A walk with Unite the Kingdom

We asked our friend Joseph Gelfer at Our Fair Future to reflect on his experience of walking with (not participating in) the Unite the Kingdom march on Saturday. This piece is challenging but needed. It’s conscious of its author’s white British privilege to feel safe amongst such a crowd, while we grieve in outrage at other places across our nations and neighbourhoods, where Black and brown people are being attacked, raped, and living in fear at the rise in racism. We’ve gathered other perspectives below. The question is: How do we wrestle back the story of who we are as a people? As we’ve written about before, how do we do a Fred Hampton on the far-right? How do we resist the elites who profit from driving us apart by weaponising anger, to listen to those whose grievances are being recognised by the far-right and Reform, but whose problems might not be so different from our own? 

“Far-right London rally sees record crowds and violent clashes with police” reads a headline in The Guardian describing the Unite the Kingdom “Free Speech” rally organised by Tommy Robinson in London on 13 September. Stand Up to Racism organised a counter-protest, which historically I would have been inclined to attend.

On this occasion I chose to walk with Unite the Kingdom, not because I support Robinson, but because I wanted to experience for myself the mood among this group of people who are so frequently othered and demonised.

What follows is not an analysis of the various undercurrents at play in British culture and politics, nor a critical reading of the unquestionably inflammatory rhetoric of those people who spoke on stage. Instead, I offer a snapshot of the people I walked with and some provocations for “us” to interrogate who “us” really is.

“I’m British ‘til I die”

To the tune of “I’m H-A-P-P-Y”, the crowd sings, “I’m British ‘til I die, I’m British ‘til I die, I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m British ‘till I die”. A guy next door to me sounds an air horn, “honk honk, honk honk honk, honk honk honk honk”, to which everyone replies “England!” which causes the air horn guy to swoon with joy. Everyone is a mate in this vast jostling crowd: “excuse me, mate”, “alright, mate?”, “sorry, mate”.

Of course, I should state the obvious: as a 51 year-old white male I have the luxury of not standing out in this crowd. More than that, I am a particular type of 51 year-old white male who still has to some degree that council estate physicality inscribed upon the body, or what Bourdieu described as “hexis”.

When I open my mouth I have the same bad teeth – which I heard people in the crowd joking about: not mine, it should be said, but of the crowd in general – and a similar accent that enables me to pass (as long as I don’t start making references to Bourdieu). The point being, my experiences might have been different if I had looked different.

The crowd is disproportionately male (maybe 80%?) and in possession of a disproportionate number of atypical bodies: the obese, the cadaverous, the built-like-brick-shithouses, the severe haircuts. At the same time they seem to have a disproportionate amount of beautiful smiles and twinkling Irish eyes. “It’s mad, innit: a once in a lifetime thing”, says someone near me; “they say it’s scary”, says another, “but it’s not scary, it’s just ordinary working people”; “it’s a revolution”, says another.

“Keir Starmer’s a wanker”

Just as seen on the news, the march is a sea of flags, mostly St. George’s Crosses or Union Jacks, many of which have something written across the horizontal: “STOP THE BOATS”, “BRENTFORD”, “CITY OF BRISTOL”, “TERF ISLAND”. There are other flags: British counties, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republican of Ireland, Israel. “Where do you come from?” I hear someone ask a stranger among the flags. “We came from Bournemouth”. “Oh, it’s nice there, innit?” “Not any more, mate”.

Other flags have pictures of Donald Trump styled as Rambo with a machine gun, others reference the death of Charlie Kirk offering a new use for “JE SUIS CHARLIE”. Other flags claim that “JESUS LIVES”, a noticeable theme: some hold large wooden crosses, a preacher shouts at the passing crowd, “If you want your country back, come to the Lord”.

There is only one chant more popular in the crowd than “I’m British ‘till I die” and that’s “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” sung to the tune of The White Stripes’ Seven Army Nation. I think I agree and suspect you do too. How confident should we be that despite the fact that we all hate Starmer, that we hate him for different reasons, with “ours” being good and “theirs” being bad?

Of course, everything that we know about the historical, political and cultural context of this march is important and, to a large extent, true. But does that negate the ostensible claims of the signs that read “NOT FAR RIGHT. NOT RACIST” and the repeated conversations I overhear saying, “we’re not racist”? There are very few non-white faces in the crowd.

I walk briefly alongside a young black guy who appears to be on his own: someone walking past reaches out to shake his hand and says “welcome, brother” and they exchange pleasantries. I don’t want to whitewash this crowd – of course there are some nasty bastards in this scene – but I’m not seeing evidence of them at this moment.

“Show us a sign!”

There’s a surprising amount of self-aware humour in the crowd. We walk past a police van parked by the side of the street lined by four officers. A few guys start hassling them saying, “What are you doing? You can’t park ‘ere!” The police find it very funny. At one point we haven’t moved anywhere for a while and a woman ploughs through shouting that the reason we’re not moving is because there are migrants in a boat blocking the street. She turns around with a look on her face that makes it clear she’s joking.

Stuck in the middle of Westminster Bridge we experience a torrential downpour of rain, which, paradoxically, happens in blinding sunlight. One person shouts, “gotta love England!” which makes people laugh. Another person, no doubt referencing the preacher further back down the road, shouts to the sky, “God, if you’re with us, show us a sign: send us a rainbow!” More laughter.

But we’re still not moving anywhere. People start walking back across the bridge in the other direction, swimming against the tide of the crowd. There is talk that the exit to the bridge has been sealed off. The mood shifts quickly, faces become tense. “This is what they wanted,” says one guy; “they’re the ones looking for trouble’, says another; “tempting to think it’s a conspiracy,” says another; “they hate us”, says yet another. The many thousands of people stuck behind – past Waterloo, the BFI IMAX and down Stamford Street – become a gridlock of confusion with people trying to find alternate routes into the city, or simply giving up and going home early.

Unite with Unite the Kingdom?

Of course, I am sensitive to the lack of criticality in this account. It is not my intention to gloss over the “real” agenda of the event organisers or the people they put on the stage to whip up the crowd. Instead, I wanted to focus on the people in the crowd, or at least that tiny number of them who circumstance exposed me to over the course of the day.

In our conversations – and by “our” I mean the type of people probably reading this article – we spend most of the time demonising the kind of people on the Unite the Kingdom march; and of course, there is much to criticise. It is true that far-right organisers exist with well-financed supporters who enable such events. These bad actors don’t care about poor and marginalised people: they are using their discontent to further their own nefarious agenda. A small-but-increasing number of us have understood that this is no longer good enough to simply point out such problems and that we have to do better at understanding, reaching out and building trust with “them”; but in reality, very few of us do anything about this.

As we stood in the rain on Westminster Bridge, looking at the Houses of Parliament and  listening to the refrain of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”, it was hard not to think that we were all in it together, both those of us at the Unite the Kingdom march and those on the other side of the police cordon from Stand Up to Racism – at least as far as opposition to the Government is concerned.

On various occasions throughout the day I heard people say in relation to the ability of the police to contain them if things kicked off, something like, “they’d have no chance”, alluding to the precarious nature of the power of the state. This crowd is an army of people that could impose not just political but literal force if it chose: it is not hard to imagine how together we could take over first via the ballot box but also physically resist any state-backed attempts to undermine our success.

Assumptions

Back at Waterloo I’m about to step onto a Northern Line train. “Excuse me, mate, does this train go to Euston?”, some ordinary-looking guy asks me. “It does indeed,” I say. We get on the train and he says, “how was your day, mate?” “Frustrating,” I say, “I got stuck on a bridge in the rain”. “Me, too! I came to support Tommy, but I’m not interested in any trouble,” he says, making a gesture with his hand to indicate people drinking.

Are we to assume that this guy is a far-right racist? Or is he simply discontented with the political status quo – not unlike you and me – but Tommy happens to be the loudest person offering an alternative in his world?

When the person on the bridge said “they hate us”, he wasn’t wrong: the elites DO hate us, both those “far-right thugs” on the bridge and the “far-left thugs” in the counter-protest: to the elites we are all plebs who have failed to make a success of our lives and who they want out of the way. Why do we not fight back together? Of course, it’s not as simple as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and racism is real, but surely there is enough common ground between us to start doing a better job of talking, attempting to resolve “our” differences and taking this country back for ALL us ordinary people?

From the AI crew: We have also, like many, been reading the responses to the Unite the Kingdom march and the racism, provocations, and political sabotage platformed there. Some we felt essential were:

• Who is organising poor white folks towards liberation? Amahra Spence.
• Empire state of denial, parts 1-3, by Lee Jasper.
• From Clive Lewis MP: his old school friend who was also on the march, here.
• The Open Letter calling out the far-right’s blatant and sordid manipulation of women’s safety (when so many of the protesters at last year’s summer riots, for example, have criminal convictions for domestic abuse) organised by Women Against the Far Right.
• A LinkedIn post on meeting UTK protesters on the train, by Dr Asad Raffi. 
• Islamic organisation Maslaha’s resource for talking about the march in schools and with children, here.
• Robinson and Farage’s civil war, by John Harris.
• And critical background from Liam Byrne, Hope Not Hate, and speeches from Saturday from Women Against Fascism.

Elsewhere in Absurdity...

We are of course both recovering from and planning what comes next after our Convention on the Fate of Britain, which was a triumph and a joy, 180-odd people at Conway Hall coming together to connect, build trust, and figure out some of how we tackle the issues raised in Joseph’s piece above. But elsewhere...

• Daze did venture over the weekend to Sligo, accompanying our great friend and non-posh Londoner Andy Green to ConversationFest.
• Clive has been busy installing the The Right To Protest, a timely, unmissable exhibition that shows how art and design can drive real change. Opening this Thursday 18 September for an UnPrivate View, at 10 Greatorex Street, London E1 5NF, more info about the exhibition here.
• And finally most of our crew will be joining thousands of others at the also unmissable, and more than timely, Together for Palestine at Wembley this Wednesday (today!), organised by our dear friends Brian Eno, Tracey Seaward, Jo Rendle and many others. If you do not have a ticket you can watch the livestream.