As a Muslim comedian, I found having dinner with ex-EDL leader Tommy Robinson strange but enlightening

The only Muslim country he’s actually been to (apart from the “Islamic Republic of Luton”) is Dubai, which is basically a Westfield with a prayer room

A protester in Antwerp belonging to the German group 'Pegida' (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) in March. The group drew up to 25,000 people in German street rallies earlier this year (Getty)

Tommy Robinson and I broke the ice quickly. He asked me what my stand-up was like. “Mostly jokes about you, mate,” I replied. Although I wasn’t completely joking (in the past I’ve attacked Robinson for his Islamophobic rabble-rousing), we had a laugh - but the laughter didn’t last long.

Because the new, grown-up Tommy Robinson has some serious things to say and all of us – me, you and our government - should listen carefully.

Let’s be clear: listening is not the same as agreeing. Reading his book was like listening to a Justin Bieber song – you can appreciate parts of the content without supporting everything he’s ever done.

I disagreed with him about Islam - a lot. Which wasn’t shocking, since I’m a Muslim and he isn’t (some of his supporters even call themselves Infidels; maybe they think it’s a bit like black people reclaiming the N-word?) He said: “The more Islam we have, the less freedom we have. The more I read about Islam the more I don’t like it.”

Tommy Robinson has made the same mistake as the jihadists: they all grab a Quran, jump to a random point, and try to figure it out. That method doesn’t work with Game of Thrones, so why would it work with a complex 1400-year-old religious text recorded in the classical form of a foreign language?

The only Muslim country he’s actually been to (apart from the “Islamic Republic of Luton”) is Dubai, which is basically a Westfield with a prayer room. You shouldn’t hate Islam just because you hate Muslim gangs in Luton. We all hate (Muslim and non-Muslim) gangs, don’t we? And isn’t Isis just a really successful Muslim gang - plus PR?

I disagreed with Robinson about refugees. He’s worried that “51 per cent of those Muslim migrants want Sharia law”. If anything, fleeing Raqqa for Lesbos means you hate Sharia and love Greek package holiday resorts. We should be welcoming the refugees – and giving them jobs as holiday reps.

I also disagreed with him about President Obama (or “Barack Hussein Obama”) being a Muslim. If he is Muslim, he has a very funny way of expressing his faith. The fact is we’ll never know – maybe Nicola Sturgeon is a Scientologist, but until Braveheart is remade starring Tom Cruise, I’m not holding my breath.

But the fact that he even mentioned Obama shows how much Robinson has matured. He and his new group - Pegida - are political with a capital P: “For me, the government’s worse than extremist Muslims. Look at our foreign policy, look at what we’ve done to Libya, look at Iraq. It was an illegal war. Look at Syria – I think we should have fucking left it alone. When they invaded those countries and killed those innocent people, we – the people of this town – faced the backlash when people were radicalised.”

I wondered if this is what Noam Chomsky would be like if he was dressed in Stone Island and covered in tattoos (and 60 years younger). Without stopping for breath, Robinson continued: “A lot of people know what the state’s up to. The state radicalised Jihadi John. If I was Muslim and I was treated the way some Muslims are treated by the government, I’d fucking join Isis.”

Robinson told me that when he was jailed for mortgage fraud, he was kept in solitary confinement for 23-and-a-half hours a day for 22 weeks. He’s come out maybe hating Muslims a bit less, but hating his government – our government – a lot more.

Because it’s not just Muslims who feel like they’re victims in modern British society; it’s white working class people like Robinson too. “There’s huge classism. If I went to Eton, I’d be running a think tank.”

The current government is so scared of having difficult conversations about society, citizenship, and class that they’ve taken their fetish for outsourcing to the extreme: they’ve outsourced leadership itself.

For Muslims, it’s almost colonial: delegate day-to-day management of the natives to safe, uninspirational imams (“90 per cent of whom can’t speak English”, as Robinson reminds me). For the white working class, they’ve let football supporters’ clubs do the job for them.

The imams are so incompetent that they’ve lost worshippers to Isis. The football supporters’ clubs are so irrelevant that they lost fans to the EDL.

Robinson is officially just an ‘adviser’ to his new (allegedly more moderate) group, Pegida UK, but I wondered if he was tempted to be the top man again: “No. The man who’s going to lead Pegida has to be middle class.”

As we left the restaurant I whispered to him, “We’re on the same side, Tommy.”

Maybe honestly, or maybe diplomatically, he said, “I know, mate.”