I went to the “Unite the Kingdom” rally to film interviews with people on the ground as well as Tommy and other speakers backstage. I have been to pro-Palestine, pro-Israel, climate protests etc so have a good sense of the rally in context of other events.

You can watch the full movie below but here are some additional thoughts:

The police estimate for attendance (110,000) seems like a massive undercount and organiser claim of “millions” is an exaggeration. I would guess 400-600k.

I saw no violence in the main area of the rally. Scuffles seem to have broken out on a side street away from the main protest (opposite Horse Guard) where due to large numbers of people attending many who wanted to see the rally could not. I did not see the actual altercation but did see riot police slowly and very professionally moving back the protestors and then collecting a few dozen bottles that had clearly been thrown at them.

Were the people in attendance “far right”? We should define “far right” which to me would be a racist party with neo-Nazi sympathies like the BNP. I obviously didn’t speak to every single person there but I, a well known immigrant with Jewish ancestry, found it a challenge to walk through the crowd with dozens of people draped in England flags stopping to shake my hand and thank me for being there. I had absolutely no trouble being there and did not feel unsafe at any point. Both on stage and in the audience were many, many people of different races and colours. The day ended with a black choir signing Jerusalem.

Among the speakers, there certainly were a few people who represent fringe parties of the European right. For someone like me who always thought a fake (?) hatred of the French was a key part of British identity it was finny being at a patriotic British event where a speech was delivered by a French politician (Eric Zemmour) in French. There were also speeches from the AfD, Vox and others. My sense overall was that some of the people on stage were probably far closer to being fringe rightists than those attending.

Like every other protest I’ve attended, asking people what specifically they wanted to achieve did not typically produce substantive answers beyond “The politicians need to listen to the people”, “We’ve had enough” etc. If I had to sum up the drivers of people attending, based on my conversations I would say that people’s concerns centre around illegal immigration, censorship of speech and failures of integration. Watch and judge for yourself.