Saturday’s demo showed that Tommy Robinson has lost the normies, leaving a rump of loyal hooligans
~ Rob Ray ~
Numbers are in for the big day, in which Tommy Robinson’s Unite The Kingdom mob walked in a straight line for a bit in one part of London while the Nakba Day march acted as a cipher for The Left in another.
The figures as reported by the organisers themselves were wild. Tommy lost control of his mouth entirely and offered the feverish delusion of a million people joining him, while left sources like Counterfire on the other side pontificated that he actually only had a fraction of their 250,000 supporters.
The Met, meanwhile, generally known for mild undercounting, came up with 60,000 for Tommy, 20,000 for Palestine.
Having consulted a leftie with experience in the matter of counting lines of humans, it may be of no surprise to you, the discerning and slightly less flappable Freedom reader, that the Met were probably closest. It seems that both sides were somewhat disappointed to find they’d failed to draw extra large masses, and got carried away with the propagandist bombast.
That said, the lower figures, if we choose to take them as sort of ball-park accurate, are on balance mildly good news for us. At 20,000 people Nakba day 2026 would be basically the same as 2025, which if not a victory is at least not an embarrassment – business as usual. For Tommy though 60k is a 40% decline from last time. And from all the available evidence, the people he lost were the normies, leaving a rump of loyal hooligans. Still a step up from his EDL days, to be sure, but given he’s working with the advantage of the football season being half over it’ll be a disappointment to have failed to keep his numbers up.
A great deal of effort will be expended, by both sides, over the next few days to realign perceptions of reality to make this A Grand Victory. But for Robinson’s key backers, at least those with clearer eyes, this will have to open the question of whether his current strategy is going to go the same way as most other mass march programmes. Massive initial enthusiasm, followed by declining returns and a descent into obscurity as people realise all these A-B marches aren’t actually achieving very much.
If that’s deemed to be the case it could go a couple of ways from here, one of which could be electoral (a turn towards Restore perhaps?) but which risks both the undermining of Rupert Lowe and losing the interest of what is a famously low-boredom-threshold crowd.
The other, more physically dangerous, would be a resumption of forms of localised far-right direct action. Denied the hotels as targets after a hurried closure program by Labour, there’s already murmurings from online racists about Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs), into which (allegedly) refugees have been dumped to keep them off the streets. Attacks on vulnerable people based in rumour-mongering around that subject could be a serious issue as the summer wears on. Similarly, variants on (or reprises of) the Raise The Flag campaign are likely given their relative success in 2025.
Either way, the key for Robinson and his fellow travellers will be momentum. Even having had a bit of a miss this weekend, they’ll have gained confidence from the success of Reform in the local elections, and it’d be a naive hope to suggest they won’t benefit from a bit of under the counter help from new administrations in places like Essex and Norfolk. Unite The Kingdom is likely to be a slow open to a long summer.
Photos from Nakba Day march: Peter Marshall
