The day the right took London

“We need to rush them. Shall we rush them?” says a tall ginger man wearing a blue raincoat, striding towards a crowd of Stand Up to Racism protesters blocking his way to Whitehall.

At this point in the Unite the Kingdom rally, around 3pm, the police have just stopped allowing supporters of organiser Tommy Robinson — real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — along Whitehall to see him speak. But the line stopping them is only one officer deep. Spotting an opportunity, several men force themselves forward, attempting to push past the police. 

“Get BACK!”, one startled police officer shouts, shoving into them, to the cries of “Go on boys!” and “Get ‘em boys!” from several young women watching from the wings. A glass bottle sails from deep in the sea of England flags behind us and hits a fellow protester on the head. 

“We’ve got to stop this!” screams one skinny man wearing a West Ham shirt, after several of his fellow protesters start to kick and throw punches at the police. “Tommy didn’t want this!” A scuffle ensues, a few people are pepper sprayed and a legion of burly police officers storm in to support.

As the bottles start to rain down, I retreat back to Trafalgar Square, where the mood veers between carnivalesque to the pantomime aggro of a football derby day. A downpour has just passed, and the air is filled with the smell of fresh rain on tarmac, lifted by the tang of weed and smoke bombs. Chants of “fuck Keir Starmer” ring out around Nelson’s column, and when I approach people to ask them why, they’re here many are keen to emphasise the common-senseness of it all. 

“We’re not racist. We’re standing up for our country. What’s wrong with that?” says Janice, standing beside her friend Kerry. Unlike most people I speak to, they’re from London, in Plaistow. Janice tells me she’s seen Plaistow change immeasurably while she’s lived there, as the area has become more multicultural. “We’re the minority,” says Kerry. “There’s a school just opposite us, and I don’t see no white kids going in there.” 

I ask if that’s a problem. “Yeah, it is a problem” she says sharply, scoffing at the question. “It’s full of Muslims.” Janice concurs: “And you know how they breed like rabbits.” Plaistow has been called Britain’s most mixed community, often hailed as a testament to diversity. What Janice and Kerry would like to happen is “mass deportation.” 

I meet two guys walking out of the fray, who arrived via a coach from Nottingham in the morning. When I ask why they’re here, they tell me that it isn’t just about immigration. “It is,” says the woman next to them.

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“I pay around £200 a week in tax alone” says one. “I can’t get a doctor’s appointment. I can’t get a dentist appointment. My teeth are rotten.” He mulls over my question of what he’d like the protest to achieve, and tells me “I’m not a big Nigel [Farage] fan”, but that “everything about the government is corrupt and wrong” and that Keir Starmer is “a traitor”. 

Like a lot of the Unite the Kingdom protesters I meet, they’re keen to emphasise the peaceful nature of the event. “Can you see any violence?” the other asks. I point out the glass bottles still flying towards a crowd of counter demonstrators and riot police.

“You’re picking up on a tiny, tiny minority”, he says, before countering that they must be plastic — they’re not — and suggesting that even if they were glass, the UK police had antagonised them by not allowing them along Whitehall to see the speeches. “I don’t condone violence” he says, shifting on his feet. “But you always get a small number of people who're probably going to do that. It’s frustration.”

Standing nearby, at what feels like a potentially unwise proximity to the protesters shouting “fuck Palestine” to the Antifa crowd, I meet a young teacher from Croydon wearing a free Palestine T-shirt — the only counter-protester not to be surrounded by police. “I felt very unsafe when I got here,” he admits, as someone walks past us and shouts “you’ve got some shit on your shirt” at him. 

He tells me that it isn’t fair to make out like all Muslims or immigrants are a threat to UK sovereignty, and that the narrative around working class values here can be misguided. “Community education, having a solid NHS, mutual aid. That’s working class values, in my opinion. I can define it because I’m a teacher, and I have to define it to my students every day.”

I arrive at the main event just after Elon Musk dialled in to tell the protesters “you either fight back or you die”, as an extremely hoarse Tommy Robinson welcomes Don Keith — an American contributor to Tommy Robinson’s media platform, Urban Scoop — onto the stage to sing the Star Spangled Banner.

In a forest of St George’s flags, I get a mixture of vaguely defined patriotism, serious discussions around the ills of modern Britain and what feels like the Overton window of political permissibility shifting in real time. 

But some give me such a confusing mix of information it’s hard to know how to make sense of it. I meet one woman who tells me within moments that Israel “should have just carpet bombed Gaza in the first few weeks”, that she travelled here from the West Midlands to protest against our overgenerosity towards asylum seekers and that, somehow, she used to be a Jeremy Corbyn supporter. She’s wearing a MAGA hat, and tells me swiftly that there should be mass deportations and that she used to be chair of her union at work. 

I ask where she gets her news. “I don’t trust any of it. [I trust] independent media. I like Tousi TV,” she says, referring to the YouTube channel of Mahyar Tousi, a popular rightwing YouTuber who was born in Iran and came to the UK as a child after being granted political asylum.

I decide to leave it there for my reporting on the Unite the Kingdom protesters and check out those opposing them. I interrupt three police officers taking a selfie, a solid day’s work just about done, who tell me that the anti-racism protesters are marching towards Green Park. I unlock my bike and head over.

In the fading light outside Green Park station, Lewis Nielsen, the organiser of the Stand Up to Racism march, tells me that it’s worrying that “we’ve seen a fascist like Tommy Robinson get a big crowd. We’ve built a message of unity and anti-racism against their hate, but we need to get bigger.”

“I don’t believe that the people in the demo today are ordinary, concerned locals,” he continues. “I think that people have been whipped up by fascist elements,” he says when I ask why so many people came out. “I’m angry about the state of society, about housing, the NHS, whatever, but it’s not migrants that caused it.” 

The mood here is subdued and tense. Outside Trafalgar Square and Whitehall people were more than happy to talk — they were in their element — but many people I approach here are suspicious and don’t want to be interviewed. There are occasional confrontations between the two sides: a tall, beery man wearing a green jacket starts screaming at a woman wearing a headscarf, and counter-protesters pour around him, pushing him away. 

But Jeremy is happy to chat while he waits for a coach back to Birmingham. His white curls are slightly soggy after a day of marching, but he’s still upbeat. He explains that he’s here to protest against Tommy Robinson’s divisiveness. 

Much of the day involved notions of patriotism and so, as people begin to trickle away, I ask Jeremy what it means to be patriotic. “Being British is to be welcoming and open to all sorts of influences all over the world”, he says. “Behind their messages of patriotism, the way that they're using the flag is to divide people. I see being patriotic as defending our multiculturalism and defending our diversity.” 

It’s a warm message, a positive one — and one which has been thoroughly out-voiced. Around 5,000 people attended the March Against Fascism organised by Lewis and, as people head off, the mood is dejected. Several of those I speak to lay the blame at the feet of the current government for embracing hostility towards migrants; “Fuck Keir,” says one guy bitterly. That, if nothing else, is something both sides can agree on.