Hope Not Hate has a round-up of yesterday’s Tommy Robinson rally in central London, including a section on what the organisation calls his “Christian turn”:
In recent months Lennon [i.e. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Robinson’s legal name] has begun to talk more regularly about God and Jesus and that was reflected today with numerous speakers and singers referencing Christianity and chants from the stage of “Christ Is King.” There was also a band from the Spirit Embassy London church in Bruce Grove, Tottenham.
However, perhaps the most extreme speech was delivered by Bishop Ceirion Dewar who screamed:
We are not at war with just the Muslim, we are not at war with just woke ideology, we are not at war with just cancel culture but we are at war with four hundred and twelve idiots that sit on those benches just up there. […] We are the defence walls upon which modernity and multiculturalism crash.
Bishop Dewar has previously addressed a UKIP meeting.
While the English Defence League drew on Christian and crusader imagery Lennon has never organised an event as overtly Christian in tone as todays.
There was some indication of this general direction at last month’s rally, which I noted here.
Dewar’s would appear to be an “independent” bishop: his website says that he was ordained in 1999 and consecrated in 2005, but does not tell us by whom. On LinkedIn, he describes himself as a Pentecostal, and posts on Facebook indicate that he is close to the American Prosperity Gospel preacher Mike Murdock (previously blogged here in relation to another British associate) and to various UK-based British-African church leaders. In 2012 Dewar was involved in a financial dispute with an elderly woman, in which a court ordered him to pay £1000.
The Spirit Embassy Church, meanwhile, is headed by a British-Zimbabwean businessman named Uebert Angel, who has the status of “Ambassador at Large” for Zimbabwe’s government. Angel was not himself part of the event, although clips show that a British associate named Rikki Doolan was on stage. Last year, Angel and Doolan featured in an Al-Jazeera documentary about gold smuggling and money laundering, in which they were secretly filmed; Doolan subsequently issued a statement denying any wrongdoing, although he admitted that as a businessman he has to say things sometimes that seem “ugly”. Around the same time, he was building links with Turning Point UK via anti-drag queen storytime protests alongside Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson.
Fox of course was also prominent at yesterday’s rally, and the night before he spoke at a function room in Hammersmith at an event hosted by the relentless conspiracist David Vance and someone named Sarah Jane Smith. The discussants also included Dave Atherton, Peter McIlvenna and David Scott; the football manager Joey Barton was originally scheduled to take part, but it appears he stepped back due to his latest legal difficulty. Smith describes herself as “a Quantum Healing Hypnosis Practitioner” whose “mentor” was the late Dolores Cannon, an American New Ager who specialised in past life regression and who published books of “communication from Nostradamus via several mediums through hypnosis”.
Footnote
A couple of weeks ago, a short video was posted online of a planning session for the rally at a serviced office in Fleet Street – familar faces included Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, Calvin Robinson, Gerard Batten, Mahyar Tousi, Richard Inman and Jeff Taylor; also spotted were “Stefan Tompson owner of @visegrad24… Paul Thorpe… Momus Najmi”. A document called “The Pledge” was shown propped against the windows.
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