Tommy Robinson – huge numbers, but facing his own difficulties
All of us on the left are still coming to terms with the numbers of people that Tommy Robinson brought to central London this weekend.
At the most surface observation, this didn’t seem to be very different from Robinson’s mobilisations; his fans assembled at Blackfriars then marched north singing “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”. On reaching Whitehall, they listened to B-list celebrities: Carl Benjmain the Gamergater whose career highpoint was winning 3,000 votes as his party came sixth in the south-west at the 2019 Euro elections, and the actor Lawrence Fox whose biggest claim to fame is still that he was once the sidekick in ITV’s detective series Lewis.
But numbers change a great deal; at Cable Street, the British Union of Fascists turned out between 2,000 and 6,000 supporters. (Liberty quoted the lower figures, the Times the higher). In the 1970s, the National Front’s biggest demonstrations were its annual Remembrance Day parades, the turnout at them never crossed 10,000. Tommy Robinson was already responsible for the largest march in British far right history: the 35,000 people who turned out to hear him in July 2024, afterwards filling all sides of Trafalgar Square. This time, his turnout was several times larger.
This weekend’s protest saw between 110,000 and 150,000 marching behind Robinson. His event ended with his drunk supporters urinating in the streets, fighting with the police, breaking into the grounds at St Thomas’s hospital, presumably with the intention of driving out the Asian doctors who work there. They kettled anti-racist demonstrators and repeatedly threatened to attack them.
A month ago, I warned that Britain’s largest anti-fascist organisation was careless about safety, outnumbered, and leading its members into conflicts they were likely to lose. The left, I warned, “relies increasingly on the police to guarantee its members’ safety.” We avoided that disaster this weekend - barely - if the movement keeps on making the same mistakes, we will not keep on avoiding it.
How was Robinson able to build such a large event? His march took place just two days after the killing of US far-right activist Charlie Kirk, whose death Robinson blamed on antifascists, causing him to demand punitive violence against the left (“We don’t hate them enough”). The Kirk story wasn’t just news in the States, it led broadcasts here too. In the week before Robinson’s protests, you could see commuters on the London staring at the images on their phones. In my son’s school, another pupil pulled him aside, saying, “Watch this,” he said, and showed him a clip of Kirk’s casket. Kirk’s family, Trump and JD Vance have been demanding great acts of purging violence against the left, so that the right’s martyr could be avenged. People heard that message here too. “Charlie stood for Britain,” Robinson claimed. A group of his supporters took that message seriously, bringing photographs of Kirk on the march, large, framed in black, waving them at their fellow marchers like religious demonstrators in a different age, petitioning the Tsar. Tommy promised that “A million Brits” would honour Kirk’s memory by attending Robinson’s march.
Other dynamics helped too: through this summer, the far right have been displaying flags, and Reform and the Tories have encouraged them – Labour too. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper expressed her support for that campaign, telling the far right to hang flags of St George “anywhere” they liked.
Through August, Keir Starmer was posting his support on Twitter for the racists demonstrating outside refugee hotels. He spoke of immigration as a conspiracy against Britain, matter of “criminal people-smuggling gangs”. “If you come here illegally on a small boat, you will face return.” He didn’t explain why people come to Britain, what they are fleeing, or how much people here take the right to travel for granted. Instead, he tried to present Labour as the party of repression, “Illegal migration is a business, run by organised criminal gangs leading hundreds of people to their death in the Channel. My government is putting an end to this vile trade.” After Robinson’s march this weekend, and under a vast weight of condemnation, Starmer has briefly tacked back. But the damage has already been done.
Praised by the press, facing only a minimum challenge on the streets, the right has spent this summer pressing on, the success of the local mobilisations drawing people into what’s now a national protest movement. And, by taking people on its marches, familiarising them with the drinking, its chants, the right seeks to make them cadres in its movement, give the resolve to their racism, make them battle-hardened.
Some friends seem to expect more Robinson protests shortly, seem to be waiting got him to call more and more protests, try to force some conflict with the state. They assume that his movement will continue at this level, grow, become more pervasive. Richard Seymour’s take stikes me as a likelier prediction: “Tommy Robinson cleans up on the streets, and Nigel Farage cashes in at the ballot box.”
For a considerable time, Robinson’s movement has been making flat progress. Fifteen years ago, he was the leader of Britain’s largest racist street campaign. Eight years ago, Robinson sought to reinvent himself as a citizen journalist, using Youtube and Twitter to promote films warning of Islam’s war against the West; for which Canadian website Rebel News paid him around £5,000 a month.
Other people have led this year’s street protests. The campaign against hotels housing refugees rose independently of him. The largest protest – at Epping – reached its peak on 18 July, with up to 2,000 people participating. Robinson told his followers to join, “I’m coming to Epping next Sunday ladies and bringing thousands more with me.” He later deleted that email. Rather than recruit more supporters, Robinson’s on-off endorsement diminished the movement. The following weekend, there was another far-right protest but numbers were a sixth of what they’d been.
As for the journalism, his audience wants him to centre himself in significant news stories, but how is he supposed to do that while partying in Ayia Napa, Tenerife and Nassau? Over the past year, despite serving jail time for contempt and making countless financial appeals, he has increased his number of Twitter followers by just a fifth. Even the hapless Kemi Badenoch has grown her online audience faster.
Robinson doesn’t have a political vision, a plan to take on the state. When he started up as a right-wing activist, he deliberately made himself available to international patrons in the global anti-Islamic movement. Those patrons aren’t organising any more, nowhere else in the world is there a far right street movement that is operating at a bigger scale than him and from which he could sensbibly learn. He had made himself the king of a movement-style which no-one else is operating. All the pressure of life are likely to lead him back to the grift.
The general pattern in recent years has been for street movements on the right to emerge and flourish briefly, to leave their mark by openinh up the space for wider political forces, the latter, not the streets, have been the beneficiary. The English Defence League helped to create a mood whose victor was UKIP. The same then happened in Germany, where street protests by Pegida gave birth not to a viable street movement, but to an electoral alliance of neo-liberals and nationals, the AfD.
The new force on the British right is Reform, ahead in the polls and buoyed by the support of a satellite TV station, GB News. Unless, Robinson is able to call sustained street protests, with a frequency he’s not sustained in over a decade, probably it’s Reform, not him who’ll be the winner out of their rivalry. In the war of the content providers, certainly, GB News will defeat Robinson. It broadcasts 24/7, in contrast to Robinson who can offer his supporters in a good week maybe 5-10 minutes of fresh content. Similarly, Farage has a much more serious strategy; he is ahead in the opinion polls and likely to form our next government.
Look at how quickly Reform responded on Monday, announcing the recruitment of Danny Kruger. All this mood of desire for far-right politics, Farage was saying – it all has a natural home, in his party, in its plans for government. This is the what Robinson’s numbers open up, a further stage of high politics moving to the right.
While as for Robinson, what he will do next is unclear – wait another year before his next protest?
Through the last decade, the consecutive emergence of street movements and then electoral parties has tended to benefit the non-fascist right the most – Robinson, with his disdain for state policy is already a step away from fascism. Farage stands even further away from fascism: committed to the electoral path, bereft of any open links to a street movement, hostile even to seemingly friendly voices such as Musk urging greater militancy on him.
But, when we think about the future coming to us after the next election in four years’ time, it would be a mistake to think the worst possibility is only a period of far-right government. Among the conference guests welcomed with a standing ovation to Reform’s annual conference, was Lucy Connolly, who at the start of last summer’s race riots had tweeted that protesters should “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards.” That party may disavow violence, but it does so increasingly sporadically.
The dominant politics of our moment – expressed in Charlie Kirk’s life, the responses to his death, and in the politics which are dominating on both sides of the Atlantic – is that which Robert Paxton once called the “first stage” of fascism: a time marked by a mass revulsion with democracy, by the emergence of militia parties, by nihilism, macho culture, conformism and the policing of people’s lives through shame. It didn’t produce fascism, exactly, rather it was the release of the energy which subsequent fascist parties were able to shape and tighten and form to power their own projects.
If we think of Reform as the likeliest beneficiary of Robinson’s growth, then we need to bear in mind that Farage isn’t the same figure he was in 2016; he is rather Trump’s mirror. And the US has radicalised since his first term – Trump has ruled without Congress, sent troops to LA and Washington, is presiding this week over the next stage of the Gazan genocide. A successful Reform party would emulate Trump not as he was in 2016 but now.
For 12 years, I have been warning that our anti-fascist leaders are inadequate to the task they have set themselves, uninterested in how the right is changing, failing to innovate and being slowly but steadily out-organised by an enemy they lack the skill to defeat. But this isn’t a moment to repeat that critique, any readers of mine will know it already. I’ll try to end instead with some, disconnected, signs of hope:
-Even before last weekend’s events, anti-fascists in London were meeting and trying to organise a new kind of anti-fascist movement, not to replace SutR, but to draw together the very large numbers of people who want a broader turn;
-After weeks of criticism, for trying to economise a movement against sexual predators, SutR did belatedly execute one of its unacknowledged turns: they've organised letters around the issue, called women's meetings, put women at the front of their protests. It’s not a coincidence that their protest felt younger and livelier in consequence;
-There has been no shortage at all of labour movement figures since Saturday calling for new tactics and new organisational forms.
Those measures aren’t on the scale we need – they aren’t the generational overturning, they aren’t the old guard letting go. But they’re something.
Personally, I’ll be doing the politics I’ve committed myself to ever since the Islington protest – working with local groups in an area which is being targeted by the far right. It will be much harder to win locally with Robinson on the rise. But there’s no way to isolate the right at the level of the state, unless we do it in civil society too.