I was unable to attend and personally document the massive Unite The Kingdom march organised by Tommy Robinson due to family commitments and duties that I had which clashed with this event. I had to console myself with watching this event online but I wanted to put down in writing some of my thoughts of this event.
I’ve attended several of Mr Robinson’s demonstrations and in particular some of his free speech promotion events but this was clearly much much bigger than any of Mr Robinson’s events that he’s held before. I’m not sure I believe Mr Robinson’s claim of three million attendees, but then as an old demonstration and public order journalism hand I tend not to believe any attendance figures demonstration organisers give out, no matter what the cause behind the demonstration. I also tend not to believe attendance figures given out by the police either and take the view that the true attendance figures at demonstrations normally fall somewhere between the claimed organiser figures and police figures.
I would guess based on the drone and helicopter video footage of Mr Robinson’s demonstration that attendance was somewhere in the 500 to 750k area or maybe slightly higher maybe even a million. That’s less than the organisers estimate and claims but still extremely impressive for a cause that is consistently monstered by the MSM and the UK political classes. Estimating crowd size is difficult and is a non-exact science but it’s clear from some reports that the Metropolitan Police were taken aback by the larger than expected size of this demonstration. We can see that the Met panicked about the size of the demonstration when they could not fit it in the area prescribed and it spread into other streets and therefore got closer to the Communist opposition demonstration where there was a clash which resulted in arrests. However on the subject of these arrests it appears to be the case that the majority of those arrested were not associated with Mr Robinson’s demonstration but were those who were attending the left wing counter demonstration. The figures I’ve seen bandied about from both the police and others state that there were 28 arrests with 18 of these arrests being of Communists who were opposing Mr Robinson’s demonstration. Bearing in mind the large size of this demonstration this was a remarkably low level of arrests of Mr Robinson’s attendees. Lots of demonstrations that I’ve attended whether they be held under the auspices of either the Left or the Right have attendees who end up being arrested for public order offences or for basically being arseholes, arrests of this sort go with the demonstration territory but there was an extremely low number of Mr Robinson’s supporters who were arrested.
The general peaceable nature of Mr Robinson’s demonstration might be due to the type of people who were attending. The bulk of those attending were normal everyday Britons of all creeds and colours and people who are generally law abiding. These were not the highly motivated activists who see themselves as ‘freedom fighters’ and are therefore willing to engage in violence for their cause, but the sort of reasonable ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ types who are not people with their heads stuffed full of ideology. Mr Robinson and his team also need to take some credit for the conduct of the crowds who turned up to demonstrate as he consistently and constantly told his supporters prior to the event that there were rules that those who attended needed to follow and these rules included no violence, no masks and no booze. The no booze exhortation might have been ignored but the other rules were from what I could see mostly obeyed.
As someone who has attended either as a participant or as a documentary photographer many many demonstrations I have been trying to work out what Mr Robinson’s demo compares to. The only thing that immediately comes to mind is the big 2003 anti Iraq war demonstration that took place in London in February of that year. That demo was I believe much bigger than Mr Robinson’s demonstration with at least one million attendees, or maybe more, at this event. Another similarity between Mr Robinson’s demonstration and the 2003 one was the nature of the attendees. Like Mr Robinson’s demo the 2003 demo was not primarily made up of politically motivated activists but normal ordinary people. Another similarity with the 2003 demo against the Iraq war was that it will probably not have any direct impact on the issues that people were marching about but might have other effects. The 2003 demo did not stop the Iraq War, it went ahead anyway and neither will Mr Robinson’s demo directly stop Britain’s immigration disaster. What both these demos did and in Mr Robinson’s demo will likely do, is have indirect effects. The 2003 demo got people who would otherwise have not been willing to get involved in left wing politics decide to do so. Long time left wing firebrand Tariq Ali said that the Iraq War demos achieved nothing but Marxist activist Seamus Milne disagreed and said in 2012: "So if people imagine one demonstration is going to change everything of course that's wrong, but demos, protests, social organisation, trade union organisation, political organisation – all these things are part of the process by which things are going to shift." I’m about as far as possible from sharing Mr Milne’s political views but I agree with him on this. The 2003 demo did indeed funnel a whole lot more people into left wing political activism and I would venture to say that there are probably many people involved in left wing causes today who got involved in these causes because of the 2003 demo.
I suspect that a similar thing will happen after Mr Robinson’s demonstration. There will be a whole host of those who attended this demonstration who will have made links with others at this demo that they might not have made if it had not gone ahead. People will have been exposed to new ideas, different ways of approaching our current problems and will have heard first hand accounts of migration and multiculturalist related problems that their families and areas had suffered from. The attendees, especially the first time demonstration attenders, will also have realised from the discussions that must have gone on amongst the crowd, that whatever problems they suffer from, others do too. It also exposed attendees to Mr Robinson’s particular brand of nationalist politics that is neither overtly racialist in nature nor steeped in the sort of Hitlerian Jew hatred that characterised the sort of far rightists that I and my friends marched against in the 1980’s.
It’s quite possible that those who attended Mr Robinson’s demonstration will carry back to their home towns whatever it is they’ve learned by attending. They might be now more inclined to set up local campaign groups, monitor what might be seen as undue Islamic influence on local councils and police forces, take part in local demonstrations against invaders in HMO’s and hotels, keep a closer eye on the far left and much more.
Just as with the 2003 anti Iraq War demo and the 1968 anti-Vietnam War demonstration in London’s Grosvenor Square (where student protestors faced extreme violence from the Met Police which poisoned views of the Met for a long time on the Left) Mr Robinson’s demonstration might have far reaching consequences and influences that I find it almost impossible to properly predict. It could, for example, create new ‘affinity groups’ of Britons who will now be more political and not as apolitical as they were in the past. We could be seeing the beginnings of a right or centre right grouping that is unashamably patriotic and much more willing than before to speak out about Britain’s current problems and speak against government and media narratives. I disagree with those on the Right who say that this demonstration will eventually mean nothing as we don’t know where those enthused by this demonstration will end up politically. It could have a massive effect or it could have little. I don’t know where Mr Robinson’s campaign is going to end up but it’s certainly going to push the Overton Window to wards the migration and Islam sceptic political right and that is going to end up being a future serious political problem for the mainstream political parties and their leaderships. For someone like Mr Robinson to get so many people out on the streets and then to have the demonstration go off relatively peacefully and attract a whole load of people who would never in a million years have seen themselves as any sort of protestor is a massive achievement. I’ve seen the British right and British Islam and multiculturalism sceptic groups have various demonstrations over the years, some successful and some very much not so successful and for very good reasons, but out of all of them Mr Robinson has the greatest achievement with the demonstrations that he and his team have organised. This is because he and his organisation has motivated those who might not previously have had the motivation to turn out for a demonstration like this. What’s even better is that this demonstration was so well attended by ordinary Britons that these numbers have drowned out the extremists, nutcases and tin foil hat fraggles that any demonstration no matter what its primary cause attracts. The world can see that Mr Robinson put on a demo that attracted a large number of what could be called ‘normies’ and that is not just testament to Mr Robinson’s ability to feel the pulse of the broader nation rather than the denizens of SW1 but also shows there is a cohort of Britons that the political classes need to start listening to.