TOMMY Robinson may attend the Hearts vs Rangers match today. That certainly appears to be his intent. “Coming soon,” he said when he posted a shot of himself in a Hearts strip, after a photograph emerged of a group wearing Hearts shirts and picture masks of Robinson’s face. We can be fairly sure why he’s coming. Not because he is a true fan of Hearts, but because he hopes to recruit those who support his far-right worldview. He thinks there is potential here to stoke discontent and division.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has history. He is a former member of the BNP and co-founder of the English Defence League, a former UK Pegida co-ordinator, imprisoned earlier this year for contempt of court, convicted, in 2011, for leading 100 football supporters in a street brawl. But we need only look at his activities over the past week to know his presence, not just at Tynecastle, but more powerfully on social media, is a serious concern.

Yaxley-Lennon spent a substantial portion of the last week online, fanning Islamophobia there, in vlogs triggered by the outrage around the violent video that went viral last week of a Syrian refugee attacked by a fellow pupil. He gets into the cracks where doubt exists, where information is incomplete, and exploits them, fills them with his own partial stories.

When he wasn’t commenting on that video, he was promoting the Great Brexit Betrayal march he has planned for London on December 9 – which meant him cancelling dates of a tour of Australia with Gavin McInnes, ex-member and founder of the extremist, white-nationalist group, Proud Boys. He sees anger and fear, and jumps in.

If he doesn’t come to Tynecastle today, it will, possibly, be because of the message sent out by a petition which urged “Kick Tommy Robinson Out Of Scottish Football”. I applaud those who signed it, but what’s depressing is that this objection to Yaxley-Lennon numbers at hundreds, a tiny figure compared with the 600,000 who signed the change.org petition on social media demanding he be freed from prison. It’s also small compared with the more than 840,000 views he had for one of his vlogs last week.

The global rise of the far-right has seen Yaxley-Lennon’s reach and influence grow, as if he were an entrepreneurial reality star, a Kardashian of the movement. Increasingly mainstream, he is now an adviser to Ukip. A recent article in The Guardian described him as a key figurehead in a “new kind of far-right activism”. We would do well not to rest on our laurels, thinking that Scotland isn’t a racist country, and that our far-right is contained.

Yaxley-Lennon has hundreds of thousands of followers, and, yes, some of them do come from Scotland. You only need look at the Scottish profiles that “like” his Facebook videos to see that. Some will be Rangers and Hearts supporters.

I’ve no doubt that if Yaxley-Lennon comes to Scotland he will find people here who see an answer in his kind of politics. A recent piece on the Football Lads And Lasses Against Fascism site, by a female Hearts fan, speculated about his appeal to fellow supporters. “A proportion of these guys have had bad luck and life has let them down. There are missed opportunities due to fatherhood too young or the wrong postcode. There is always something that is lacking and they are handed the cause on a plate by those who want to profit from others’ misery.”

It’s a reminder that Yaxley-Lennon isn’t our biggest problem. It’s the cracks that he slides into and tries to exploit and expand, the anger and pain that are already there. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our best to keep him and his way of thinking out, both online and offline – but that we also need to give other answers.

Some want to make Yaxley-Lennon an issue of freedom of speech, but this is an issue of freedom of hate – and all of us must do our best to stop its spread.

COME ON THE COOS!

DID you see the story about the giant Australian cow, which wasn’t really a cow but a steer, which took the web by storm last week?

Knickers, as he was called, is bigger than your average steer. So big, in fact, that for a moment, it seemed like one of the key global questions was not hard Brexit or soft, but whether Knickers was real or fake, and, if he was, how he got so huge.

Knickers was big for some genetic reason, it transpired. But bigger questions lurked. Why were we so bothered? What was it about the Knickers story that grabbed us so? My theory is it managed to press two of our social media hot buttons at once.

Firstly, Knickers looked like he was of those optical illusion stories and we love them. We almost expected to be told that half the population see a normal-sized cow. Secondly, it was about cows, and we can’t get enough pictures of them. Whether it’s cow books, cow gifs, paintings of McCoos, the bovine species is a human preoccupation.

The Knickers story also proved how much we need a good distraction from contemporary political issues, an escape from Brexit fatigue. That is why I will make no attempt, though I have my theories, to try to answer the inevitable next question of why we are so obsessed with cows.

They’re probably a load of bullocks. Over to you.