‘Unite the Kingdom’ is a harbinger of a Western European cataclysm

You may not agree with the New Right that rallied in London in the tens of thousands, but it is a symptom of establishment decay

Seen from its former empire, riots in Great Britain may look wretchedly atavistic. Not to speak of a tiny bit of Schadenfreude. For the Times of India, the recent Unite the Kingdom rally and riots have turned London “into a stage for Britain’s anxieties.”

And not just anxieties. While many protesters remained peaceful, there also was, in best old English tradition, some energetic fighting: Kicks, fists, and bottles flew as if at a football match or late at night outside a not-yet-gentrified pub around last call. There ended up being 26 police officers injured and 25 protesters arrested. For now. The authorities have promised to catch even more. Clearly so as to make an example of the uppity ruffians and keep the rest of the common people in check. That, too, is good old English tradition. 

Organized by “far-right activist” (The Hindu) Tommy Robinson (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), Unite the Kingdom was billed as a “free speech” demonstration, but it’s real and explicit core agenda was a protest against immigration and Islam (or rather the daft, mean caricature of Islam that Robinson and his followers propagate).

Still a fairly young man at 42 years of age, Robinson has a well-known and ingloriously petty criminal record: assault, passport and mortgage fraud; yet another conviction, for contempt of court, was arguably political. He also has stacked up serious credentials as a right-wing influencer, organizer, and troublemaker. None of that, however, has stopped him or is ever likely to do him any political harm. On the contrary, just as with other recent break-out figures – Trump in the forefront – the very deserved bad-boy rep is only making him stronger.

Unfortunately, even Robinson’s aggressive siding with genocidal Israel (his really unforgivable crime, in my book) – a pattern now common with the far right in the West – and plausible assessments that he is functioning as a “Zionist asset” (and benefitting from it) won’t hurt him. Even if it sits extremely, comically badly with his constant complaining about foreigners subverting Britain. That is just the horribly corrupt way the West is now. And to be fair, in that respect, Robinson is de facto as mainstream as the whole ruling Labour Party and the rest of Britain’s establishment, too, from BBC to NHS.

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That’s why, here, it makes little sense to get stuck once again reiterating what a very dubious figure Robinson cuts. Instead, let’s focus on why he is capable of causing such a stir. That will tell us much about the current state of Britain and the West more broadly.

The event’s overall vibe was representative of much of the New Right in Europe and the US: fears of whites being subject to a “Great Replacement”; patriotic or nationalist (pick your term) misgivings over losing traditional national identity, and anger at government and mainstream manipulation of the public sphere via cancel culture and outright censorship.

There is no doubt that the meeting was a major political event. For one thing, it was large: London police reported 110,000 participants; the BBC has counted “up to 150,000.” That number is impressive especially since a rival meeting of counter-protesters, at an estimated 5,000 marchers, was smaller by orders of magnitude. There’s a reason the left-centrist Guardian has admitted Robinson achieved a “record” turnout. But his numbers also need to be kept in context: A 2023 meeting in defense of Palestine, for instance, drew 300,000 protesters.

It is a fact, in any case, that the size of the Unite the Kingdom rally far exceeded police estimates. It also seems clear that this was the single “largest nationalist event in decades.” Emphasis on “single” because Unite the Kingdom was really just a peak performance in a sequence of demonstrations and protests targeting migration and Islam. In the first week of August 2024, for instance, 27 towns and cities were affected by almost 30 such events, often involving riots. Those disorders were the worst since 2011.

Last month, a year after that 2024 brushfire, the BBC was, again, reporting on “a wave of asylum home protests.” In other words, what has just happened in London wasn’t an isolated political squall, but just a particularly strong gust of wind in an ongoing storm that shows no sign of abating. There is no reason to believe the Unite the Kingdom event was the last of its kind. Its successors may also well be bigger again. And more violent, too.

Robinson was, of course, putting his very own spin on his march in London when calling it “the spark of a cultural revolution in Great Britain” and telling his followers that “Britain has finally awoken, and this is never going away.” Yet, even if you detest his politics, there is no doubt that – one way or another – Unite the Kingdom matters and will matter.

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The question is how. The first thing to note is that the event was not merely about that one, rather rundown kingdom across the Channel. Much of it did concern specifically British issues, such as enormous and deserved anger over hyper-unpopular Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

And there can be no understanding the resonance and effects of “Unite the Kingdom” without recalling that the most successful political party in Britain now is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the national variant of Europe’s New Right. While the relationship between Robinson and Reform UK is not (yet) straightforward, they clearly converge ideologically and politically.

Yet things beyond the UK were at least as important. Hence the (video-link) appearances of, for instance, US mega-billionaire and international New Right sponsor Elon Musk and French New Right publicist and – largely failed – politician Eric Zemmour, deploring a loss of true Britishness (Musk) and invoking the “Great Replacement” (Zemmour). Other (remote-access) speakers from abroad included a representative of Germany’s AfD party and Jordan Peterson, the professional cultural pessimist and woke-baiter from Canada.

Hence also the fact that protesters also brought up the recent murder of US Christian New Right activist and leader Charlie Kirk. Whatever his murderer thought he was doing, it is certain already that he has made Kirk a martyr. Witness the elderly London lady holding up a sign with Kirk’s face and the words: “God bless, never forget.”

In the US, the killing of Kirk has triggered, once again, much talk of fatal “polarization” and the real possibility of civil war. And if not that, then a wave of terrorism from below answered by a bigger wave of state repression. Grim as it is, none of this talk is unrealistic. Those still poo-pooing such nightmare scenarios as “unimaginable” only reveal their own narrow-mindedness.

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In Britain and, more broadly, Western Europe, mainstream elites and their hangers-on in the media and elsewhere might feel that their politics are still not as dangerous as all that. Yet that, too, is shortsighted and complacent. If we know one thing from history and the present – 1848 or the Arab Spring, for instance – it is that catastrophic tipping-points are not just about one event in one place, but the sum of events and, more importantly, their interaction.

In that all-too-real, not-theoretical-at-all sense, Unite the Kingdom is one more harbinger of a possible European cataclysm. Consider only that both Starmer’s hapless regime and that of France’s Macron were once touted as Centrism’s “last chance.” Even the staid Economist has noticed that there may be a pattern of decline and fall here. And in Germany as well, it is the New Right that has the best chances to emerge victorious from the perma-crisis engineered by centrist elites. Europeans want change. If the center refuses to offer it, the center will fall.

That, finally, may emerge as the truest and most bitter lesson of our moment once we’ll look back from a very different future: Dislike the Robinsons all you like – and I, for one do, as an inveterate leftist – but they are symptom, not cause. For the cause of Unite the Kingdom and the future it may well signal you have to look to the ruthless, austeritarian, detached, and corrupt Center.