To resist normalisation, we need enduring groundwork with attacked communities—and spaces for open strategising
~ Blade Runner ~
On Saturday 13 September, between 110,000 and 150,000 turned out in response to Tommy Robinson’s call, a mobilisation framed as a defence of “free speech” but saturated with white nationalist, Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric. It is said to be the largest far-right protest in history.
At the rally he was joined by international supporters: Elon Musk appeared by video link, calling for the government to be removed and parliament dissolved. Éric Zemmour, the French far-right politician, invoked the “great replacement” myth in openly Islamophobic terms.
The crowds marched from the South Bank and Westminster Bridge towards Whitehall, but numbers quickly overflowed. Thousands remained on the bridge and in Parliament Square, while others spilled into Trafalgar Square. Police spent much of the day funnelling and dispersing the mass.
Chants targeted migrants and Keir Starmer—Seven Nation Army was repurposed to sing “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” alongside with the co-opted slogan “Whose street? Our street”. Union Jacks and St George’s crosses were everywhere, along with American and Israeli flags.
This mobilisation follows a summer of racist outrage, coordinated online, amplified by Labour politicians in particular, and legitimised by media coverage. Already in June, London hosted a mass rally under the “Football Lads Against Grooming Gangs / For Our Children” banner—another openly racist march where a small antifascist block was kettled “for its own protection”.
Saturday’s counter-protest, around 20,000 people organised by local trade unions and grassroots groups marched after a rally at Russell Square and ended behind the far-right stage. They were surrounded and effectively kettled for hours, with hostile crowds pressing on police lines. A small black bloc was at one point stuck behind far-right lines before withdrawing to the left bloc. Beer bottles and other projectiles were thrown at the anti-fascist side.
The sheer scale, fuelled by trains and coaches, initially took the police by surprise. By the end of the day, the Met reported 26 officers injured, four seriously, and at least 25 arrests for assault and violent disorder, mostly against far-right attendees trying to break cordons. Anti-fascist blocks were eventually escorted out through narrow corridors in the middle of hostile crowds.
While much of the left hides behind its routines, single-issue campaigns and cycles of electoral hope, defeat and disillusionment, anarchists and anti-authoritarians continue to mobilise—but without the structures needed to strategise and build resilience. Open assemblies are rare. Too often disconnected from the non-white and marginalised communities we should be rooted in, we show up as external actors.
We cannot afford to just react. The far right is being normalised as part of a wider domestic counter-insurgency strategy. Brexit and the myth of ‘invasion’ are offered from above as the answer to the growing gulf between the excluded and zones of consumer comfort. It is not strength but fear: a ruling class haunted by past revolts as it scrambles to pre-empt system collapse with repression at home and war abroad.
In this situation, our task is to build bonds of trust with the communities most under attack, and to carve out spaces of refusal where we can strategise openly and disagree without splintering. We need local defence and mutual aid structures that endure beyond news cycles, rooted in everyday life rather than just spectacle. And we need the courage to confront not only fascism in the streets but the wider system that breeds it.
Without this groundwork the far right will continue to dominate public space and the streets. With it, the next rupture may open the chance to strike at the roots of the system itself.
Photos: Peter Marshall on Facebook, Blade Runner
