18.09.2025

Nationalist tsunami

Big numbers attended Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom protest. Part display of xenophobic hatred, part elegy for an imagined past, part call to arms. The left needs to rethink its strategy, argues Eddie Ford

Maybe 150,000 turned up in central London for Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ demonstration on September 13 - some estimates put it even higher. Whatever the exact number, it was certainly very large - especially as the demo was called at very short notice.

Robinson himself is claiming “three million patriots” marched through London’s streets in the “biggest protest march in British history”, and his supporters have hailed it as a “patriotic tsunami”.¹ This number is obviously untrue, but such lying is par for the course for Robinson. The biggest demonstration ever is widely thought to have been the Stop the War protest in February 2003 against the Iraq War with between one and two million people.

But the nationalist right has every reason to be boastful, as the demonstration clearly reflected the mood of an increasingly large section of the population. By contrast, the counter-protest organised by the Socialist Workers Party’s favourite front, Stand Up to Racism, was overwhelmed by Robinson’s (the official police figure is 5,000, with SUtR claiming 20,000).

In its “festival of free speech”, which the far right claims to champion both in the UK and US, the huge crowds waved Union Jack and St George flags, and the rally began with members of the Destiny Church from New Zealand performing a traditional haka dance and a song about “making the west look like the Middle East” - then displayed the flags of the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State and Palestine to huge boos from the crowd, which they ritualistically tore in half to equally loud cheers.

Afterwards, they listened to speakers extolling racist conspiracy theories, ranting on their Islamophobia and general nationalist paranoia. The former French presidential candidate and prominent YouTuber, Éric Zemmour, told protestors they were subjected to “the great replacement of our European people by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture”, adding: “You and we are being colonised by our former colonies” - which he outlines in great detail in his notorious 2014 essay, Le suicide français, not to mention his 2006 book, Le premier sexe, warning against the feminisation or “devirilisation” of society.

Failure

Elon Musk had top billing via video link, telling the crowd about the “destruction of Britain” through “massive, uncontrolled migration”, and the “unreal” failure of government to “protect innocent people, including children who are getting gang-raped”, calling for “the dissolution of the UK parliament”. Then the billionaire - or is he now a trillionaire?² - got to his real theme that “the left are the party of murder” in an obvious reference to the killing of Charlie Kirk and, upping the rhetoric, declared: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you” - which means that “you either fight back or you die”.

These were comments that forced Sir Keir Starmer to release a statement condemning such talk as “dangerous and inflammatory”, which “threatens violence and intimidation on our streets” - adding how he does not think “the British public will have any truck with that kind of language”.³ But that is clearly not the case for a significant segment of the British people, who have been attracted to this sort of rhetoric - eager as they are to express their loathing of Starmer and the British establishment. A favourite chant of the crowd was “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” to the tune of the ‘Seven nation army’ song, and their chants included “Oh Tommy!”, “Whose street? Our street”, “Allah? Allah? Who the fuck is Allah?” … and so on.

But the star of the day was Robinson himself, of course. From the stage he announced that “Britain has finally awoken” and “this is never going away”, saying that the British courts had ruled in Epping council’s failed case against the home office that the rights of undocumented migrants like Somalians, Afghans and Pakistanis “supersede” those of the British public - “the people that built this nation”. At one point he played a video that included images of convicted members of a grooming gang, followed by a video of a white woman crying, which went down well with his audience. Meanwhile, books “co-authored” by Robinson with titles like Manifesto: free speech, real democracy, peaceful disobedience and Mohammed’s Koran: why Muslims kill for Islam, did a brisk trade.

People aired a number of grievances. One sign read, “Why are white people despised when our tax money pays for everything?”, whilst another simply stated, “Send them back”, and the person holding it said he came to “stand up for what we believe in - the religion and identity of our country”. Interestingly, religion played quite a big part on the demonstration, which was not just the preserve of drunken racist boneheads or fascists, even if a few people did shout “Fucking Jews!” and “Heil fucking Hitler!”. People carried wooden crosses and lit-up crucifixes and, when the crowd arrived at Whitehall, they were led from the stage in a chant of “Christ is king” and then a public recital of the ‘Lord’s Prayer’.⁴

We need to start off by saying how not to respond. Screaming “Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Off our street!” to 150,000 or more people is utterly hopeless - as is the idea of demanding they be no-platformed, a weapon that could just as easily be used against the left.

How are you going to no-platform a social movement? A mass movement that not only takes the form of Tommy Robinson, of course - albeit a famous outlier - but also Reform UK, which is consistently way ahead of the other parties in the opinion polls.

Yet the craziness continues, with the left no-platforming itself over the trans question at the moment - totally losing the plot. For a rather different perspective that undermines left orthodoxy, the Weekly Worker featured a series of articles a little while ago looking at how communists in Germany debated with the Nazis in the early 20s. What is truly significant about reading the reports of these debates is the fact that they were called off by the Nazis because they were losing the argument. We in the CPGB are certainly not uncritical of the KPD, but any criticism is not directed at them for debating with the Nazis. It is not a principle that you must debate with fascists, but equally you do not rule it out either.

More to the point, no-platforming the sort of people who attended Unite the Kingdom on the basis that they are Nazi German nationalists misses the mark spectacularly. Quite obviously, the vast majority of them are English or British chauvinists who have heroes such as Boudicca, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, not Adolf Hitler. Robinson imagines himself to be a true Brit standing up for traditional British values … king, church, country.

We need to recognise him and his movement for what it is and not what it is not: goose-stepping, Nazi advocates of Mein Kampf. They are British and Britain can produce fascism just as much as Germany or Austria - or any country for that matter.

Argument

There were so many on Tommy Robinson’s demonstration that it overflowed along the Embankment and trapped the left on both ends of Whitehall, with the police kindly helping them get home. That is the sober reality, which should act as a wake-up call to start thinking.

But tragically the left shows no sign of that. One of the instant responses was that we need the involvement of celebrities like Lady Gaga! Another bizarre suggestion is that we paint black the red cross on the St George’s flag that are appearing everywhere on roundabouts and on the sides of buildings - what sort of message does that send out? That we are Breton nationalists? The Kroaz Du features a black cross on a white background.

The SWP’s Party Notes talks of the need to “win the argument”. But this argument is not with Unite the Kingdom marchers or Reform voters. No, it is with the left and the need to get more and more people “on the streets, counter protests and unity events.”⁵

The street, street strategy means Palestine activists, YP people, trade union militants, Labour MPs … but also, in the name of ‘broad as possible’, welcoming Zionist racists onto SUtR demonstrations, after all that is what Lewis Nielson’s paymasters in the trade union bureaucracy want. But as we saw on September 13 and we see with Reform riding high at 30% in opinion polls … it does not work.

Effectively, the SWP proposes to leave Unite the Kingdom marchers and Reform voters to Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and Elon Musk. Effectively, the SWP moralistically dismisses them as irredeemable bigots. Effectively, the SWP constitutes SUtR as the defenders of the old liberal order … an old order that is in visible decay.