With something in the region of 150,000 people attending, the Unite the Kingdom march on the September 13, 2025, was probably the biggest street mobilisation of the extreme right in British history. It was the initiative of Tommy Robinson, one time founder of the English Defence League (EDL) and former member of the British National Party, who now casts himself as a “citizen journalist,” championing “free speech” and lamenting “open border mass Islamic immigration.” Robinson has built a movement around his supposed “martyr” status as an imprisoned criminal. His most recent prison time for contempt of court arose from his refusal to comply with a court order following his defeat in a trial for libelling a 15-year-old Syrian refugee.

After he left the EDL in 2013 claiming he was on a path to moderation, Robinson had looked like a spent force. But his career was resurrected with the backing of America’s far right super rich. Funding from US tech billionaire Robert Shillman and the media platform Rebel News would make Robinson a leading light in the so-called “counter jihad” movement in Europe and North America. But it was the support of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, that has transformed the reach of Britain’s far right street movements across 2025.

Musk addressed the rally in a 20-minute interview with Robinson, in which he openly called for a violent revolution. “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” he told the crowd. Under Musk’s ownership, Robinson has been welcomed back to Twitter/X, and the platform has actively driven audiences to his and other extreme right accounts. The big US digital platforms have also shifted their content moderation policy under pressure of the White House, leading to the re-platforming of the far right. This supported a summer of street mobilisation, combining terrorising asylum seekers staying in temporary hotel accommodation and the more innocuous activity of covering towns with English and British flags. The mass march brought this activity together and gave a stark illustration of Britain’s growing problem with far right indeed extreme nationalism.

Global MAGA: The Transnational Extreme Right Fly to London  

Many journalists and anti-racist counter protestors remarked on the “ordinariness” of the marchers, going well beyond the usual cohort of hardened far-right figures. But despite drawing in such a sizeable audience there was little sign of dissent from the crowd to the hardline rhetoric coming from the top table.

Speakers repeatedly linked Islam and immigration to paedophilia and other touchstone far right conspiracies. Filip Dewinter, the Flemish nationalist, summed up this extreme mood when he said, “Islam is our real enemy. You have to get rid of Islam.” Eva Vlaardingerbroek, the Dutch far right influencer, got a rapturous response calling on onlookers to summon the spirit of St George and “slay the dragon residing at No. 10 Downing Street.” And Dominik Tarczyński from Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS), one of the more senior politicians present, led the crowd in chants of “send them back.” Germany was represented by Petr Bystron of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), who in May was stripped of immunity by the European Parliament amid an investigating over alleged Russian bribes.

Current Issue

October 2025 Issue

Mixed in with this assembly of the world’s most infamous demagogues and fascists there was also bizarre and sect-like religiosity on display. For Brian Tamaki, who was joined by around 40 supporters on stage from New Zealand who performed a rendition of the Haka, the goal seemed to be the creation of a transnational white ethnostate based on Pentecostal Christianity, led by the United States and joined by Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia – and not therefore nationalism as such. He even appeared to argue at one point that the British monarchy—no doubt a sacred institution to many marchers—had to go in order to deliver on this messianic vision. This among other wild and wacky statements signified the emergence of a British MAGA, openly patronised by some of the world’s richest people.

While in principle the presence of these elements could undermine the appeal of this new far right bloc to right wing inclined voters, the MAGA movement has shown that voters can tolerate any number of issues and practices they disagree with on their “own side,” when they believe that the threat coming from their political enemies is greater. By concocting an existential danger facing white Britons, women, children, etc., coming from so-called Islamisation and mass immigration, the same logic can then underpin support for attacks on democratic institutions when they are cast as part of this conspiracy against “the people.”

Britain’s Dangerous Road Ahead

There was one notable absence from the Unite the Kingdom proceedings: Nigel Farage. He has been careful to keep his distance from Robinson and even left the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), when it allowed the EDL founder into membership in 2018. But Farage has juggled this with giving soft support to the wave of far-right street protests. With his new party, Reform, ascendent in opinion polls over a deeply unpopular Labour government, the mass march gives further impetus to the agenda-setting power of these forces. And encourages the fatalistic sentiment that Reform is on an “inevitable” march to power.

In truth, there is not a great deal separating Robinson and Farage politically. Both identify with Trump and the MAGA movement and both are integrated into the same transnational far right media, funding and information networks. Reform has promised a militarised campaign of deportations on a Trump-like scale upon taking power targeting ethnic minority communities and requiring the ripping up of Britain’s human rights protections. Farage has made the exit from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) the “first thing he would do as Prime Minister.” Reform’s unusual party structure ominously provides an indication of how the party would govern. It provides for no accountability with power concentrated entirely in the hands of Farage and his close allies. 

Political scientists traditionally distinguish between the extreme and far right. The former are explicitly anti-democratic; the latter are radically nationalistic and conservative but still within a democratic framework. These distinctions are however increasingly blurred in the 21st century. And it would be naive to imagine that the rules, rights and freedoms that underpin competitive democracy would survive a Reform government intact. This would be a British Trumpism writ large, backed by some of the same oligarchs but with even fewer constitutional constraints on its power. 

There is still a large democratic majority standing against both Farage and Robinson. More in Common polling found that just 12 percent of Britons have a positive view of Robinson, rising to 28 percent for Farage. Some 45 percent have a negative view of Farage, and 46 percent for Robinson. This democratic camp is however bitterly divided and politically fragmented. The Conservatives long ago abandoned any semblance of a cordon sanitaire and senior figures now discuss an alliance or even merger with Reform to stave off electoral oblivion. Facing seemingly endless personal scandals and well behind Reform in the polls, the Labour Government has allowed the far right to set the agenda, echoing its messaging on irregular migrant crossings in small boats across the English Channel. As one journalist astutely put it, they are “unable to either stop the boats, or escape talking about them.”

There is little in Labour’s narrative to give hope or voice to the democratic majority. On the left, there are, in effect, three leaders competing to play this role. Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are engaged in a fierce faction fight that seems likely to end in a split before their new party is even launched. This is likely to favour the Green Party’s new dynamic leader, Zack Polanski, who has set himself the gargantuan task of going after Reform and Labour voters with a class-based message quite different to the traditional Green style. 

One Crisis Away from Weimar?

Amid all this political fragmentation and an insurgent oligarch-backed far right it is hard to avoid the grim sense that Britain is one crisis away from a Weimar-like breakdown. While there is a novelty to the current moment that defies historical analogy, when the historian Eric Hobsbawm described Germany’s interwar catastrophe as driven by “ruling mechanisms that could no longer function… [and] a mass of disenchanted, disorientated and discontented citizens who no longer knew where their loyalties lay,” the parallel with a politically polarised polity losing faith in its democratic institutions is rather unmistakable. Britain’s winner-takes-all unproportional electoral system could easily turn out a freak result that gifted Reform a large parliamentary majority with just 30 percent of the vote or less. With no codified constitution and Parliament entirely sovereign to legislate as it wishes, a far-right government would face scarcely any constraints. Despite the election still being years away (potentially as late as 2029), the window to avert this scenario now seems increasingly small.

Starting with a baseline of around 1 in 4 voters that approve of Farage, the problem is that Reform do not need to persuade many more voters in their positive alternative but only that they are the lesser evil to the fractured parties of the liberal left. This makes unity around a progressive agenda critical and urgent. Responsibility in the end lies with the Labour Government to use the instruments of power to tackle Britain’s many, deeply engrained problems and restore confidence in its democratic institutions. With its popularity having declined so sharply among the general public even the normally loyal parliamentary Labour Party is now quietly looking around for new leadership, potentially under one of their few remaining popular politicians, the Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, to play this role.

But several obstacles stand in Burnham’s path—not least the problem of having to orchestrate and then win a parliamentary by-election to return to the national parliament. Despite the risks, which also include having to defeat the opposition of the incumbent leadership, and the enormity of the stakes, this now looks like the most credible option available to avert the election of a Reform government. Only under such new leadership will Labour be able to strike the informal alliance with democratic and liberal forces needed to face down and delegitimise the far-right threat, combining a progressive economic agenda that has broad support—including among Reform voters—with a robust and strident anti-racism.  Warnings about British democracy have been sounded before—and the country has indeed faced decades of illiberal development under both centre-right and centre-left governments (with the recent proscription of a pro-Palestine civil disobedience organisation a particular nadir and being challenged in the courts). But the threat from the new oligarch-backed British MAGA is on a dramatically different scale. The question now is whether the broad left can rise to meet this moment of genuine peril with the unity and vision it demands.