No, Unite the Right was not about women’s safety

It’s tedious, is what it is. It’s tedious to have to point it out when it’s so obvious. There is, sometimes, joy and glory to be found in unearthing inconsistencies in an intellectual opponent; undermining them by sussing out any hypocrisies they would have preferred to ignore. There is little pleasure in saying what follows, however, as so much of it could be seen from space. Still, we do as we must, and sometimes we have to call things out so that the record is set straight.

In this case, the point is: no, the people who marched through London last Saturday, led by Tommy Robinson on his Unite The Right march, do not care about women’s safety. Some of them may say that they do, and they may tell journalists and social media that they “only” oppose immigration on feminist grounds, but they don’t mean it.

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They’re not the only ones. Anyone on the hard and far right who pretends to care about sexual violence only cares about it when the victim is white and female and the perpetrator is black or brown and male. They use patriarchal violence as a tool with which to argue for their preferred worldview, which is that Britain should close its borders and, in extreme cases, even repatriate some of the immigrants who have settled here.

They don’t even do a good job of hiding it well. On that march in the capital, a woman filming was told to “get [her] tits out for the lads” by a series of blokes looking like uncracked boiled eggs someone had painted red. Not very feminist of the women defenders, is it?

Earlier this year, the Guardian pored over police data and found something which should have felt surprising but didn’t. Of the 899 people arrested during the racist riots of summer 2024, 41% had previously been reported for “crimes associated with intimate partner violence”. They included “bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint and non-molestation orders, controlling coercive behaviour and criminal damage”. Someone resurrect Emmeline Pankhurst to tell her we’ve finally found some worthy successors!

Of course, the same rank hypocrisy can be found a few rungs away from Tommy Robinson’s outfit, over at Reform UK. Several of the party’s female politicians launched Women for Reform last month, an initiative allegedly focusing on the safety and security of women. Really, it begged the question – safety and security from whom?

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After all, “Farage’s fillies”, as they call themselves, are happy to be representative of a party which elected James McMurdock in 2024 – a man once convicted for assaulting his ex-girlfriend. He received a custodial sentence for having kicked the victim “around four times”. When Reform was asked about it, a spokesperson said they knew about the conviction but still let McMurdock stand. Again: exactly who are they trying to keep women safe from?

There are two ways you can think about this particular vein of cognitive dissonance. The first is to point out that there is a rich history of racism being enabled by invoking the sanctity of white women. Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955 is an especially poignant example, though far from the only one. The intersection of racial and gender politics can lead to noxious results.

The second is to realise that the inconsistency doesn’t matter. Obviously, you may enjoy looking at A then pointing at B and saying “hah! surely anyone with half a brain can see this doesn’t work!” but ultimately it won’t change anything. People do not get their minds changed by having it explained to them that the thing they care about isn’t entirely coherent. The populist right can keep being disingenuous and keep winning; that’s part of their plan. Arguably, it’s what they do best.

One of the reasons why it works so well is that it puts people like us in a bind. What should we do about such blatant hypocrisy? The urge is to fight back by pointing it out, but isn’t it our own time we’re wasting? They don’t care, and neither do their supporters. If, however, we decide to let it slide, for exactly those reasons, then aren’t we surrendering something quite fundamental to some of the worst people alive?

In truth, there doesn’t seem to be a real answer to this. Both reactions are correct and neither is. It’s infuriating and there isn’t really anything we can do about it. What times we live in.