One of Tommy Robinson’s main organisers, Richard Inman, has publicly joined up with Ben Habib’s new Advance UK party, abandoning UKIP where he was a member of the NEC.
Inman has been at Robinson’s side since the days of the Football Lads Alliance, which hoovered up the remnants of Robinson’s English Defence League.
Thrown out of UKIP
In 2018 he was heavily involved in working with then-UKIP Leader Gerard Batten to get Robinson involved in UKIP, prompting Nigel Farage to split and launch the Brexit Party. Batten and the Robinson supporters were eventually defeated but the debacle inflicted lasting damage on the party.
Since then Inman has been a key organiser in Robinson’s ‘street movement’ and especially the big public rallies.
Warmly welcomed
In a sign that another attempted link-up between Robinson and UKIP was on the cards, Inman and other Robinson supporters were co-opted onto the UKIP NEC last year, while Robinson was in prison.
Before he was locked up Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) had spoken positively of such an alliance, which was warmly welcomed by UKIP’s Leader Nick Tenconi and Chairman Ben Walker.
They could see the grifting possibilities of getting into bed with the far right’s grifter-in-chief, and Tenconi even spoke of running Robinson as a parliamentary candidate for UKIP
But Tenconi’s clownish activities appear to have cooled Robinson’s enthusiasm for the project. There has been no public contact with, or endorsement of, UKIP since he got out of jail.
Formerly prominent UKIP activists like the Voice of Wales duo, the convicted fraudster Dan Morgan and his sidekick Stan Robinson, started spending less time promoting UKIP and more campaigning for Robinson.
Then Rikki Doolan, a frequent presence on the platform at Robinson rallies and a UKIP spokesperson and candidate in the May elections, announced that he was leaving the party. He gave no reasons.
Now he has been followed by Inman.
But more significantly, Inman immediately announced that he had joined Ben Habib’s recently-launched Advance UK party and urged others to do the same.
Rupture with Farage
Habib, a former Brexit Party MEP and deputy leader of Reform, has been outspoken in his support for the imprisoned Robinson which was one of the causes of the rupture with Nigel Farage and Reform leading to the creation of Advance UK.
Inman now spends most of his time in Northern Ireland where he has been a frequent presence live-streaming from anti-migrant events, especially in Ballymena where some of these have led to serious violence and destruction.
In his online announcement, Inman said:
“Ben has just launched Advance UK, I have resigned from the NEC of UKIP and joined the party. I think the entire movement, including all other parties, should do the same.
“Advance is…something on a completely new level…a vehicle which could change the direction of the country”.
Whether this signals a coming together of Robinson’s street movement and Habib’s party remains to be seen, but it would be exactly the sort of relationship that Robinson was proposing with UKIP before he went to jail last year.
