Crusaders

It was also bizarrely Christian-themed. Unlike in the United States, Britain’s fascist scene rarely comes wielding the crucifix. Yet the Unite the Kingdom rally boasted marchers bearing wooden crosses and cadres of young men chanting Nick Fuentes’s slogan “Christ is King.” Conservative Anglican Bishop Ceirion Dewar was also among the speakers, and guests included Rev Brett Murphy and Right Rev David Nicholls. Added to this overt religiosity was the “crusader” cosplay, and speakers repeatedly asserted that Europe was a Christian continent and England a Christian country.

This reflects the transnational counter-jihadist coalitions that Robinson has been building over the years. For instance, he was part of the early lineup of members of the anti-Islam Hearts of Oak group, formed in 2020 by Alan Craig (former leader of the Christian Peoples Alliance) and Peter McIlvenna (formerly of Christian Concern). Likewise, the trajectory in recent years of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) — once Farage’s party and a major force behind Brexit — has opened it to a fusion between anti-Islam Robinsonades and rightist Christian politics.

The current leader, Nick Tenconi, is both a far-right Christian and the CEO of Turning Point UK (an offshoot of Charlie Kirk’s US group). Robinson had been appointed UKIP’s adviser on “grooming gangs” by then-leader Gerard Batten in 2018, but Batten was forced out the following year and the pro-Robinson faction banned. Now, under Tenconi, Robinson has spoken at UKIP rallies alongside its lead spokesman, the repeatedly defrocked clergyman Calvin Robinson.

The emphasis on Christian identity is deeply weird in a country where public expressions of belief are slightly embarrassing. It points more to the Americanization of the European far right than to any national spiritual awakening: Robinson’s reinvention as a “citizen journalist” owes much to American cash from outfits like the Daniel Pipes–founded Middle East Forum. Yet this also helps the new far right solve a problem. Christianity as an ethnic rallying point cuts across the old racial lines while sustaining a Kulturkampf against Muslims.

Musk’s Radicals

The event was also strongly Musk-inflected. Musk has a strategy of supporting European far-right formations, such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which include open neo-Nazis and street-fighting fascists. He had reportedly dangled the incentive of a $100 million donation to Farage’s Reform UK late last year. But if that offer was ever made, it was evidently withdrawn when Farage and Musk fell out — because Farage refused to admit the likes of Robinson into his party. Farage wants a parliamentary far right, not a street movement; a party that rejects “mass immigration,” not an anti-Islam party. He has experience dealing with wayward, charismatic figureheads whom he can’t control. This is why, since leaving UKIP, he has been trying to build a party run as a business under his own grip.

Musk demanded that Farage be replaced as Reform leader, and then he backed a breakaway formation by businessman Ben Habib called Advance UK. Robinson swiftly joined. Habib claims the new party was Musk’s idea — it may even have benefited from Musk money. As such, along with a couple of obscure crypto firms, Advance UK was listed as a major sponsor of the Unite the Kingdom rally. The crowd and speakers understood who their patron was. “Thank You Elon,” said the placards; Polish Euro-parliamentarian Dominik Tarczyński urged the crowd to thank Musk for “freeing the bird.”

Robinson won’t stop at public rallies. He is a fascist and always has been, whether he was a member of the British National Party, his cousin’s British Freedom Party, Anne Marie Waters’s For Britain, or Advance UK. And his modus operandi is street fighting, from his days in a Luton football hooligan firm to his leadership of the English Defence League and then — following a brief pretense of opposing “extremism” — the anti-Islam Pegida UK.

His current practice, as a “citizen journalist,” is incitement. This began in 2017 with illegally filming the trials of grooming gangs suspects and encouraging vigilante action — resulting in contempt of court charges. It was as a Shillman Fellow at Levant’s Rebel Media, alongside Laura Loomer and Hopkins, that Robinson began to professionalize his output. The fellowships are paid for by Robert Shillman, a tech billionaire who sits on the boards of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. It surely helped Robinson’s case that his outfits had always been aggressively pro-Israel in a manner untypical of the British far right until then.

When Robinson left Rebel Media, he set up his own channel with fellow employee Caolan Robertson. His content was systematic lies and instigation. His former collaborator Robertson himself exposed this when he left the far right. Robinson had posted a video of himself being assaulted by migrants in Italy but had engineered the conflict by throwing one of them into traffic and then assaulting him. He was jailed last year for another case of incitement, defying courts to repeat false claims against a Syrian refugee in his pseudo-documentary, Silenced.

Throughout, Robinson has been defended by a transnational Islamophobic network. To help with his legal jeopardy in 2018 and recast him as a free speech martyr, the Middle East Forum donated to his legal fees and organized three pro-Robinson rallies. The Gatestone Institute leaped to his defense, as did the Australian Liberty Alliance, which donated an undisclosed sum.

Silenced — screened in Trafalgar Square at a pro-Robinson rally in 2024, days before the stabbing of children in Southport was used to trigger a series of racist riots — was publicized by overseas allies like Morten Messerschmidt’s Danish People’s Party. Finally, he benefited from Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Musk reinstated the accounts of Robinson and confederates like Hopkins. He enabled Silenced to be seen widely across the platform — Robinson claims it was viewed 167 million times before it was removed for legal reasons. Musk also promoted disinformation leading to the racist riots last year, including Robinson’s lies. He rushed to Robinson’s defense when he was jailed for contempt of court, claiming he was being suppressed for “telling the truth.”

The Unite the Kingdom rally was the product of years of international networking and funding, backed by wealthy, racist Americans. But the fact that so many people turned out to Robinson’s fascist jamboree cannot be blamed on his donors, or even the platforms that profit from his propaganda. The UK has been on a course to rightist radicalization for years. As Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon demonstrate in Reactionary Democracy, this is a turn being taken by political and media elites, who assiduously craft “legitimate concerns” about race and migration that they then claim to be responding to.

The last five years have witnessed a bipartisan Sturm und Drang over “small boats” arriving in the UK. As the Tories grew more inflammatory in vilifying refugees, Labour attacked from the right, accusing them of operating an “open borders” regime. As tens of thousands of demonized asylum seekers were packed into cramped hotel accommodation by the Conservatives, they became targets of far-right attacks — first by rioters in Knowsley, Merseyside, in 2023, and then in last year’s pogroms when rioters tried to burn down a hotel outside Rotherham.

“Unite the Kingdom” was built during a summer of racist agitation outside asylum hotels, which a Labour government has done everything to validate. It comes only months after Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, echoing the language of arch-racist Tory Enoch Powell, where he claimed that high net migration had caused “incalculable” damage to the British social fabric. The only reason Robinson’s crowds weren’t bigger sooner is likely that many suburban racists didn’t want to be embroiled in brawls with cops or anti-racists.

Left-Wing Response

It would be wonderfully simple if this passion for persecution could be defused with a bit of social democracy. It is true that Britain is a deeply unhappy society, increasingly a poor country with some rich owners, a housing crisis, underfunded public services, and crumbling infrastructure, and it could do with radical reform. These demonstrators want their “country back,” but it has never been theirs. The real owners can be seen in the “Who Owns Britain?” report by think tank Common Wealth: BlackRock, Macquarie, the CK Hutchinson Group, Berkshire Hathaway, Invesco, Vanguard Asset Management, the EP Group, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Drax, and Goldman Sachs. Asset managers and private equity own Britain. Labour won’t change that, and neither will any number of pogroms or flags pustulating, like acne, from lampposts.

It is also true that the Labour government has caged itself in an austerian fiscal framework and wasted the last year on unpopular welfare cuts. By demoralizing its shrinking base, Labour hands the initiative to right-wingers. And because it needs fear, pessimism, and compliance to govern from the pro-business hard center in days of decline, its last whiff of populist authenticity is being “tough” on foreigners and other bogey-scapegoats. It forms an affective symbiosis with the far right, while validating its narrative.

But Robinson’s fans don’t particularly want a government that tackles inequality. They are not disaffected Labour voters. Like Reform UK’s base, they will be mostly radicalized Tories from very white constituencies with few amenities and prospects and a statistically higher-than-average share of home and car ownership. They eat up fascist disinfotainment not because they are angry at the rich but because they fear and loathe those with less money and status.

They mean exactly what they say — or what he says. They think immigrants and Muslims are a sexually threatening, antisocial burden. They think Islam is overthrowing Western civilization. They think most refugees are here “illegally” and should be “sent back.” They think there is a “great replacement” of white people in Europe. They think Starmer heads a totalitarian tyranny that jails heroes for speaking the truth. That these are often radicalized versions of ideas presented to them by mainstream media and politicians doesn’t stop them from blaming the media and politicians for “betraying” them. They are undoubtedly radicalizing as capitalism grows nastier and life gets harder, but their agitation is no more a displaced class struggle than was the QAnon frenzy.

Missing these last five years, as a growing far right has monopolized attention, is any national political organization on the Left. Though active on the streets, especially over Gaza, we have been painfully slow to get organized outside Labour since Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in 2019. We have not set an agenda that others must respond to.

This has abetted the Starmerite strategy of marginalizing the Left in order to engineer a battle between the center and the Right. This also ensured that when a new left-wing party was finally broached, it was immediately bogged down in problems of culture and internal organization that ought to have been addressed years ago — almost resulting in an unforgivable derailment of the entire project by those at the top. Now we face an even worse problem than Reform UK, urgent though that remains as Farage proposes mass deportations. In addition to parliamentary reaction, we face a newborn fascism on the streets.

We now need both the shield and the sword. A shield to frustrate fascist organizing among those most susceptible to its message. And a sword to take on the oligarchs running our economy and politics and change the country in ways that Tommy Robinson and his allies will do everything to stop.