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Determined to get a good spot on Whitehall, the woman from Liverpool had woken her nieces at 3am to travel to London. Her dedication paid off. By the time the march reached her on Saturday afternoon, she was sitting on a wall outside Downing Street, the little girls in camping chairs at her feet, engrossed in their iPads.
She had unfurled two banners. One said “Keir Starmer is a wanker” and the other read: “We’re not far right, we are England’s mothers and we will not stay silent. Stop the rape of our children, mothers across Britain are taking a stand.”
I asked her why she was there and she looked incredulous. Wasn’t it obvious? “Because Keir Starmer’s a wanker.” Why? “He’s taking our speech away.” Even though you’re allowed to sit outside his house and call him a wanker? “Well he is.”
As for the other sign, she made it, she said, “because I’m not far right and I’m sick of being called it. I’m sick of coming to places like this and being called far right. I am here for the right reasons today, for the future of these children. People are coming in illegally and raping our kids and it’s got to stop.”
I went to Tommy Robinson’s “unite the kingdom” rally on Saturday to record an episode of the Guardian’s daily podcast, Today in Focus. Robinson called it “the biggest freedom of speech” rally in British history. Others, like Hope Not Hate, prefer to describe it as “Britain’s largest ever far-right protest”. Unsurprisingly – with the exception of one jovial Welshman who said “well, my views are far right” – no one I met thinks of themselves in that way. “We’re just right,” I heard, over and over. As in: correct.
There is no doubt that many of the speakers at the rally were racist, with many delivering variations on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Robinson told the crowd: “It’s not just Britain that is being invaded, it’s not just Britain that is being raped. Every single western nation faces the same problem: an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens is happening.”
But most of the 110,000 marchers couldn’t hear the speeches. Many couldn’t even fit on to Whitehall to see the big screens. I didn’t get the impression they were there for the speakers anyway: this was about being heard themselves.
A few wore their racism with pride, like the man with the misspelled sign that read: “Why are white people dispised when our tax money pays for everything.” But mostly these were “ordinary people” with “ordinary jobs” who “care about our kids”, who said time and again that they’d “had enough”. Usually it was about immigration. But often it wasn’t just that. They’d had enough of a Britain they felt was no longer working.
Instead of blaming years of Tory austerity, or a capitalist system rigged against the little guy, for these people, “illegal immigrants” were to blame. And Starmer was the bogeyman. “Look what he’s done to the farmers, inheritance tax, you know, the NHS is down on its knees,” said a man from Norfolk. “We have potholes in the roads, we can’t get GP appointments, people are actually left in the hallways of some of the NHS hospitals and are not seen to for hours and they’re in critical condition. This country is becoming a joke.”
For him it was personal: “I’m starting to lose my teeth, right, because I’m a type 1 diabetic. And it’s the struggle of me trying to get my teeth replaced because of my diabetes. They don’t help people like me. But they would help someone that steps foot on our land from a dinghy and gets everything.”
No one used the words “asylum seeker” or “refugee”. It was “illegals” and “fighting age men”. All tarred with the actions of a tiny number of people, like the man in the Bell Hotel in Epping, who was convicted of touching a teenage girl.
Everyone claimed that they didn’t have a problem with legal immigration: the millions of people who have come to the UK with visas, to study or work. They weren’t blamed for putting pressure on services. Just the people who arrived on small boats – who made up just 4% of arrivals in 2024.
I left the rally when too many people on Whitehall were getting aggy and I realised the police had shut off all the side roads, making a quick escape impossible. Since leaving I’ve been grappling with how best to describe what I saw and heard. It was a far-right rally, yes, but many people attended unperturbed by the fact it had been billed as such by many media outlets, including the Guardian. They did not feel alienated by such an extreme, and previously fringe, label. In his speech, Robinson said something that I fear may be true. “They tried to silence us for 20 years with labels,” he said. “‘Racist’, ‘Islamophobe’, ‘far right’. They don’t work any more!”
When the far right becomes the mainstream right, what language do we have to describe what is happening? How have conditions led to so many feeling unheard, frustrated and angry? Until the foundations of Britain are fixed – the NHS, schools, potholes, fuel prices – I can’t see this movement doing anything other than growing.
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Helen Pidd is a presenter of Today in Focus, the Guardian’s award-winning daily podcast
