The ironically named “Unite the Kingdom” march – it was much more about fomenting division and hatred – numbered somewhere between 110,000 and 150,000 participants, far lower than the organisers and their acolytes have since claimed, with figures running into the millions. In fact, the inchoate protests were roughly one tenth the size of the largest ever march in the UK, against the Iraq war in 2003, a fraction of the pre-Brexit Remain demonstrations, and smaller than some of the Palestinian Solidarity marches in recent years.
Nonetheless it was a significant event, and a sinister one. The fact that so many people turned out for it, many who would not regard themselves as extremists, should worry everyone who wants to preserve Britain’s peaceful and tolerant multicultural society and defend its free and democratic traditions. As the Sky News commentator Sir Trevor Phillips pointed out, it was not something that Sir Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch could pull off anytime soon. Perhaps not even Nigel Farage, the great charlatan himself, studiously avoiding the event, could inspire such a crowd. It was far more substantial than anything the British National Party or the National Front could muster years ago, and the attendees could not all be dismissed as “knuckle-dragging thugs”, as they often are. It is not patronising to say they presented as more “normal” than the kind of past generations of neo-fascists on the far right who used to dress up in German Second World War uniforms and go on retreats in the Welsh mountains plotting an improbable British putsch. That is why this larger modern iteration of populist nationalism is so pernicious.
In particular – and in common with many developments in far-right politics – these sort of flag-heavy demonstrations represent and drive a dangerous upsurge in virulent Islamophobia. The expropriation of national flags and the very term “patriotism” as expressions of an exclusionist nationalism or ethnonationalism (views vary) are particularly insidious facets of this movement. The apparent growth of a version of Christianity, one not worthy of the name, is odd as well as disquieting. There were people on the march waving the Cross and shouting “Christ is King” who probably rarely attend church outside of baptisms, marriages and funerals. If they did pop into the average C of E, Catholic, evangelical or non-conformist service on Sunday, they might find the actual teachings of their Lord, Jesus Christ, less to their taste. Like the party “crusader” outfits, this performative, faithless Christianity feels like just another way of making Muslim people feel uncomfortable.
To be sure, this was no “free speech festival”, as the organisers claim. There is an unconscious irony in so many people complaining about getting “cancelled” and suppressed by “two-tier justice” when they were perfectly able to mount at scale such a disruptive event, and one noisily laced with hateful, aggressive language, such as the chanting of “who the f*** is Allah?” and “whose streets? Our streets!” There were, a few, arrests when protesters assaulted police officers, but otherwise they were permitted to say what they liked, without let or hindrance. There were not enough police to fully control the event, a lesson to be learned, but on the whole, the civil rights of the Unite the Kingdom, the Stand Up to Racism and the Antifa groups were stoutly upheld by the authorities.
Its leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, commonly known as Tommy Robinson, made a speech that was chilling in its demagoguery. Whatever his true beliefs and intentions are, he is not one of life’s conciliators. His address was as lurid and conspiratorial as anything any British demagogue has come out with. Among other things, he declared to his supporters that: “The traitors in Westminster are watching right now, cowering and trembling. Keir Starmer, the Labour Party, the revolution has started…The silent majority will be silent no longer. Today we are sending shockwaves through the corridors of power of the elite like a bloody earthquake.”
For that inflammatory nonsense he was not arrested, as we might suppose from his portrayal of the UK as some kind of communist police state, but allowed to skirt the edges of the laws on incitement with impunity – because free speech in Britain is not endangered. The same goes for the unmolested presence of Katie Hopkins and Laurence Fox, and the beamed-in appearance on a giant screen of Elon Musk, like a malign TellyTubby. Dedicated advocate of democratic freedoms as he thinks of himself, he was freely allowed to bang on about the “woke mind virus”, inform that “violence is coming…you either fight back or you die”, and called for the dissolution of parliament. He seems unaware that Britain enjoyed free and fair elections only some 14 months ago. It certainly wasn’t the Sermon on the Mount; but he won’t be prosecuted.
But what of the protesters? What do they mean with their flags and cries of “we want our country back”? What do they really want? A fascist state? Mass deportations? Legalised rampant racism? Some, it must be conceded, do indeed wish for such a doomed place. Many, probably the great majority, are not violent and do not want to burn their neighbourhoods down or assassinate the prime minister. Their attendance at this rally, reflecting a wider penumbra in those who don’t spend their time mounting lampposts with flags or shouting at hotels, is as much about a terrible frustration at the failings of the mainstream parties, and disappointment in the Labour government. They do feel, sadly, that “Britain is broken” and, although misguidedly, that there is an “invasion” of immigrants, and that the country has lost control of its borders – not least because the Labour and Conservative parties tell them as much. They’re distressed by the visible decline in their high streets and traditional industries, even as they browse Amazon and eBay or buy Chinese cars. Brexit has seriously stunted economic growth and living standards; while managed migration and foreign investment are two of the few engines of economic growth and dynamism Britain can turn to.
There are debates and arguments in politics, in other words, that are not being advanced, and it should be little surprise that, in such a vacuum, demagogues and political frauds such as Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage meet such a ready audience and can “divide the kingdom”, to coin a phrase. If they can exploit the power and liberty of free speech, why do our progressive politicians find it so hard to do so?
