It is fashionable – on both the right and on the left – to preach impending societal collapse. Last summer, the French newspaper Le Figaro described a “whiff of civil war” in the air in Britain. Elon Musk went a step further, suggesting civil war “was inevitable”. Through an unsustainable combination of low growth, poor infrastructure and high immigration, the right in Britain, Ireland and America see a powder keg.
Meanwhile, the left looks on and sees a world recaptured by racists and people they glibly refer to as fascists. They see the mainstreaming of Nigel Farage and wonder if Britain is heading further to the right of him. They watch Maga run amok in America, so much worse in Donald Trump’s second term than his first, and wonder if that energy – with the ICE raids and disregard for tradition – is setting the broader weather. These are cross-border feelings, fomented on social media channels that have little concern for the peculiarities of each nation state.
All of these lingering tensions found their way to central London last Saturday, as upwards of 150,000 people came out for the Unite the Kingdom march organised by far-right activist and ambulant thug Tommy Robinson. The protest, march, demonstration, p**s-up or bender – whatever you might want to call it – started south of the river and wandered towards the Houses of Parliament, where Robinson and Elon Musk (via video link) addressed the crowd.
Musk suggested that it was time to overthrow the government. There were Union Jacks and St George’s crosses everywhere. “Whose streets? Our streets,” was a chant of preference by protesters. As the day went on, things descended into even uglier invocations of Hitler and the Nazis.
Trump delivers Maga rebuke to world with familiar litany of boasts and chastisements
Traitors Ireland: ‘Poetic justice’ say the winners, but will the show be back on RTÉ?
Maria Steen, opponent of marriage equality and abortion, championed as a symbol of choice
Big Mike’s restaurant in Blackrock to close due to ‘insurmountable’ industry challenges
Meanwhile, a counter protest formed and everything cohered along exactly predictable lines: the right angry about immigration, the left angry at the right.
The left were bearing their slogans of old that declared “It’s okay to punch Nazis”, and “Refugees welcome”. One report in the New Statesman found the opponents could settle on one thing between them: they both enjoyed calling each other “paedos” across the barricade, which was manned by a seriously heavy police presence.
I don’t think Britain is on the brink of a civil war, but I can’t deny there is an uglier atmosphere than I am used to. The spectre of political violence in America – with the public and gruesome assassination of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk just days prior – thrums in the background of an already tense moment.
The riots of November, 2023, in Dublin also came to accurately prefigure the larger-scale iterations in England the following summer
I am not surprised that Robinson could generate a crowd of that size. Labour and the Conservatives are polling at less than 40 per cent between them. The so-called left-behinds are casting around for an alternative vector for political expression, settled in the belief that the establishment has failed them. Robinson has marshalled that and all the anxieties of the summer, with protests outside asylum hotels serving as an illustration of the times. For plenty in that crowd, Nigel Farage and his Reform UK doesn’t go far enough: he is just another establishment stooge dressed up in wolf’s clothing.
But I wish I was surprised to see something else. I’m referring to the Irish Tricolour, which was brandished in the crowd, snugly between predictable signs imploring that someone (unclear who) “Get them out”. and Others beseeching the government to “Stop the boats”. I cannot in good conscience say I am surprised.
The Irish are not above this kind of base political expression; we have had people protesting outside asylum hotels long before it became the tactic du jour in England. One of our most famous exports is Conor McGregor – and who can forget all those Irish Tricolours that cropped up alongside the Union Jack in Belfast last August, two traditions finally united in shared antagonism to immigration? The riots of November, 2023 in Dublin also came to accurately prefigure the larger-scale iterations in England the following summer.
There is, too, the revealing fact that the white Irish in London understand that they are not the type of immigrants Tommy Robinson is invoking. Stop the boats? What? Into Holyhead? No. A large part of this immigration anxiety is particularly concerned with an influx of people from the Middle East, all wrapped up in ambient concerns about Islam and how that interacts with comparatively more sectarian and less conservative society in the liberal West.
That much is obvious. But what is new is that this is a cross-border dialogue, forged in all those social media channels that blur the specificities of each country and generate a one-size-fits-all casus belli. The resultant atmosphere is one of unspecified and disparate rage, penned into a tight space in Westminster on a rainy Saturday. It is turbo-charged by the internet and a political establishment that seems to have stopped listening long ago.
