Singer Lily Allen appears to have threatened Tommy Robinson with legal action after the PEGIDA UK leader got the better of her during a heated three-day exchange on Twitter.
The row was sparked by a tweet Allen posted, in which she accused the Daily Mail of racism for highlighting the migrant status of the man suspected to have killed 39 people during New Year celebrations in Istanbul.
Robinson called her out on the tweet, saying she was more concerned with “virtue signalling about racism” than she was about those who had died.
As the spat continued, Robinson asked Allen whether she felt any responsibility toward girls who have been attacked by migrants and asylum seekers in the UK, adding “after all you invited these #refugees in.”
Allen responded: “If you’re referring to my trip to Calais that was regarding the Dubs amendment and our legal responsibilities.”
But Robinson countered that the government’s responsibility is first and foremost “the safety & security of OUR people, not people in the Middle East.”
Allen bizarrely responded: “where does it say that?” to which Robinson replied with a screenshot of a government national security document in which protecting “our people”, both at home and overseas, was detailed as a priority.
As the skirmished progressed, Robinson asked Allen whether she had ever spoken to the victims of Muslim sexual grooming gangs in the UK, to which she responded that she had only ever personally been sexually assaulted by white men.
Allen then suggested that the movements of all white men should be “restricted globally,” in response to another Twitter user who sardonically said that, as the apparent sole cause of evil, white men should be “locked up”.
Robinson proceeded to call out Allen on her claims of sexual assault, asking Allen why she hadn’t reported the crimes to the police – a question which causing the singer to suggest that he didn’t believe her, bringing more opprobrium from other Twitter users upon herself.
Allen later linked to an article in the Independent attempting to explain what she had meant when she had claimed only to have been assaulted by white males.
“Sometimes, in some conversations, it is still necessary to say: ‘Yes, white men can be rapists too (and not just in cases where the women basically made them do it by wearing short skirts or drinking alcohol or venturing outside the house at night)’,” the author of the article claimed.
But the online paper’s readers too were having none of it, pointing out that Allen has chosen to live in the Cotswolds, a wealthy rural area of England where the population is almost exclusively white, while Robinson lives in the much more ethnically mixed city of Luton.
“Allen is ignoring the statistical evidence which clearly indicates that white men are the safest race of men to be around, and instead, using her personal experience, which is likely to be skewed since she evidently goes to great lengths to avoid ethnic minorities,” commented one reader.
Another pointed to Crown Prosecution Service evidence which shows that white sexual offenders are under-represented compared to the white population as a whole, and a higher proportion of Black, Asian, and mixed ethnicity offenders than in the general population.
With the public turning on her, Allen resorted to threatening Robinson with legal action, telling him: “Get fundraising.”
She also blocked Robinson from following her account, claiming that he was upsetting her fans. Robinson, meanwhile, seems unperturbed by the incident: