Strange bedfellows: EDL protesters take up the plight of Muslim women 

"I remember once, me and my friend were talking about these kind of issues, and his dad said, ‘What are you on about, you're a f**king racist.' I said, ‘Get in the car, let's drive past Luton Sixth Form College.' After driving past, his dad said, ‘I f**king see what you mean.' Every single one of them would stop in the road and completely dagger-look you. Their youth are hostile towards us. Even if you're just walking down the street, you put your head down, or you're getting in a row. Everyone in Luton knows the score."

Not everyone in this country has to deal with blatant extremism on their doorstep, but the second reason for Robinson's obsession affects us all. It is the fact that there is one system of thought that it is more or less forbidden to satirise, criticise or in certain contexts even mention in the public discourse: the religion of Islam. It's a horrible feeling, not being able to criticise a system of thought, and one that is completely alien to our way of life. The feeling disturbs you so deeply when you encounter it that it becomes easy to start considering alarming theories, like the one about the growing demographics of the Muslim community, which Robinson mentions, or the one about the clash of civilisations. This is where people like Paul Ray come in. Ray, who was recently caught jubilantly using the word "Paki" on American radio, was never more than a self-appointed spokesman for the EDL, and Tommy doesn't share his stance against all devout Muslims:

"All I know is that I know Muslims myself personally, I've got no problem with them. Our problem is with Islamic extremists. We're not experts on the Islamic religion. Obviously now we've got people coming and wanting to get involved who are experts on it, but the English Defence League was formed to tackle Islamic extremists, the sort of Islamic extremists who are not hiding behind doorways or hiding in mosques preaching hatred, the ones that are standing blatantly on our streets doing it. That's what it was formed for."

Disappointingly, though, Robinson won't criticise Paul Ray, whom he defers to as "an expert on the Koran". As long as a critical conversation about Islam cannot be had in the public domain, people like Ray will be fielding questions.

By his own admission, Tommy Robinson has no political nous, and doesn't know very much about Islam or Islamic extremism, except what he has seen firsthand. But in the course of several long conversations I detect nothing racist or far-Right about him. He thinks "Barack Obama's great for America." He doesn't think our troops should be in Afghanistan or Iraq ("though of course we're going to support our boys who are fighting there 100 per cent"), because "it's probably an unjust war". He wants to ban the burka, but he has no problem with the hijab: "Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that, no one cares about them covering their hair if that's part of it — is that in the Koran? — the same way Sikhs wear their headscarves. I don't think anyone cares about a normal headscarf, I don't think they do, and I couldn't care."