How to deal with Tommy Robinson’s far right mob

Almost everybody was wearing a flag – the St George Cross or the Union Jack – many with slogans emblazoned. Two men from the “Anti-Terror Alliance” carried a banner saying “Deport all Illegals”.

Some people carried wooden crosses. A small contingent of veteran soldiers in berets held aloft the flag of the Queen’s Regiment.

The chants were not sophisticated: “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”, “Stop the Boats”, “I’m England till I die” and “Oh Tommy Tommy…” And there were very few home-made placards: because what these people think, they know is legally unsayable in public. They want to return Britain to being a white monoculture through deporting not just asylum seekers but black and brown British citizens.

Their only problem is, there is nobody who will do it for them and they are too timid and disorganised to do it themselves.

I’ve been undercover on many fascist demos and while the scariest thing about this one was the size – 110,000, according to the Met – one consolation was the absolute atomisation and disorganisation of most of the people there. 

I watched one dad, dressed in a white shirt and union flag tie, arrive with his young kids and wife. They had no idea where to go, what to do, or what was really happening. They – like I suspect the vast majority – had been mobilised via social media: they didn’t know anyone else, and had no experience of what going on a demonstration actually entails. 

That explains why, once the march reached Parliament Square, many simply drifted away to the railway stations without listening to Robinson and the bizarre group of religious leaders backing him. 

We’ve known since the European Parliament elections of 2009, when 800,000 people voted for the BNP, that there is a hard core of explicit racists prepared to vote for any fascist formation that looks credible, and to respond to its calls for action. 

But what British fascism has continually failed to do is organise those people into a movement. And though the demo was big, I think it is still failing. Because to be an organised fascist needs something many of the people on this march did not have: self-discipline and the capacity to absorb abstract ideas.

I do not think a single person on that march is capable of being won over to voting for the left, or the centre. These were people from the extreme east of London and from the small-town suburban Home Counties, with a fair smattering from the West Midlands and, from the flags, a noticeable number of Ulster Loyalists. They were using our country’s flag as a badge of white identity and throwing more council housing at them won’t make them any less racist.

My guess is that, though Reform is attracting former Labour voters, these were not them. Their levels of casual and explicit racism were extreme. 

But having turned up and chanted the name of a convicted racist criminal, they didn’t really know what to do next. If they vote, most will vote Reform – so this counts as the radicalised mass base of Reform and the Tory right.

But unless our democracy cracks, they have no way of achieving their goal, which is to ethnically cleanse Britain of Muslims, Pakistanis and “illegals” who, in their minds, form an agglomerated enemy. Here’s how I think we have to respond to this threat. 

First, tough and intelligent policing. By kettling the marchers in their assembly point for two hours the Met left most of them too exhausted to be aggressive. By the time it actually started, many of the participants were at that stage of drunkenness where you just want to lie in bed.

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Second, by maintaining all the defences erected in public and corporate life against this hard core of racists being able to express what they believe. They called it a “free speech march” for a reason: saying you think “all P*kis are paedophiles” in a workplace is a recipe for getting the sack – and as Lucy Connolly found out, inciting mass murder is still a jailable offence in this country.

Third, by matching the extreme right’s weak, viral and chaotic mobilisations with a strong, organised and purposeful politics of the centre and the left. Democratic resilience will leave them flummoxed, because they have been whipped up to a state where they believe some kind of white revolution is imminent, and when it doesn’t happen a lot of them will get bored.

Hannah Arendt described fascism as the temporary alliance of the elite and the mob – but the interesting thing about this march was the absence of the elite. They were there in spirit; somebody paid for the security and the stage; but the only celebrities I saw marching arm in arm with Robinson were Katie Hopkins, and a few feet away, Laurence Fox.

Fourth, by not giving an inch in defence of the multi-ethnic nature of Britain as a polity. The Labour government can, and should, work hard to reduce irregular migration and get those claiming asylum out of hotels. And reducing legal economic migration, at a time when pressure on housing and services is high, is a legitimate aim. 

But we must be proud of the multi-ethnic and multinational state we have created, and be prepared to defend it as an ethical concept, and can find common ground with sections of the conservative right in doing so.

Finally, the government needs to get on the front foot with the politics and narratives of hope. I wish some of the Labour backbenchers who’ve been whispering against Keir Starmer could have seen the vitriolic hatred directed at him on Saturday. 

As a human rights lawyer he is the personification of everything they despise. They hate him because he is the avatar of the tolerant, progressive country they want to smash.