedom Party who is possibly seeking electoral success, this does not make a great impression. No one, even people within your own limited demographic, is going to be overtly impressed by calling political opponents ‘far left Islamist pricks’ and ‘scumbags and vultures.’ This is a very far cry from reasoned political debate and Mr Tommy’s oratorical abilities are severely lacking. He is also genuinely confused as to why so many people, including many of his former followers, or ‘vultures and wrong uns’ as he calls them, dislike him. Well, Mr Tommy, one of the reasons is that you have shown yourself to be a vain, egotistical Captain Mainwaring happy to exclude dissention and have been ridiculed on various panel shows and, even worse, on a spoof programme last week. He cannot resist the media attention but cannot stand the way that this also makes him seem like an eejit.

Mr Tommy clearly has little self-control: his voice rises in pitch the more aerated he gets; he cannot control his language and in fact says ‘fuck’ or its derivatives 6 times in 40 seconds; he comes across as self-pitying when repeatedly claiming that nothing is his fault: he says that he went to prison for 8 days for ‘the Tower Hamlet thing’- which is a lie as he went to prison because he broke his bail conditions. He says it wasn’t his fault that his rooftop protest at the Fifa HQ backfired and he was held in custody for 3 days when in fact it was. He claims, in a 30 minute whine-a-logue, that ‘I don’t moan’ then goes on to do just that.

Mr Tommy tells us all how he is skint, in arrears for his mortgage and that his wife has left him because he prefers going out with his silly mates instead of getting a job and helping look after the kids. UnKle Kev Karrol and ‘the lads’ are more important. Mr Tommy incoherently starts to rant about the splinter groups who he has fallen out with whilst waving his arms about like a methed up penguin on a windy day - which is rather amusing. There are also moments of understatement such as ‘me and Kev had a couple of arguments’ and delusional martyrdom – ‘my life is a demo!’

Mr Tommy comes across as paranoid, deluded, angry, depressed and disjointed. He jumps from subject to subject, incapable of marshalling his thoughts coherently or of finishing one point before moving on to the next. He has also apparently never heard of editing. He cannot understand why his life has become so problematic and stressful and his stammering, spluttering and swearing make him sound like an angry little pub bore with a bad temper.

Mr Tommy main problem is that he will not accept responsibility for his actions especially for the recent Walthamstow disaster ‘victory.’ He will not accept the fact that he is the leader of a movement who held a deliberately provocative march through a potentially volatile area (and thus getting the greedy media fix he craves), that his members made little secret of the fact they were out for trouble and who then got it and it all went horribly wrong after he fled the scene. What did he expect? Local Muslims handing out glasses of pop? Local antifascists saying ‘bygones are bygones’? This is another example of the EDL’s embarrassing political naivety.

The EDL’s next march is in Walsall and crucial as far as numbers are concerned: they need to rally themselves in order to convince their followers they still have some credibility and to assess how many they can get for their return to Walthamstow – which is obviously going to go much smoothly this time as they say they are refusing to liaise with plod! If plod treated them badly at an official do, an unofficial one will incur their wrath somewhat! Mr Tommy also claims that Walthamstow ‘was a great day’ – which it was in the sense that the Battle of Trafalgar was a ‘great day’ for the French to dump some old boats they didn’t want. Mr Tommy said ‘We need to go back to East London and show em whose streets they are!’ Well, seeing as Mr Tommy admitted he had never been there before and the vast majority of the EDL were bussed in from outside London let alone from the East End, it would seem that the streets of Walthamstow quite rightly belong to whomever lives there. Just a wee point of logic but important nonetheless. He called for unity and for those who have left in droves to come back as he forgives them. How kind!

Be Seeing You!