‘We’ve lost our voice’

‘We’ve lost our fucking voice’, says Mark, shades on, and seemingly a few beers deep, as he and thousands of others amass on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge.

It’s Saturday 13 September, and the Unite the Kingdom march is about to get underway, organised by nationalist, anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, former head of the notorious English Defence League (EDL).

St George’s Crosses and Union flags flutter everywhere. The mood is boisterous but polite, lagered up but family friendly. It has a distinctly away-day feel.

Mark has come with his friend, Chris, and Chris’s wife, Sadia – who came to the UK from Indonesia.

‘We’re here for change, aren’t we?’, says Chris. ‘We work hard every day, pay our taxes, and we get nothing… Can’t see a doctor, can’t get the benefits.’

For Chris and Sadia, illegal immigration – one of the core concerns of the demonstrators – is a particular slap in the face, given their difficulty in bringing Sadia over. ‘We’ve done it through the legal route, we’ve had to pay thousands and thousands of pounds. She’s got a degree in English, speaks perfectly, a qualified nurse, but she can’t come here? Why? How can they? It’s unfair.’

To a man and woman, practically everyone I speak to brings up this point, entirely unprompted – that while legal migrants who contribute and integrate should be welcomed, illegal migration is dangerous and unjust.

I meet Caroline and Natasha, from Nottingham, who are wearing matching UTK (Unite the Kingdom) bucket hats. ‘Nobody’s got any problem with people coming to this country if they want to be part of Britain, if they want to be part of our society’, says Caroline. ‘We’re free for anybody to come as long as they want to be British… Welcome, just be part of our society. That’s it.’

Needless to say, these protesters are some distance from the ‘far right’, ‘racist’ caricature presented in the media – and they aren’t happy about being smeared.

I speak with Tom, Kieran and Marsino, all in their early twenties. ‘Look around. There’s no far right here’, says Tom. ‘It’s just normal people, family people. There’s kids, there’s women, children, everyone. If anything, these protests are true solidarity with the people.’

I ask Marsino, who is black, whether he thinks the march has lived up to the Third Reich hype. ‘Well, clearly it’s not racist, otherwise I wouldn’t be here!’, he smiles.

So what are they here for? To oppose mass and illegal migration, and to fly the flag for British culture, certainly. But also to demand free speech.

Tom ends our chat with a defiant, ‘God bless England, and God bless Charlie Kirk!’ – the US conservative firebrand slain on stage at a Utah university last week. The crowd is peppered with placards of Kirk.

Jamie and Aidan, both 19 and from Watford, say people their age feel silenced. ‘I’ve got a lot of friends who would want to come, but they just feel like they can’t’, says Aidan. ‘They can’t say what they want to say, because they’re scared.’

Jamie is flying an Israeli flag along with a Union flag, to show his solidarity with Britain’s Jewish population – already under the cosh before 7 October 2023, now subjected to Jew-killing slogans being beamed out from Glastonbury and their synagogues being smeared with excrement. ‘I feel like the Jewish people, especially in London, should be treated better’, he says.

This is the fourth Unite the Kingdom demonstration to date. It represents the culmination of Robinson’s attempts to clean up his image and reach a broader swathe of people – from the hundreds drawn from football firms charging through Muslim areas in the EDL days to the tens of thousands he seeks to call to central London’s traditional protest routes today.

Ahead of each demo, Robinson calls on attendees to forgo masks, violence and booze (looking around, the latter instruction was the least adhered to on Saturday). There is entertainment, as well as speeches. He booked a black gospel group to play at the rally on Whitehall.

Whether or not this kinder, gentler Robinson is all it seems, it’s working. Saturday was the biggest UTK demonstration yet, drawing between 110,000 and 150,000 people, according to the Metropolitan Police. (Robinson claims three million were on the streets, based on something he says he heard from officers.)

In any case, the size of the crowd appeared to surprise the Met, who had to redirect marchers to stop Whitehall from being overwhelmed, and who struggled to keep flag-draped protesters away from the relatively small, 5,000-strong counter-demonstration, led by the Socialist Workers Party’s various ‘anti-racist’ front groups.

It was there where flashes of the old days were grimly apparent – with bottles and punches thrown between the warring sides and two dozen police officers injured. This seems to be where the genuine, brawling racists in attendance focussed their energies on Saturday, with reports of ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Fucking Jews’ being chanted.

These handfuls of National Front types continue to glom on to Robinson’s activities, despite there being no great love lost between them, particularly where the Jewish people are concerned – with Robinson dismissed as a ‘Zionist shill’ due to his long-running support for Israel.

On the actual march and rally, where the vast majority of attendees are, you wouldn’t know any of that was going on, though. The only aggro I witness when I get to Parliament Square is between a grey-ponytailed man in a Robinson t-shirt and a small group of speccy young people – apparently self-styled Christian nationalists – who are jabbering something about the Jews. ‘You should get out of university – it’s making you stupid’, says the older man in his Robinson tee.

The sheer size of the crowd renders the accusation that everyone here is a racist rather difficult to support, as do the many black and brown faces in the crowd. Numbers appear to have been swelled not by an uptick in white supremacy, but a summer of agitation over migrant hotels – along with the horrific killing of Kirk.

I get talking to Jamie and Cayman, both 23 and lifelong friends from the Isle of Dogs – a working-class area of east London roiled of late by demonstrations outside the Britannia International Hotel, which was recently handed over to house migrants. ‘A lot of protests over there at the moment’, I say. ‘Yeah, we’re bang in the middle of it’, says Cayman, a tiny England flag sticking out of his afro.

‘The working class here is just being completely ignored, and all our rights are going straight out the window’, Cayman tells me. ‘We pay taxes, we live in shit holes, we work shit jobs with shit pay, and people are flying in – well, I say flying in, floating in – and getting all the benefits that we should have, that we want. Our veterans, our homeless people, our women – fucking everything’s gone out the window. That’s what I think.’

‘I just think that a certain point of view has gone too far. It is nice to be nice, but then it gets to a point that you’re being overly nice’, says Jamie, a little more diplomatically. ‘We’ve grown up with people from different backgrounds and creeds… That’s not a problem… We’re all in the same boat here.’

I wander over to the rally on Whitehall, where a hoarse Robinson is addressing the hardcore who made it through the rain and police blockades. The line-up is eclectic, ranging from Advance UK’s Ben Habib – who has welcomed Robinson into his Reform splinter party – to schoolgirl Courtney Wright, who was kicked out of her school’s ‘Culture Day’ for wearing a Union Jack dress.

The ranks are also swelled by the oddballs of the European hard right, who at times leave the crowd a little nonplussed. When Robinson announces the AfD is the only party to save Germany, one woman nearby applauds. Éric Zemmour delivers his speech in French, touching on the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, with each passage then read out in English.

Elsewhere, speakers bang the drum for a Christian restoration – by force, if necessary. A New Zealand preacher calls for non-Christian places of worship to be banned, which doesn’t exactly jive with the supposed free-speech message of the demonstration.

Other than an ecstatic rendition of ‘Sweet Caroline’, Elon Musk is the biggest hit of the day, dialling in not so much for a speech as a big-screen Zoom call, with Robinson asking him pre-written questions from the stage. Musk calls for ousting the government, before telling Brits, darkly: ‘Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back – or you die.’

Robinson thanks Musk for allowing people to see ‘the truth’, with his free-speech takeover of Twitter, now X. Given this is the same Robinson who relentlessly pushed lies about a Syrian schoolboy – and once harassed an Independent journalist over a story about his alleged misuse of his supporters’ donations, screaming baseless claims that her partner was a paedophile – this is more than a little rich.

But whatever is drawing these thousands to Robinson’s banner, it clearly isn’t the more unsavoury parts of his past, or present. To dismiss this protest on the basis of its fringes, or its leaders and speakers, is a mistake.

These are – in the main – ordinary people, lacking the old parties and movements through which they once imposed themselves on politics, trying to find their voice anew. The question is, who is prepared to listen?

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater