The ironically named “Unite the Kingdom” march – it was much more about fomenting division and hatred – numbered somewhere between 110,000 and 150,000 participants, far lower than the organisers and their acolytes have since claimed, with figures running into the millions. In fact, the inchoate protests were roughly one tenth the size of the largest ever march in the UK, against the Iraq war in 2003, a fraction of the pre-Brexit Remain demonstrations, and smaller than some of the Palestinian Solidarity marches in recent years.
Nonetheless it was a significant event, and a sinister one. The fact that so many people turned out for it, many who would not regard themselves as extremists, should worry everyone who wants to preserve Britain’s peaceful and tolerant multicultural society and defend its free and democratic traditions. As the Sky News commentator Sir Trevor Phillips pointed out, it was not something that Sir Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch could pull off anytime soon. Perhaps not even Nigel Farage, the great charlatan himself, studiously avoiding the event, could inspire such a crowd. It was far more substantial than anything the British National Party or the National Front could muster years ago, and the attendees could not all be dismissed as “knuckle-dragging thugs”, as they often are. It is not patronising to say they presented as more “normal” than the kind of past generations of neo-fascists on the far right who used to dress up in German Second World War uniforms and go on retreats in the Welsh mountains plotting an improbable British putsch. That is why this larger modern iteration of populist nationalism is so pernicious.
