The second "Unite the Kingdom" march organised by Tommy Robinson on 16 May, bringing ~60,000 onto the streets - which is around half as many as the first Unite the Kingdom demo in September last year - coincided with the annual pro-Palestine march to commemorate the Nakba. There had been talk of the banning of these demonstrations, but in the end they went ahead - but very heavily policed; 4,000 cops on lucrative overtime payments at a cost of £4.5m! Not only that but drones, dogs, horses, helicopters, and facial recognition were in use.
No doubt the choice of date was deliberate, given Robinson's (or Yaxley-Lennon's) continuing campaign against "Islamists" - which in reality translates into promoting anti-Muslim hatred, pure and simple. Indeed Robinson has revived his activism of late on two fronts, having previously been devoting himself mainly to online campaigns after he left the EDL in 2013 (it was infiltrated by neo-Nazis, apparently, a step too far for Yaxley-Lennon). These two fronts are, firstly, inciting attacks against asylum seekers and refugees who are invariably labelled "rapists" and "paedophiles" and, secondly, staging counter-demonstrations against the pro-Palestine marches which have been taking place since 2023.
However what has changed is Robinson's adoption of a rather pathetic British version of MAGA, that is MEGA - Make England Great Again. Trump's acolytes recently welcomed him into the USA and gave him lots of money; after Elon Musk had financed the lavish September "Unite the Kingdom" demonstration against immigration the 16 May version was paid for by several lesser millionaires, as well as tech billionaire Robert Shillman, who also got Robinson a job with the right-wing Canadian media website Rebel Media.
Both "Unite the Kingdom" marches included many ordinary-looking people and not all of them white; Robinson claims not to be racist - or at least is selectively so. He has given his own support to the split from Reform led by Ben Habib, called Advance UK, but it seems those who come to his marches don't really differentiate between Robinson's racist activism and the more "respectable" and passive racism of Nigel Farage's Reform UK or Advance, or any other... What they may be put off by, however, is Robinson's new-found religiosity. He found Jesus while in prison last time round and the con-men and women who he invites onto his stages to promote their wares, and the bad singing, do not evoke much enthusiasm from the punters.
As for Robinson's own "politics" the sum total of it on display was him leading the chant of the hard-hitting,"Starmer is a wanker!"
The Together Alliance's love and unity...
It was partly to respond to last year's large Unite the Kingdom demo that the so-called Together Alliance organised a demonstration on 28 March this year - "against racism and division". Hundreds of thousands of people - half a million, according to the organisers - joined this march. The slogans on the banners and placards were directed mainly against the far-right and against Farage's Reform UK party. And everyone was there: trade unions, anti-racist campaigners, left-wing organisations, the Greens, Labour MPs, etc., and others turned out in opposition to racist, anti-migrant politics.
However what was also quite obvious was that the political parties like the Greens and Labour - and even the Lib Dems - were there to launch their campaigns for the coming local election.
As for "defeating" the far right by marching for "Love, Hope, Unity" - or by a day out at the polling station - this is a fairy tale which might help some on the left go to sleep at night. But unfortunately for them - and the rest of us too - far-right ideas and even fascist ideas are always present in class society in one or other shape or form. They appear above the surface whenever there are social and economic crises and disappear below the surface again, if and when the crisis is resolved. But they don't go away.
This article traces the origins of these ideas in British society by looking at the fascist movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the more recent manifestations of far-right activism - up until today. It also discusses the nature of far-right activism and its significance, in a period where the far right might seem to be growing beyond its traditional strongholds.
The British far-right before the Great Depression
It was during the crisis between the two world wars in the 1920s and 1930s when fascist organisations appeared in Britain, as they had appeared in Europe (most prominently, in Italy and Germany), attracting the impoverished middle class, but also sections of the working class.
However unlike in Germany and Italy, the British bourgeoisie saw no need to impose fascist rule, even if, at the time, Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts offered their services. The British capitalists had an empire to fall back on when the banks crashed and the economy went into depression. This was not the case for their German counterparts, who chose instead, to finance Hitler. Unlike the British bosses, they were confronted with a working class experienced in making revolutions, and equipped with its own independent Communist and Socialist parties - posing an evident threat to them - and maybe their whole system.
Anyway, in Britain, any threat which emerged out of working class militancy was effectively managed with the help of a very well-integrated trade union bureaucracy. The willingness of some of the leading British trade union leaders to collaborate with the government and the industrialists and their full participation in the war machinery between 1914 and 1918, had helped maintain social peace "at home" during these years. After the war, the potentially pre-revolutionary situation of the general strike in 1926 was again effectively "managed" with the help of the union leaders.
By January 1923, the number of persons registered unemployed went up to almost 1.5m. It was in the midst of this crisis that the first British Fascist organisation was founded on 6 May 1923 - by a WWI veteran of the hospital corps, Rotha Lintorn-Orman - as a splinter group of the Conservative party. Lintorn-Orman was a virulently anti-Communist Tory, drawn to fascism because of her admiration for Mussolini and his handling of the "unruly red" Italian workers. Her mother, who had inherited a large amount of wealth from a family of high-ranking military officers, financed the organisation.
Riding an anti-Communist, anti-worker, wave
Most members of the British Fascists were also wealthy - including aristocrats angered at the post-WWI decline of the large landowning agricultural sector and high-ranking army officers indignant over the decline of the British Empire. While the organisation mainly reflected the concerns of disgruntled peers and high-ranking officers, it also drew members from the petty-bourgeoisie, ruined during the "Slump", as well as people from the fringes of society, criminals and thugs, who engaged in street fights with members of the Communist Party.
The organisation's membership numbers were overinflated by its leaders, but it might have reached 20-30,000 at its peak in 1925. Most were not active members: at a show of "force" during an "Empire Day" demonstration in London in 1925, only 5,000 people attended, reflecting the limited influence the organisation had outside its narrow milieu.
Its membership rapidly declined after the mid-1920s. In part, this was due to differences within its leadership. But the capitalist class as a whole did not see the need to rely on fascist groups to attack workers' organisations. As for xenophobic rhetoric, it was already monopolised by the government! At the time, the biggest section of migrant workers was in the docks and in 1925, Baldwin's government introduced the apartheid-like "Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order" - the first legislation to specify skin colour as grounds to restrict to work - with the backing of the leadership of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union (NSFU).
That same year, when shipowners cut wages with the agreement of NSFU leader Havelock Wilson, an unofficial seamen's strike broke out, right across the British Empire, which lasted 100 days. Crucially, most black or Indian "Lascar" sailors, usually recruited by the bosses as strikebreakers, refused to break this strike. On the contrary, some migrant sailors joined the unofficial strike leadership, organised through the Communist Party-led Minority Movement, and argued for an international union with no colour bar.
However, when attacks on miners' wages triggered the 1926 General Strike, the government and capitalist class were well prepared, with the co-opted volunteers and Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) - to break the strike. It had no need for the British Fascists, who were even barred from joining as volunteers. There were exceptions, though: one of the main British Fascist leaders, "General" RBD Blakeney, defected with his supporters in 1926 to join the OMS.
Other members of the British Fascists resigned to form smaller groups, which would ultimately merge in 1932 to become the first large fascist organisation in Britain, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) at a time when the capitalist class, in the context of the Great Depression, feared it would be unable to impose the austerity measures necessary to maintain its profits.
The Great Depression and the British Union of Fascists
The main figure in this development was Sir Oswald Mosley. Born into an aristocratic family, he was a careerist, who changed his political positions with every shift in the wind. After serving as a commissioned officer during WWI, he became a Conservative MP. He resigned from the party in protest against the brutality of the Black and Tans in Ireland, but only because he thought they undermined the image of "British imperial rule"!
After a brief interaction with the Liberals, he joined the Labour Party in 1924, where he was associated with the left-wing Independent Labour Party. However, the Labour Party's successful general election of 1929 left Mosley with only a minor ministerial post. He had made a name for himself taking up the main issue facing workers at the time, i.e., high unemployment. But his proposals to tackle this were ignored by the Labour Party and in response, he produced the "Mosley Memorandum", advocating extensive state intervention through public works, protectionist tariffs to secure "imperial preference", the economic self-sufficiency of the British Empire, and a corporatist system to reorganise the economy and reduce class conflict.
The "Mosley memorandum" to "rebuild Britain", was loaded with British Empire nostalgia. But at this stage, his proposals were not so different from those of other mouthpieces of state intervention, to the point that they even drew praise from the "liberal" economist John Maynard Keynes.
Dissatisfied with the Labour Party, Mosley launched the "New Party" with a few disaffected Labour MPs. But it won very few votes in the 1931 general election. Then, following clashes with Communist activists at a public meeting in Glasgow, Mosley decided to form a "trained and disciplined force". As a journalist reviewing Mosley's autobiography writes, "Mosley may have succumbed to (...) his own desire to build up a paramilitary organisation, to which he seems to have been emotionally attracted both as an ex-officer and (more creditably) as someone who liked the classless atmosphere of the barrack-room". And indeed, after touring Mussolini's Italy, he returned convinced that fascist Italy's economic programme was the way to rebuild Britain.
He refused approaches from Churchill and Chamberlain to rejoin the Conservative Party. Instead, he was determined to form an "anti-establishment" party. By 1932, he had succeeded in uniting the existing fascist groups to create the British Union of Fascists. He also created a militia of black-uniformed paramilitaries, the "Fascist Defence Force", nicknamed "Blackshirts" - emulating the Italian fascist Voluntary Militia for National Security.
The BUF's aim was to build a mass movement by exploiting the social despair resulting from the Great Depression and the bosses' austerity measures. It directed itself against scapegoats, principally Communist activists, who "threatened Britain with a Communist revolution". At its peak, between 1933-34, the BUF claimed to organise 50,000 members.
The historic "Battle of Cable Street"...
BUF propaganda also accused "Jewish interests of this country, commanding commerce, commanding the Press, commanding the cinema, dominating the City of London, killing industry with their sweat-shops" - repeating some of the anti-Semitic scapegoating used by Hitler in Germany. It increasingly focused on migrants and, in particular, on Jewish workers.
Impoverished Jewish workers, who had fled pogroms in Europe, had settled around the ports of London. They found work in the tailoring sweatshops which had sprung up in the East End. Their experience of struggle and the political tradition which they brought with them, meant that in the interwar years, the East End became a stronghold of the early Communist Party and unions were set up, linked to the party. At the same time, hundreds of British workers had travelled to Spain to join the International Brigades to fight Franco - whose far-right regime was openly backed by Hitler and Mussolini. And their experiences strengthened those opposing the Blackshirts - the anti-Franco slogan "No pasarán!" (they shall not pass) was adopted by activists across Britain.
The Blackshirts staged provocative demonstrations in areas where workers were known to be well-organised. One of the most well-known confrontations between local workers and the Blackshirts took place in Cable Street, in London's East End on Sunday 4 October 1936. They were met by large numbers of local residents, trade unionists and Communist Party activists, many of whom were Jewish, who blocked their route. Barricades were erected, and clashes with police followed. The BUF was ultimately prevented from completing its march.
Cable Street became a symbol of "resistance against fascism" for the reformist British left and remains so up to this day. It is presented as a decisive victory, apparently (according to them) proving that fascism can be stopped through confrontation in the streets.
Joe Jacobs, a Communist garment worker who participated in the battle of Cable Street, stated that in fact, "the defeat of Mosley started way back", when dockers, many of them Irish, prevented the BUF from "gaining a foothold in Shadwell and Wapping". He also observed that the fight against fascism had "only just begun", since in fact, reactionary movements do not disappear because of a single confrontation. They persist and can grow again when social and economic conditions allow.
The BUF "beaten" by Hitler
In fact, the BUF managed to gain support and some electoral successes, including in the East End. In the March 1937 London County Council elections, it polled nearly 8,000 votes across Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and Limehouse, though it won no seats. Throughout the 1930s it was able to secure a small number of local council seats, although it never gained any MPs.
The decline of the BUF toward the end of the 1930s had less to do with confrontations in the streets than with the new policies of the ruling class imposed, as a result of the approaching war. Significantly, the BUF had the backing of newspaper magnate Lord Rothermere, who in his Daily Mail editorial entitled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts", praised Mosley for his "sound, common sense, Conservative doctrine". But on the whole, support from the wealthy was sporadic.
This, of course, didn't mean that the BUF was not considered by a section of the ruling class as an alternative - as Joe Jacobs put it: "Mosley was being supported to build an alternative to the National Government, if it should fail to hold down the workers' struggle against unemployment and the low standard of living". But ultimately, the National Government did manage to maintain capitalist order.
The fate of the BUF was sealed, however, when the ruling class chose to justify its imperialist war as a "war against fascism". Unsurprisingly, the BUF was banned and dissolved in 1940.
Race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill
Fascist and racist currents do not, of course, disappear by decree and in fact, there was a brief resurgence by Mosley and his supporters in the 1950s. This period coincided with new waves of migration from the Caribbean and other parts of the former empire - now known as the "Windrush generation" - named after the ship that brought them to England.
As before, economic tensions and housing shortages were exploited to stir up racist rhetoric. Signs reading "No dogs, no Irish, no Blacks" appeared in the front windows of guest houses. Fascist groups sought to mobilise against Black migrants, and clashes took place in areas where these communities had settled.
In August 1958, in Nottingham's St Anns, home to around 3,000 recent Afro-Caribbean immigrants, a "race riot" broke out - thought to have been triggered when a mixed-race couple was turned away from a pub. Others say that a staged gang fight between "Teddy Boys" and black youth spiralled out of control. At one point over a thousand white youths gathered, chanting "Keep Britain White". Dozens of men and women were injured.
Much more serious riots occurred that summer in London's Notting Hill. Racist slogans were raised, and far-right groups, including remnants of Mosley's British Union of Fascists, organised meetings and propaganda.
Some homes were petrol bombed. Similar attacks happened in Manchester. The violence eventually subsided; nine racist youths received prison sentences, but the underlying creeping racism remained.
As the "post-war economic boom" in Western countries resulted in a general increase in living standards through the 1960s, the appeal of fascism's scapegoating of minorities remained marginal... until crisis hit again.
The return of the crisis... and the far right
By the late 1960s a new far right organisation had appeared on the scene, calling itself the National Front (NF). It had been founded in 1967 by a former member of the BUF, and leader of the League of Empire Loyalists, AK Chesterton. Others who joined included its later leaders, John Tyndall and Martin Webster of the Greater Britain Movement (GBM). Despite the many squabbles between the different currents and aspiring leaderships, the NF managed to start winning votes in elections. And its "solution" to the crisis was the expulsion of immigrant workers.
As the NF gained votes, the then Labour government decided to adapt its policies to appeal to what seemed to be a growing NF electorate. In 1965 Wilson passed the Race Relations Act, which drastically reduced the number of Ministry of Labour employment vouchers available to Commonwealth immigrants, dropping the cap from 20,000 to 8,500 per year. It also increased checks on dependants entering the country and made student and visitor visas subject to strict time limits. At the same time however, to counter accusations of racism, clauses in the Act made the promotion of racial hatred a criminal offence and banned racial discrimination in public places, such as hotels and public transport.
A Race Relations Board, was created to investigate complaints of discrimination, and the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (NCCI) to aid in community integration.
Passing legal restrictions on immigrants on the one hand and appearing to oppose discrimination on the other, became standard approach for both Labour and the Tories, partly to attract a growing black electorate. Numerous bodies and quangos were created to protect black citizens from racism. Incapable of addressing the social roots of racism, their efforts were at best ineffective, and at worst, socially divisive. The far right was quick to stir up a feeling of resentment by claiming that resources were going towards "the fight against discrimination" and black immigrants, while little or nothing was being done for the poor white British.
Enoch Powell's bloody river
It was thus in 1968, that Tory MP Enoch Powell, reacting to the Race Relations Act, gave his so-called "Rivers of Blood" speech, in which he predicted that "in this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man" and warned that "as I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood". He warned against the danger of racial explosions and argued for the repatriation of black people as the only way to avoid them.
As a result of the speech, Powell, who was shadow defence secretary, was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Tory leader Ted Heath.
His racist speech did however strike a chord with London's dockers, as he knew it would. They had just been on strike for 9 weeks over changes to the conditions of the Dock Labour Scheme, which meant that certain jobs were no longer reserved for registered dock workers. But in the end they were defeated and the port authorities were able to employ cheaper unskilled labour taking on many new immigrant workers, who were thankful for a job. Anger and resentment had been building up in dockers' ranks - and now unofficial walkouts took place. Around 300 dockers marched to parliament carrying placards reading "Powell was right". There are those who quote this as a sign of the British working class's racism, but that entirely misses the context.
At the time there was also a significant minority of dockers who convened a rival meeting to disassociate themselves from the pro-Powell demonstration, which they condemned as "anti-trade-unionist and racialist".
The NF peaks and then falls to Thatcher
At the beginning of the 1970s the oil crisis hit and inflation rose to over 25%, triggering mass lay-offs and plant closures. Unemployment doubled to over 1 million between 1973-75. The National Front was now in its element. In the West Bromwich parliamentary by-election in May 1973, Martin Webster got 4,750 votes (16%) and saved the organisation's election deposit. Then, in the October 1974 elections, it averaged 3.1% across 90 constituencies. In the 1976 local elections, it won 18% in Leicester, and nearly took a council seat in one ward - and in Deptford, the combined NF and National Party vote reached 44.5%.
But then it went into decline. One obvious reason is that working-class militancy returned, in response to the "oil shock" and the imposition of the 3-day week by Edward Heath's Tory government in 1973. The "Battle of Saltley Gate" was a pivotal 1972 mass strike and protest in Birmingham during the first official national coal miners' strike. On 10 February 1972, about 30,000 local engineers and car workers walked out in solidarity, overwhelming police lines and forcing the closure of a vital fuel storage depot. This massive show of working-class solidarity turned the tide of the national dispute, resulting in a victory for the National Union of Mineworkers and forcing the Conservative government to concede to major pay demands. That same year, the jailed Pentonville 5 Dockers were released due to huge working-class protests. It was the working class that could take credit for the fall of the Heath government in March 1974.
By 1979, NF membership had fallen to approximately 5,000. But by now, the Tory Party's Margaret Thatcher had begun to occupy some of the far-right's political space, providing those who had voted NF with a mainstream party to express their views. She made headlines when she echoed Enoch Powell, saying that "this country might be rather swamped by people of a different culture". Some Tory local councils went even further, by paying black people to go back to their home countries.
Then came the BNP
In 1980, John Tyndall, who had been chairman of the NF from 1972-74 and from 1975-80, resigned. His justification was that "homosexuals like Martin Webster" held senior positions within the NF. He was also against recruiting skinheads and football hooligans, which he felt damaged the "respectability" of the NF. So he proceeded to establish a rival group, the New National Front, and then in 1982 united an array of other far-right groups as a single party through a Committee for Nationalist Unity, launching the British National Party - the BNP - in April 1982.
The BNP was able to take over from the NF as the main far-right organisation. Its platform stated that "... immigration into Britain by non-Europeans should be terminated forthwith and we should organise a massive programme of repatriation and resettlement overseas of those peoples of non-European origin already resident in this country". But thanks to Thatcher's success at taking over part of the far-right audience, the BNP in the 1980s remained marginal electorally - as it was for the first twenty years of its existence.
In the meantime, the combination of token anti-racism from the government, everyday racism from the police and growing poverty due to the capitalist crisis, eventually ignited inner-city uprisings - Bristol in 1980, then Brixton, Southall, Liverpool, and Manchester in 1981. In each case, the trigger was police brutality and overt racism.
These riots put a stop to some of Thatcher's racist demagogy. Suddenly, she discovered "community problems" and released funds for inner-city programmes, resorting to recipes from the Labour Party's playbook.
The "anti-racist" quangos relaunched
One Labour recipe she borrowed was "ethnicity politics", invented under Roy Jenkins in the 1960s. Rather than tackle racism directly, the idea was to encourage separate ethnic and religious communities to organise as distinct groups - fostering rivalry between them and making them easier to manage. Each group was invited to nominate "community leaders" often unrepresentative reactionaries, who were flattered with seats on conflict-resolution committees and offered funds for community projects - frequently religious organisations more likely to divide than unite the working class population.
The Commission for Racial Equality, which Thatcher had planned to shut down before the riots, was revived to channel state funds into black "self-help" projects. In 1982 alone, £270m went to 200 new "ethnic projects". A few young radicals found positions in the new bodies and were absorbed into the system, but unsurprisingly, none of these funds produced meaningful change.
Thatcher's post-riot strategy was primarily aimed at winning over the aspiring black petty-bourgeoisie, counting on them to defuse inner-city tensions. A significant section found jobs in the new quangos or in the media. The political attention generated by the riots also prompted some to position themselves as representatives of the black population as a whole.
Funds channelled to "community leaders" - often leading religious organisations - combined with Thatcher's systematic attacks on local council budgets, meant that churches effectively moved in to fill the gap left by the retreating state.
The 1990s far-right revival - lessons for today
It is in this context that the far-right had a sort of revival, in the 1990s, providing the BNP with ready-made ground to grow on. Under Tyndall's leadership, the BNP ran a campaign explicitly called "Rights for Whites" in London's East End, targeting precisely those deprived white working class communities who felt that resources were flowing to ethnic minority organisations while nothing was done for them.
In 1990, a BNP candidate polled 8% in a Tower Hamlets council ward; in October 1992, in a local by-election in the Millwall ward of Tower Hamlets, the BNP obtained 20% of the vote, and the following year in the same ward polled 34%, winning the seat. Derek Beackon became the first ever elected BNP councillor.
However, the real breakthrough came only after Nick Griffin ousted Tyndall in a 1999 leadership contest and set about modernising the party. Griffin broadened the party's electoral base by presenting a more moderate image, targeting concerns about rising immigration and about specific local issues.
Barking and Dagenham became the BNP's new electoral battleground. The borough had been traditionally Labour, representing white working class communities - Ford workers, dockers, manufacturing workers - who by the 2000s felt economically abandoned as their industries shrank. Between 2000 and 2011, the proportion of white British residents in Barking and Dagenham fell from 82% to 49%. This rapid demographic change, combined with Labour's failure to address the underlying economic grievances, provided the BNP with a ready-made narrative.
Under Griffin, the party's single biggest electoral result came in the Goresbrook ward of Barking in the 2004 local elections, where it polled 52% of the vote. Then in May 2006, the BNP won 12 seats on Barking and Dagenham council, forming the official opposition with 17% of the popular vote. Had they stood candidates in all contested seats rather than just 13, they could have taken outright control of the council.
In the 2005 general election, the BNP polled 16.9% in Barking - the constituency of then employment minister Margaret Hodge, who had controversially claimed that eight out of ten of her constituents were considering voting BNP. The underlying cause was a political vacuum created not just by Thatcher, but by Labour itself. In former Labour-dominated councils such as Barking and Dagenham, the BNP was able to mobilise the resentment of working class voters against Labour, many of whom had lost faith in a dominant local party that had faced no serious competition from mainstream opposition parties.
In the end the BNP's hold on the borough was broken. In the 2010 local elections, the BNP lost all 12 of its Barking and Dagenham councillors - showing that this was a vote of anger rather than the symptom of a permanent rightward political shift by workers.
The anti-Muslim far-right goes online
The emergence of the English Defence League (EDL) in 2009 marked a change in how far-right movements in Britain present themselves. The EDL gained prominence after 9/11 in the US, and the July 2005 attacks in London, framing itself as an "anti-Islamist" movement to counter "jihad". Of course, politicians of all sorts cynically claimed that terrorist attacks in the West had nothing to do with their wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. But these wars had fed back into Europe and the US in the form of terrorist bombings.
At the time of the July 2005 terrorist bombings on London Transport, Blair refused to use the term "Islamic fundamentalism" and instead adopted the term "anti-extremism", to avoid arousing anti-Muslim feelings. His policy was to promote conservative religious values in order to maintain support among ethnic minorities and Middle England bigots alike. In fact, he increased government support for Christian groups, and through the partial privatisation of education, allowed religious bigots into the classroom, even reviving creationist teaching.
No wonder the anti-Muslim, pro-Christian EDL found fertile ground in this period. At the centre of the EDL's rise was Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), who grew up in Luton, a town marked by deindustrialisation.
Robinson had been a football hooligan, before moving into politics. He built a following on social media. The EDL was also one of the first far-right organisations to make systematic use of social media platforms to organise demonstrations, spread racist ideas and attract sympathisers. It developed links with similar movements across Europe, participating in loose "international" networks of anti-Muslim activists.
Its street protests - often involving marches through towns with significant Muslim populations - were highly publicised and led to frequent clashes. But at its peak, the EDL had only a few thousand members. And although its social media following amounted to tens of thousands, its demonstrations never gathered more than 1,000-3,000 people, mainly angry white working class youth from deindustrialised areas. The EDL rapidly declined from 2011 onwards due, in part, to internal divisions and the departure of Robinson. But this could also be said to be due to the government's own policies - which, by scapegoating migrants and in particular Muslims, brought far-right ideas back into mainstream politics, with a vengeance! EDL sympathisers could find a home in the mainstream too.
The provocation of violence
The normalisation of xenophobic, nationalist, ideas by mainstream politicians inevitably leads to acts of violence. Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in 2016, just days before the Brexit referendum, stabbed by a far-right thug who had connections to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Cox was targeted as a vocal supporter of refugees who wanted Britain to remain in Europe. In more recent years, smaller but more frequent actions have been led by far-right organisations, such as protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, particularly during the summer of 2024.
During the unrest and riots against asylum seekers seen over the summers of 2024 and 2025, as well as during the 17 September "Unite the Kingdom" march, online networks played a role in amplifying calls to mobilise, with figures such as Elon Musk helping financially (in fact, Elon Musk also helped Robinson to pay his
legal costs in one of his court cases). The "Unite the Kingdom" march saw a turnout of up to 150,000 people - the largest "far-right" demonstration in British history.
The organisers had managed to mobilise usually passive right-leaning non-voters, as well as the ever-growing number of disillusioned Tory-voters, now looking to Reform. But it's also obvious that the core of the far-right was there - those who play on their white victimhood and who claim to be "more" oppressed even than refugees.
The "flegs" are everywhere!
Successive governments' anti-working class policies also helped mobilisations behind a "national identity" - under the flag of St George and the Union Jack. The "flag-raising" campaign emerged from activist circles not directly linked to Robinson, but they operate in a similar political space and reinforce the same themes of nationhood, while complaining about the "exclusion" of whites.
Far-right activists like Robinson have since attempted to build new platforms, which have ideological connections to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in the United States, using the same populist anti-migrant rhetoric, online mobilisation, and appeals to a "silent white majority".
Other organisations operate in a similar vein. Britain First, for instance, has combined street demonstrations with a strong online presence, using provocative actions - such as mosque visits and "patrols" - to generate viral content. Meanwhile, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), once primarily associated with Farage and Brexit, has undergone a transformation, adopting increasingly anti-communist, ultra-religious, and openly anti-immigrant positions.
These groups, although not united, share similar methods. Like their predecessors, they rely on scapegoating - today focusing primarily on Muslims and, more broadly, on non-white migrants - to channel the anger created by the capitalist crisis and over 15 years of austerity. Unlike earlier movements, they operate in a media environment that allows them to reach larger audiences, mobilising "members" who do not participate regularly in far-right activities.
The far-right: useful to the capitalist class
So what about Nigel Farage's Reform UK? Is it "far-right" as some maintain? In fact, Reform has taken the place of the right-wing of the Conservative Party, emerging in the context of a broader rightward shift in bourgeois politics linked to the deterioration of the capitalist economy.
Its leader Farage has been able to capitalise on the economic crisis since 2008, particularly among sections of the ruined, conservative petty-bourgeoisie, offering a mixture of nationalism and anti-migrant scapegoating.
Historically, Britain's two-party system - reinforced by the first-past-the-post electoral system - allowed
the Conservatives to absorb most right-wing currents within their own ranks, with only occasional and limited exceptions, such as the rise of the National Front in the 1970s. It is this electorate and its politicians which Reform has taken over today, in the context of the all-time unpopularity of the Tories.
As things stand, there is little evidence that workers have turned en masse toward Reform UK, and even less so, toward openly far-right organisations. In the last general elections, the first party of the working class was "abstention"!
A survey conducted in November 2025 showed that out of 11,000 Reform supporters, 26% were low-paid, economically insecure workers. But while the media argues that many of these workers are attracted by Reform's anti-immigration policies, it's quite possible that their main motivation to support Reform is their rejection of the old mainstream political parties. The same survey indicated that 18% of Reform supporters were traditional Tories, who are as much anti-working class as they are anti-migrant - and 29% were middle-class conservatives squeezed by the crisis.
Robinson's millions may put them off
As for the far-right organisations, it is difficult to estimate the size of their membership today. Formal membership numbers for groups such as Advance UK or Britain First, are often small, sometimes only in the hundreds or low thousands, but this obscures a much wider layer of passive supporters and online followers who engage intermittently rather than as committed "activists". This allows these organisations to inflate their membership figures.
The limited development of these far-right groups, probably also reflects the fact that the main political parties have adapted to the rightward shift in politics and are themselves implementing some of the anti-migrant policies promoted by the far-right.
However, since these far-right groups have already demonstrated their willingness to defend the capitalist system, in the event of a deepening crisis - especially if the working class begins to organise and fight back - it is always possible that they could become useful tools for mobilising sections of the petty-bourgeoisie against workers, as has happened in the past. This only underlines the urgency of rebuilding a revolutionary working-class party!
May 2026