It was meant to be a famous day. Attendees of the Unite the Kingdom march told each other they would one day be asked, “Where were you on 13 September 2025?” Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist and their leader, had called on demonstrators not to wear masks or drink alcohol, and instead to celebrate with music. Nearly 150,000 people were there and for a while, before the violence and shouts of “Heil fucking Hitler”, it felt like a nationalist street party.
It was sunny. Beach balls were kept up over the crowd to cheers. “They’re ones meant for window cleaning!” a Wigan man waving the largest flagpole (two four-metre poles, zip-tied) explained proudly when a stranger congratulated him. “How far have you travelled, mate?” Weed joints were passed around. They found ways to make songs like “Seven Nation Army”, “Sex on Fire” and “We are the Champions” fit to “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”. “Look dad!” a boy called excitedly, “They’ve got a balloon dick with Starmer’s face stuck on!”
I asked one man to tell me why he was here, and he said it would be easier to show me. He turned around to show his back draped with the England flag, marked with a concise three-point manifesto. One: “Keir is a wanker”. Two: “Starmer is wanker”. Three: “Stop the boats”. Unite the Kingdom was branded as a “free speech rally”, and free speech meant saying what you thought about immigration.
Susan had travelled from the farthest reach of Wales – Holyhead. Though she had allowed herself one drink on the five-hour train ride with her friends, she was not having any more. She was there as a grandmother worried about her grandchildren’s future. “The country’s in a hell of a state and it’s the immigrants they’re letting in.” Immigrants coming in to work, pay taxes and “make a life for themselves” was good. “We’ve had Chinese, Indians, we’ve had these working-class people all our lives and it’s never been a problem… they’ve worked hard, they’re not scroungers, they’re British taxpaying people, fair enough.” She had enjoyed life up to the Nineties. “The rave scenes had just hit, everyone was loved up in Manchester!” But there had been a “massive change” in the last 20 years, and especially since Brexit.
The problem, she said, was a new kind of immigration. “The hardworking taxpayer is funding these people coming in through the backdoor who we don’t know who they are.” What she feared most was Sharia law. As we spoke, a hearty cheer for a young boy who had climbed a traffic light to wave a flag turned into a chant of “save our kids”. Susan explained that fanatics and extremists wanted women treated as second to men. And we could come under that law if too many came in, because “they breed like fleas, there’s no birth control or anything, and this is what they’ve planned to do to overtake us by population”.
Max, a local 28-year-old, had come because “we’re being invaded”. Labour and the Conservatives were full of left-wingers trying to “genocide us and make us a minority”. He mentioned the US murders, last week, of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk. Zarutska, a Ukrainian immigrant killed by a black man, had “gotten culturally enriched by a knife in her neck”. He expanded sardonically: “The many benefits that built the West, isn’t it? He must have been a doctor or an engineer.”
To Max, Reform was worth voting for only because there was no better option. He would rather have “someone more patriotic”. He liked Mark Collett (a neo-Nazi), Red Ice (a white supremacist multimedia company) and Patriotic Alternative (a far-right, fascist, neo-Nazi and white nationalist hate group). Tommy Robinson was “far left” because he was pro-immigration if it was legal and non-Islamic. I would see Robinson’s “line-up of Pajeets”. In that way he was part of the attempted “genocide of all people of European ancestry”. When I asked how he had come to his views, he told me to “go down to Whitechapel and have a look. Maybe you find it culturally enriching to have their rotting fish out with their flies swarming everywhere in their market, but I don’t.” With 15 years before the demographics tilted, it was necessary to “build white areas” and repatriate immigrants.
Chants went up of “Allah? Allah? Who the fuck is Allah?” and “Whose streets? Our streets!” I spoke to 23-year-old teaching assistant Nathan, whose family had come together from Somerset in Union Jack suits. He was there for “freedom of speech and re-understanding patriotism”. Some parts of British history were shameful. But others were worth celebrating. He mentioned the successful integration of ancestral Celtic immigrants. More recently, “there are many cultures that have come to our society that have immigrated and brought benefits to us”. But recent Islamic immigration had “gone wrong”. The key split for him was that Islam was “very misogynistic and very homophobic”. Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where his family had lived for nine years before moving to Somerset, had “basically become a Muslim town”. They had watched it “go from a fully functioning multicultural society with a thriving high street” to a state of “quite militant” Islamic law in certain areas. All was not lost yet, but it would be soon “if we don’t do something about it, if we’re too scared to be called racist”.
A husband and wife from Devon wore “I am Peter Lynch” t-shirts and asked to be referred to as Peter Lynch and Peter Lynch. Lynch was a man who died in prison after being jailed for participation in a riot outside an asylum hotel last summer. The husband had gone to Lynch’s funeral. There, he had seen the Ukip leader Nick Tenconi, who impressed him. But he would vote for Ben Habib’s Advance UK – a party formed after Habib’s departure from Reform in November 2024. It was something of a tactical vote: “We can’t let Nigel Farage, that two-faced bastard, have his own way.”
Like many protesters, he would have been pro-Reform when he “had no other choice”, but “now we do”. Farage was a Tory unable to enact the policies he wanted. Those were: “get these boat people out, get illegal immigrants out, protect our children, protect our wives, get rid of Sharia law”.
The protest began its march to Westminster. A scared woman asked if she was safe on the South Bank. A policeman assured her that the protesters were contained and posed no threat.
As I came down to Trafalgar Square the sky was once again thick with flags, but of a different colour. A Stand Up to Racism counter-protest was pushing into Whitehall from the other end. “Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here”. “Whose streets? Our streets!”, they called, like their Unite the Kingdom counterparts, but this time waving Palestine flags and anti-fascist signs, wearing keffiyehs and Covid masks.
Florence, a 30-year-old in logistics originally from France, explained: “We have a disagreement on the border policy and we are exercising our right to free speech.” She believed they were targeting people of colour because of racism. Mara from Devon, in her sixties, “just felt it’s important to stand up and be counted because I am horrified by people like Tommy Robinson.” She was the daughter of a political refugee and grew up in a Britain that was “a very tolerant country”. She wished she knew how the disagreement had got so extreme. “It is always easier to blame the outsider.”
The police’s measures to separate the protests were to have a dead zone where Horse Guards Avenue met Whitehall. Robinson’s stage, where he and Elon Musk spoke via video link, was south of the intersection and faced south. The Stand Up to Racism stage, where Zarah Sultana and Diane Abbott spoke, was north of the intersection and faced north. But protesters from the Unite the Kingdom march went past Robinson’s stage on a parallel street to the east and came to the fencing on Horse Guard’s Avenue. The Stand Up to Racism march went to their fencing. The two groups were 25 metres apart, in each other’s eyeline. The anti-fascists raised middle fingers and shouted, “Nazi scum, off our streets”. The other side gestured back.
Then there followed a series of sudden and frantic dashes by the police as they tried to secure the other side roads from Robinson’s protesters. But soon they reached Trafalgar Square, joining the counter-protesters pouring in off the Strand.
At first you could walk between the two groups. The conflict was verbal, if not quite civil. Both sides called each other “paedos”. A Unite the Kingdom protester conceded that our foreign policy “has been fucked for years” but that didn’t mean everyone had to keep coming over; his Stand Up to Racism opponent said, “that’s because you keep bombing the different countries mate!” One young woman had a sign reading, “It’s OK to punch Nazis”. She told me she saw the “rise of fascism” and it was “scaring the shit out of me”. A Unite the Kingdom protester approached and said: “We don’t need all this division. I’ve never ever advocated punching anybody.” She asked if his co-protesters felt the same.
The street began to organise by group. There were far more Unite the Kingdom protesters, and they kept coming after the column of counter-protesters had poured into Whitehall, so the counter-protesters began to get packed in between Robinson’s stage and their fencing. At the top corner of Whitehall a small group of anti-fascists was cut off. They linked arms and chanted.
Flags got thrown. An anti-fascist sign was snatched, and beer cans were thrown across the lines. Fireworks and smoke bombs were let off. Groups of women and children left the front lines, with adult hands steering child shoulders. Men with their eyes soaked in pepper spray reeled away in the same direction, pressing their faces into their sleeves and saying, “fuck, that’s bad”. Earlier a man had explained to me how the “top blokes” of both Millwall and Charlton, who were playing their derby, had arranged that the fans would not fight as usual but unite and head to the protest. A man with a Millwall Loyalists flag gave the “No one likes us, we don’t care” chant. Men came down from scaffolding they’d climbed to shout asking if anyone had “any fucking packet”, meaning cocaine.
Police on horseback rode out from the Mall to enforce the separation across Whitehall. Then a large column of police pushed through the crowd in a line, two-by-two with hands on the shoulders ahead. A man passed me, the back of his head dented and bloody. The first glass bottle to shatter was reproved by a hush, but soon they were flying freely. The Unite the Kingdom protesters aimed projectiles at the counter-protesters, at the police and, if one of their own had climbed to an appealing spot such as the top of a letterbox, at him. When a thrown bottle hit a horse in the face, causing it to cry out and rear back, the crowd cheered. They roared, “Send them back! Send them back!”, “Fuck Palestine,” and “We want our country back!” A man near me joined “na-na-na-na: England!” with “na-na-na-na: Sieg Heil!”, and “Starmer is a wanker” with “Adolf is a hero”. During one surge at the police, he shouted “Fucking Jews! Heil fucking Hitler! F*ggts!”
Young protesters fantasised about attacking the counter-protesters. “If we could just get everyone to take two steps forward at the same time, then two more, we’d get our hands on them and they’d be fucked. How many of them are there and how many of us? They’d be fucked.”
Fatigue and rain began to dampen the conflict as the evening wore on. One protester told me he had never believed in “cloud-seeding” before, but was beginning to after seeing the timing of the rain. The drone of police helicopters had been a constant over our heads all day, after all. A full beer can had hit me and burst open down my back. The crowds dispersed. Whether the rain was government-engineered or natural, I was grateful.
[See also: The rebuilding of Tommy Robinson]
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