On the road to Parliament Square, men kept stopping Kate to tell her she was beautiful. She was a devout Christian and aesthetician from Kent and she wore an elaborate skirt made of Union Jacks. It had taken months to prepare her outfit for Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march. “I wanted to wear something that was quite ladylike, but covered up,” she told me. “I saw a girl last year, she had all her bits hanging out. I think that’s a bit distasteful. It’s not part of the message we’re trying to get out there.” An elderly man asked her for a photo. “You look amazing,” he said. She held a wooden cross up high as she posed. “Christ is King,” she said. The man beamed: “I think He might be.”
The government had banned 11 “far-right agitators” from entering the UK in advance of the march on 16 May. The previous “Unite the Kingdom” rally, in September 2025, descended into fighting: this time Robinson had urged his supporters to be peaceful. The route had been planned to avoid the rally to mark Nakba Day, which commemorates the mass displacement of people during the 1948 Palestine War. The marches ran parallel. More than 4,000 police officers had been deployed to keep the peace and separate the groups. Robinson was far away from the crowds, behind a metal fence with the other A-listers: ex-Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, ex-Ukip YouTuber Carl Benjamin, ex-actor Laurence Fox and several priests. Everyone was filming everything.
Three white women were preparing to go on stage. They wore black niqabs, covering everything but their eyes. They removed their coverings, revealing short dresses, heels and bright lipstick. The women kept removing the niqabs and then putting them back on, laughing hysterically each time. They were from the anti-Islam French group Collectif Némésis, and they were there to “stop the Islamic invasion that oppresses women”. Men were watching them, confused. “They’re not real Muslims, are they?” one asked his friend. His friend shook his head. “They’re strippers.”
I was standing by the fence with Matt and Paddy, two bald men who both had “SKINHEAD” tattooed on the backs of their heads; Matt also had a St George’s Cross and a cherry red Dr Martens boot inked near his neck. He’d had them done years ago. “As you get older, the ink starts fading out,” he noted sadly. He lived on the south-east coast, so he’d seen a lot of small boats coming in. “We’re all Tommy Robinson,” he told me.
A British-Iranian YouTuber in a linen suit called Mahyar Tousi, from the channel Tousi TV, came over to take selfies through the fence. He was feeling pretty tired, he said, but pleased with how orderly the crowd had been so far. “I think people are basically self-policing and self-cleaning.” Some people would call this lot the far right, he said. “Just come and talk to these guys – they’re not bad people. I can show you far right. I can show you ethnonationalists. They don’t like me.” He wandered off. “I watch him every night,” said one woman, starstruck. “He has 1.6 million subscribers.”
Laurence Fox ambled over to the fence, holding a cigarillo. “There’s a version of England that we’re told, and the version of England that’s real,” he said to me. “It’s difficult to see the mainstream media say this is about hate… This is the real Britain.” It would be nice, he felt, if the rest of Britain could stop being so ashamed of itself. Fox is from a grand British acting dynasty, and was in films like Gosford Park. In 2020 he went on Question Time and accused an audience member of being “racist” for calling him a “white, privileged male”; during Covid, he was protesting lockdowns. His agency dropped him. Now he leads the Reclaim Party. I asked if he was happier before his fall from grace. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. “I was a good actor. I miss it. And I would like to live in a world where I’d be able to act. But I don’t conform to various belief systems of saying that men can be women, or, you know, because I’m white, that there’s some problem with me. I just see that as racism.” He looked wistful. “By the grace of God, we’re happy today,” he said. “And it’s by no one else’s grace.”
Not everyone at the march was a Christian, but most were happy to mumble along to the Lord’s Prayer and join in chants of “Christ is King” when instructed. A pastor got on stage and started yelling at everyone about Christ. “Give a shout for Jesus!” he screamed. “King of kings, lord of lords, your saviour, my saviour, Tommy’s saviour!” Behind him, Robinson grinned.
Some of the older people were getting tired and had perched on the plinths. Men kept letting off smoke bombs, filling the sky with pink and blue powder. Through the haze, I could just make out Robinson, telling his audience to prepare for a “battle of Britain”. He pointed to parliament. “In that building,” he said, “are 650 traitors to this country.” Two men in the crowd introduced themselves to each other and found they’d both just tried and failed to become Reform councillors. “I stood in Tottenham,” one said. “It was difficult.”
I wandered away from the stage. The assistant in Tesco in Westminster was standing at the door, apologising to customers. “If you’re coming in, there’s no alcohol,” he said. “Police have stopped us from selling it.” Cans and bottles had piled up in the square.
A middle-aged man wore a black shirt covered in Gothic script: Fate whispers to the warrior: You cannot withstand the storm. And the warrior whispers back: I am the storm. The storm’s name was Graham and he was a builder from Milton Keynes. I asked him why he’d come and he started crying. “Sorry,” he said. “This is my home. This is my country.” He was scared. “What could happen to you? Any female in this country? Any male in this country?” he said. “Rape. Murder. The people we’ve let in do not respect women.”
The protesters had been ordered to leave by 6pm. Robinson was getting into a van while women watched, waving. “We love you, Tommy!” they called. “Remember us!” A Scouse woman sucked a pink vape. “I feel like a proper fangirl,” she told her daughter. “I’m in love.” People were beginning to disperse through the park, passing a few pro-Palestine marchers going in the other direction. A group of students had come down from Glasgow for the Nakba rally. They’d seen a few “Unite the Kingdom” marchers: “A bunch of fucking gammons with room-temperature IQs,” said a boy called Finn, and they all laughed.
It wasn’t quite a fair characterisation. “Unite the Kingdom” is a slick operation now, with its own world of micro-celebrities, politicians and “new media” journalists. It has telegenic foreign speakers and money from US billionaires, with Elon Musk posting support. It has an anthem – “God’s Kingdom” by the Unite the Kingdom Collective, which Robinson was pushing his fans to get to number one (it currently has fewer than 1,300 streams on Spotify). It has middle-aged women, children and dogs wearing bowler hats and British flags.
You could still find the thugs, though – the ones who’d been with Robinson since his days in the English Defence League. By the park I met Jack, who told me he was a football hooligan. “I think the march is wank,” he told me. Most people involved were “thick as fuck”. Slicks of white powder had congealed in his nostrils. “Do you want some cocaine in your face?” he asked. “I’ll give you a fucking line of coke.” A few feet away, 20 police officers had swarmed around one man in an England football shirt who was lying on his stomach, handcuffed, legs bound. His red face was covered in sweat and dirt and stones. A horde of men encircled the police, filming from every angle, hoping for one last viral hit. “Relax, bro!” someone shouted. The man spat on the ground. “Suck your mum,” he said.
[Further reading: Anthony Barnett: England, ethno-nationalism and what I told Andy Burnham]
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Subscribe here to commentProgressives cannot admit that their …perhaps your policies have generated and sustain Reform. Labour do not listen to the white working class . As theysay in France, tant pis, bebe,