Tommy Robertson, Gary Stevenson and the discontinuity thesis.

I’ve recently posted a couple of critiques about Tommy Robinson and Gary Stevenson who seem to be at opposite ends of the political spectrum but they’re fighting last century’s battles.

The Warrior and the Economist: Two Ghosts Fighting an Obsolete War

On the surface, they are polar opposites. One is the street-level warrior, the tribal chieftain of the dispossessed, whose language is visceral, personal, and physical. The other is the armchair economist, the detached analyst of the working class, whose language is structural, historical, and political.

Tommy Robinson and “Gary’s Economics” represent two distinct faces of British discontent. Robinson’s world is a raw, immediate conflict of tribe versus tribe, fought on the streets of Luton. Gary’s world is a slow, grinding conflict of class versus class, fought across decades in the tax code and the housing market.

Both are eloquent. Both are responding to real pain. And both are ghosts fighting last century’s battles.

The Discontinuity Thesis is the lens that reveals their shared, fatal blind spot. They are two generals, armed with different weapons, fighting over a territory that is being rendered uninhabitable by a force neither of them can see.

The Warrior’s Ghost: Tommy Robinson

As we have previously dissected, Tommy Robinson is a pure product of the 20th-century labour-based economy’s collapse. His world is defined by a visible, physical enemy: the rival tribe, the Pakistani Muslim gangs, the Islamist extremists who compete for the same limited territory and cultural space.

The Battlefield: The street corner, the schoolyard, the town square.

The Weapon: The gang. Tribal solidarity, physical intimidation, and the threat of force.

The Theory of Power: Power comes from controlling physical space and dominating the rival human group.

The Discontinuity Thesis diagnoses this as a tragic misidentification. Robinson is fighting the other prisoners for control of the cell block while the prison itself is being automated and scheduled for demolition. The force that truly makes his working-class community obsolete is not the mosque down the street; it is the automated warehouse, the AI-driven logistics network, and the global flow of capital. His weapons are useless against an enemy he cannot punch. He is a historical artifact.

The Economist’s Ghost: Gary’s “Squeeze Out”

Enter Gary. He is a more sophisticated ghost. He is not distracted by the visible, tribal skirmishes. He correctly identifies the deeper, structural conflict. His enemy is not the Other; his enemy is the Rich.

Gary’s “Squeeze Out” is a perfect, clinical description of the 40-year hollowing out of the Western middle class. He correctly identifies the mechanism: the returns to capital vastly outpacing the returns to labor, allowing an asset-owning class to systematically drain wealth from everyone else. He sees the slow strangulation where Robinson sees a knife fight.

The Battlefield: Parliament, the tax code, monetary policy.

The Weapon: The vote. Political pressure, policy change, and the power of democratic persuasion.

The Theory of Power: Power comes from winning the political argument and using the state to redistribute wealth and regulate capital.

This is a far more accurate map of the 20th-century class war. But it is still a map of a world that no longer exists.

The Shared, Fatal Blind Spot

Both the Warrior and the Economist are fighting a human-vs-human war. One fights a tribal war, the other a class war.

The Discontinuity Thesis posits that this is the fundamental error. The primary conflict of the 21st century is not human-vs-human. It is human labor vs. automated capital.

This is not a “squeeze.” It is an extinction event for the economic value of human cognition. And this event renders both of their weapons obsolete.

Robinson’s weapon, the physical threat of the mob, is useless. The system no longer needs the economic participation of his mob, so its threat to disrupt production is meaningless. A strike is only powerful if your labor is required.

Gary’s weapon, the political power of the masses, is equally useless. The political power of the 20th-century working and middle classes was never a moral victory. It was a direct consequence of their economic leverage. Unions, strikes, and the threat of mass uprising could cripple the economy, forcing the capital class to the negotiating table.

AI annihilates that leverage.

When the system no longer needs the labor of the masses, it no longer needs to listen to their votes. The “politically malleable” institutions Gary hopes to influence become brittle relics. You cannot tax an asset class into submission when you have nothing they need from you. The power of the vote becomes a polite fiction when the economic foundation it rested upon has been vaporised.

Conclusion: The Final Diagnosis

Gary is describing the patient’s long, chronic illness with perfect accuracy. He has charted the 40-year decline of Rentier Capitalism flawlessly. He is the best doctor in the pre-AI world.

The Discontinuity Thesis is the autopsy report that reveals the patient did not die of the chronic illness. They were killed by a new, high-velocity, technologically-driven event that made the old disease irrelevant.

Tommy Robinson is fighting the other patients in the ward. Gary is fighting the hospital administration. Both fail to see that the building is being flooded by a force that is indifferent to their struggles.

Both are ghosts, haunting the memory of a system where human conflict was the only game in town. The new game is here, and it is not played by humans.

They are two sides of the same coin but with just different scapegoats.