Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is the real name of Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist who totally, utterly, humiliatingly failed at the EU elections. Running as an independent candidate for the North West because not even UKIP, a party Nigel Farage now says is fixated with Islam, would take him, Lennon was the first person to be milkshaked on the campaign trail.
More humiliating, though, than being drenched with strawberry-flavoured milk, was just how badly Lennon did at the count, which he left early in anticipation of his loss.
The final result for North West showed Lennon getting just 38,908 votes, which is 2% of the vote share. He did worse than UKIP, and Change UK, two parties widely believed to have been totally destroyed by this election.
Much joy will be had in re-visiting footage of the count in Manchester, where people booed Lennon’s vote count. And that's great - the derision for this far-right thug whose paranoid obsession with Islam means he’s happy to conflate peaceful Muslims with Islamic extremism at every turn should know no bounds. All who are good and decent should be thankful that Lennon is not anywhere close to becoming an elected representative of the UK.
But focusing on a humiliatingly small number of outliers in a bid to say something about the whole is the exact sort of myopic point of view that Lennon has. Just because he’s failed doesn’t mean his brand of hatred is over.
In France, the largest party in the EU elections was the far-right Front National, run by Marine Le Pen. In Italy, the populist anti-immigrant Five Star movement won in Italy, boosting Matteo Salvini, a man who says nationalists like him are the only people standing in the way of a European Caliphate. His anti-immigration bill stopped NGO ships from using Italian ports as a base to rescue migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.
Meanwhile, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, a man who built a fence at the southern part of his country to stop refugees coming in to his country, and is paying citizens to have children in a bid to boost its white population, also won big. In Spain, the far-right Vox Party made a dent, with 6.2% of votes, becoming the first far-right party to win any seat in the country since the death of its fascist ruler, General Franco, in 1975. In Belgium, the far-right Vlaams Belang party got two MEP seats, and in Germany, the AfD came fourth in the polls.
This surge was countered by countries such as The Netherlands where Geert Wilders’ far-right party, the Freedom Party, lost all its EU seats, and Denmark, where the far-right Danish People’s Party, was decimated. And on another plus side, Salvini’s attempt of making a big far-right populist bloc within the EU Parliament has been damaged by in-fighting about Russia.
All in all, though, anti-migrant and anti-Islam feeling is not fleeing this continent, and each country brims with people who’d love to vote for someone like Tommy Robinson or someone holding the exact same hateful views he does. Whatever happens next in the UK, it’s worth remembering we’re not so different from the rest of Europe, after all.