THIS Saturday, May 7, fascist Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the former leader of the violent and Islamophobic English Defence League, will be returning to the streets of Telford in Shropshire with his supporters.

Yaxley-Lennon is continuing his attempt to use the appalling grooming cases in the city to stir up division and claim — despite all the independent evidence to the contrary — that it is only the Muslim community who is responsible for such acts.

This is a horrible and cynical ploy by Robinson to use the victims of abuse to promote his own agenda. Let’s be clear from the start that he cares absolutely nothing for those who have suffered.

Yaxley-Lennon is no stranger to trying to use the young and vulnerable for his own ends. Last year he was ordered to pay £100,000 in libel damages to a Syrian schoolboy in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire.

His claims Jamal Hijazi was to blame for attacking “young English girls” were untrue. Jamal had been the victim of an attack that had been filmed and gone out widely on social media, but Robinson had claimed that Jamal had “beat a girl black and blue” and “threatened to stab” another boy.

The narrative from Yaxley-Lennon is familiar. Refugees, migrants and Muslims are supposedly violent aggressors — a complete reversal of the truth. Jamal faced death threats after being targeted by Yaxley-Lennon and the far right.

The attempts by Yaxley-Lennon to rebuild his own support and that of the racist and fascist right in general (and specifically his latest preferred grouping For Britain) have to be put in context.

Just last week some 13 million people in France voted for the fascist Marine Le Pen. Le Pen, like her father before her, has seen her extreme racist and Islamophobic agenda legitimised by mainstream politicians.

French President Emmanuel Macron has used racism and Islamophobia time and again — helping to normalise the extremism of Le Pen and Eric Zemmour.

Some working-class heartlands have despaired in the face of economic crisis and unemployment.

That despair has opened some communities up to the poison of Le Pen as she tries to appear as the champion of ordinary people.

Despite her failure to achieve a total breakthrough her relative electoral success has inspired the international far right and Yaxley-Lennon was clearly cheering her on on social media.

There is a danger and the potential that exactly the same processes — the legitimisation of racism and Islamophobia and despair in working-class communities amid economic chaos — could allow a similar outcome to come about in Britain, just as in France.

Recent weeks have seen Boris Johnson and Priti Patel promote a raft of openly racist policies.

The planned “offshoring” of asylum-seekers to Rwanda and the passing of the Nationality and Borders Act mark a real step change.

For all the talk amid the crisis in Ukraine of opening the door to refugees, the Act all but ends the legal right to claim asylum in Britain.

Ukrainian refugees have certainly been treated appallingly, but Afghan refugees and those crossing the Channel in small boats to escape war and poverty have not even received crocodile tears.

Meanwhile the passing of the Nationality and Borders Act leaves six million people with their citizenship rights seriously threatened.

In the wake of the Windrush scandal that threat cannot not be underestimated.

The government’s blatant attempts to stoke up tensions about “defending Britain’s borders” is all grist to the mill of the far right.

Patel may have had to pull back from the lethal Channel “pushbacks” she had planned but just as with Johnson’s call to “defend Churchill’s statue” at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests and his openly Islamophobic attacks on Muslim women, the rhetoric of the hostile environment will encourage the racist and fascist right.

It may seem a long way from the struggle to win control of the Elysee Palace in France to the streets of Telford but it’s not really so far.

Just as with Le Pen, Yaxley-Lennon wants to appear as the voice of the voiceless and the abandoned “red wall.” He tried the same game when he stood for the European Parliament in the North West region in 2019.

The fascists have always tried to hide their real project under a smokescreen of claims to represent the “white working class,” from the EDL to the British National Party back to the National Front — and for that matter to Mosley’s blackshirts in the 1930s.

It’s the job of anti-racists and anti-fascists to argue hard that no working-class community can allow itself to be divided if it wishes to defend itself in the face of the government’s assaults on our standard of living.

It’s not Muslims or refugees who are cutting the funding to our NHS and schools, or leaving us without decent and affordable housing — it’s the government that wants us to make the brutal choice between heating and eating.

But we also have to mobilise against the fascists in towns like Telford. We can’t allow Yaxley-Lennon and co to lord it over local people and intimidate the Muslim community in order to show their disgusting documentary of lies.

Stand Up to Racism is proud to mobilise alongside the Shropshire and Telford Trades Council on Saturday.

We urge as many anti-racists, trade unionists, campaigners and faith communities as possible to join us at 1pm in Southwater Square in Telford on Saturday.

Weyman Bennett is co-convener of Stand Up to Racism (standuptoracism.org.uk).