The first time Paul Ray answers the phone, the line keeps cutting out. I’m at a train station on the edge of London; he’s in a café in Lviv, western Ukraine. It’s October 2024.
“When I saw your message, I was actually at the international legion for foreign fighters,” he says. “I was about to sign up.”
Why didn’t he?
“Because I wanted to tell my story.”
If 2009 marked the birth of the English Defence League (EDL), then the past 12 months have seen its reawakening.
Technically, the group splintered into rival factions over a decade ago. But last July, its spirit was reanimated, when a wave of anti-migrant riots swept across England following a mass stabbing attack in Southport. Within days, police confirmed they were investigating the role of EDL supporters. The Government announced it was considering whether the group should be proscribed under UK terror legislation.
That has yet to happen. Instead, over the past year, the EDL’s most recognisable avatar, Tommy Robinson, has succeeded in recasting himself as a crusading citizen journalist, a truth-teller at odds with the establishment. Despite a recent prison sentence for contempt of court, he now commands 1.3 million followers on X, the backing of Elon Musk, and the praise of at least one Member of Parliament. For a former football hooligan once dismissed as a fringe agitator, it is quite the ascent.
But how did the movement he leads begin — and with whom?
Though Robinson may be the EDL’s most recognisable figure, he was not its founder. That dubious honour belongs to Paul Ray (born Paul Cinato), a blogger from Luton who has spent the past 15 years in exile from the movement.
Ray, now 49, briefly resurfaced in 2011, when he was linked to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who killed 77 people. Beyond that, little has been written about his life. He is, by nature and circumstance, a recluse.
Last year, with the EDL back in the headlines, I contacted Ray through one of his defunct blogs. Months passed. Then in November, a response arrived. He was willing to talk.
Over the following months, I interviewed him three times — each conversation lasting more than two hours. Ray laid out his version of how the English Defence League was born, and how he lost control of it. It’s a story that begins in Luton and moves restlessly through London, America, Malta, and finally Ukraine.
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