It was the largest far-right march in British history. The police estimated over a hundred thousand in attendance at the protest led by Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins and Laurence Fox — but even that’s likely an underestimate.
It was broad, too, for all the drunk thugs, and the very online obsessions of those wearing Crusader costumes or yelling the ‘Christ is King’ slogan popular among Groyper Nazis. Many of those attending wouldn’t think of themselves as far-right, and some of them brought their children. But the message they were getting was fascist.
Alongside speakers who called for the banning of mosques and all non-Christian religions, Elon Musk addressed the crowd through a video connection. He called for the dissolution of parliament and a ‘revolutionary’ change of government. He said: ‘violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.’
Cashing in on anti-migrant policies
How did that happen? Although the killing of American influencer Charlie Kirk probably boosted turnout, what’s really been driving this is a nationwide campaign of agitation against refugees and immigrants. After last year’s pogroms against Muslims and refugees, one might have expected a move at Westminster to damp down the antagonism against the country’s minorities. To the contrary.
The government, the opposition and the press — after a law and order crackdown and a hymning of true ‘British values’ — resumed and accelerated normal business. The result is that Tommy Robinson cleans up on the streets, and Nigel Farage cashes in at the ballot box: such is the division of labour in the British far-right.
Consider. Less than a year after the racist riots triggered by disinformation around the Southport stabbings, Keir Starmer said in his Powellite ‘island of strangers’ speech that high net migration had caused ‘incalculable’ damage to British society. Amid far-right protests outside hotels housing refugees this July, Downing Street said Britain was ‘fraying at the edges’, and the now-departed Angela Rayner stressed the need to address ‘real concerns’ about migration. Treasury minister James Murray stressed his empathy with the racist protesters: ‘we’re frustrated too’.
This panic about migration tearing the social fabric was identical to one being peddled by Farage, leader of Reform. We are ‘close to civil disobedience on a vast scale’ over immigration, he claimed. Of course, Farage has been threatening violence and civil breakdown for years. It’s clear what he wants. It’s less clear what Labour wants.
Last month, when Farage spoke of deporting 600,000 asylum seekers to Iran and Afghanistan, Starmer pointedly refused to criticise him. Not for the first time: last year, when Farage pushed conspiracy theories that contributed to the racist riots, Starmer stiffly said he wouldn’t comment on the ‘words of others’.
So they amplify Farage’s talking points, won’t criticise him on immigration, and simper at the far-right on the streets. The effect, says political scientist Rob Ford, is to have driven immigration up the agenda and cut Labour support ‘without gaining any voters back from Reform’. But this is so obvious the government can hardly have missed it. Why, then, do they persist?
A mobilised far-right
We need to put this in the perspective of the last five years. Since 2020, the Tories started cramming tens of thousands of refugees into poky hotel accommodation. They gave them £8.24 a week to spend. At the same time, they launched a culture war against small refugee boats arriving in the UK, falsely claiming most arrivals were not ‘real’ refugees, and that they brought crime and alien values.
This handed fascist groups, like Britain First and Patriotic Alternative, both a propaganda coup and an easy target. They began leafleting, protesting and staging hotel invasions. They marched on Dover to intimidate arriving refugees.
In a less organised way, growing numbers of people were involved in racist hate crimes: the number increased every year since 2013. In 2022, a lone wolf attacker firebombed Dover in an attempt to ‘obliterate Muslim children’, before killing himself. The following year, there was a spontaneous riot at an asylum hotel in Knowsley, after footage went viral allegedly showing a man chatting up a fifteen year old girl.
The Tories, having swerved hard to the right since the Brexit vote, were creating the conditions for racist violence. Their motive was clear. They were adrift, lacking a coherent national agenda capable of summoning widespread support. They were in constant danger of haemorrhaging votes to Farage’s various political vehicles — Ukip, then the Brexit Party, now Reform.
Briefly strengthened by the Brexit vote, after 2020 they had little to offer. They relied on constant culture wars, the theatre of cruelty, to soak up popular attention while their leadership disintegrated. It didn’t work: in the 2024 general election, the Tories held onto just over half of their vote, with a quarter going to Reform.
So, when and why did Labour begin emulating Farage on immigration? A surprisingly long time ago, during Ed Miliband’s leadership. Farage, leading a party with no MPs, became a national figure in this era. The media, having decided that a revolt of the ‘white working-class’ was the next big thing, gave him unprecedented coverage for such a minor figure, contributing to Ukip’s electoral growth.
Ukip also benefited from racist panic over grooming gangs, which The Times disingenuously presented as a Muslim problem. Farage began a steady drumbeat over immigration, hoping to use grooming gangs to win votes in northern towns. Labour, he said, had sacrificed the ‘innocence of children’ on the ‘altar of multiculturalism’.
Labour’s instinct was to cave. There was already an influential Blue Labour faction who wanted to swerve right on immigration, the family and the flag. Its doyen, Lord Glasman, had even suggested that Labour should reach out to supporters of the far-right street gang, the English Defence League. Miliband attacked the previous Labour government from the right on immigration. Labour promised a crackdown on migrants to woo Ukip-curious voters, and suggested renegotiating the treaty with Europe to end free movement.
They couldn’t stop talking up Ukip: it was an ‘existential threat’. Farage, said Labour MP Simon Danczuk, was the ‘politician of 2014’ whom Labour must listen to. They even hired a Ukip ‘data guru’, and issued a strategy document telling campaigners to emphasise how immigration put pressure on services. All this while Farage raised the temperature by vituperating against ‘foreigners with HIV’ and calling Romanians criminals.
Validating Reform
There was no ‘existential’ threat. Farage wanted people to think that Ukip was ‘parking its tanks on Labour’s lawns’, and the media believed him. For instance, they thought that Rotherham might go Ukip on the back of grooming gangs. It didn’t come close. Ukip gained votes (mostly from the BNP and the Conservatives), but Labour’s vote share increased. Ukip’s only two MPs were Tory defectors.
All Labour achieved by pandering to Ukip in that era was electoral defeat. They alienated their own base and failed to win over the Ukip-curious.
This is the model of political success — amplifying the issues of the Right and imitating their rhetoric — that Starmer has adopted wholesale. In opposition, he began his leadership by ruling out any return to free movement between Britain and the EU and promising to smash the ‘gangs’ smuggling people to the UK.
Playing into Tory panic-mongering over ‘small boats’, they vaunted a ‘five point plan’ to stop crossings. Increasingly, they tried to outflank the Tories to the right by condemning them over small boat arrivals, and accusing them of running an ‘open borders’ regime, with a ‘Travelodge amnesty’ for asylum seekers branded as illegal immigrants.
Starmer tried to sound tough by promising a new Border Security Command that would make the country ‘hostile territory’ for people smugglers. Farage said that he wanted the 2024 general election to be about immigration: Labour seemed determined to make that happen.
After the election, in which Reform gained four million votes and five seats (all from the Conservatives and four in traditional Tory constituencies), Labour pivoted even more strongly to immigration. Starmer’s advisor, right-wing hatchet-man Morgan McSweeney, told Labour MPs they had to talk about immigration or lose to Reform. Internal briefings now advise Labour on how to talk tough on immigration to beat Reform.
As we’ve seen, this is a complete failure. In fact, it’s much worse: it turns Reform into the existential threat that Ukip never was. Look at the by election at Runcorn and Helsby, Labour candidate Karen Shore tried to run on a Farage-lite agenda: here big idea was a Facebook petition to close the ‘asylum hotel’. The result was a collapse in turnout among Labour voters, handing the seat to Reform.
By talking up right-wing organising issues, Labour demoralises its base and validates Reform. It can only court disaster — but that won’t stop Labour.
What is the logic here? Any party as committed to the status quo as Labour is, is likely to start inveighing against immigration. Labour went into the last election with little to say about the major issues, like the cost-of-living crisis, that had damaged the Tories. It has wasted the last year on unpopular cuts to winter fuel payments and benefits.
Immigration and flag-waving is their single claim to populist authenticity — even if no one buys it. But it’s worse than that. Labour wants Reform to do well, because they want the next election to be a clear contest between Labour and Reform.
We’ve seen a similar strategy before. In the US, Democrats wanted Trump to win the Republican nomination in 2016 because they thought they could beat him. In France, Emmanuel Macron has won two presidential elections by ensuring a run-off against Marine Le Pen, while presenting Le Pen as ‘soft’ on Islamists and launching inquisitions into ‘Islamo-leftism’.
This, flooding the zone with racist paranoia, may be reckless and vile. But it’s a great strategy for the political centre when they have nothing positive to offer because it excludes the left and presents voters with a blackmail: vote for us or get the far-right. The problem is, quite often you get the far-right.
Richard Seymour is a London-based writer, a founding editor of Salvage, and the author of Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (Verso, 2024).
Follow Richard on Twitter/X: @leninology
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.