A day out at Unite the Kingdom 

It was just after Midday at the start of Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally and a giant Carl Benjamin was holding forth in front of the Cenotaph. “Can you feeeeeel the winds of change blowing,” he crooned on a massive flat screen TV, trying to warm up the crowd for an afternoon of Katie Hopkins, Ant Middleton and a man who played the cello while covered in rashers of bacon. 

Benjamin was a vastly different entity in the flesh compared to the trailblazing polemicist online. He had the seedy attire and haunted charisma of a gigging magician who carried the shame of one too many children’s birthday parties. Benjamin’s lacklustre overture set the tone for the afternoon’s official proceedings. A carnival of pride for the forgotten — one that sought to accommodate everyone from Elon Musk to the families of those who had been raped by hotel migrants, ended up coming across as incoherent and hammy. 

During the Queen’s funeral, it was noted that this would be the last outing for Imperial London and all its pomp. Central London on a weekend now feels like a city that only really comes alive as a competing arena for protest and grievances. “Tommy Robinson is having one of his marches,” said one father to his child outside Charing Cross Station, as if this were now a fixture in league with the Changing of the Guard. Gormless statues of Nelson Mandela and Gandhi in Parliament Square were commandeered with St George’s flags and pensioners from Southend, Dagenham and Wigan picnicking and listening to Rikki Doolan, Robinson’s pastor dressed in a Union Jack three-piece as he belted his aspiring chart topper God’s Kingdom. 

The smell of marijuana and lager was mixed with one of those fresh Spring mornings that made the world feel young and anything possible. One effete lady from Faversham, a retired social worker who resembled the late Victoria Wood, was nattering away to a pair of police officers about the Kalergi Plan, the conspiracy to depopulate the West’s white population. “Right, well I haven’t heard of that one” said the officer trying to be generous. Spanish schoolchildren were curiously milling about with a vanguard of motability scooters at the top of Whitehall, taking photos of their home made placards that read: Keir Starmer is a wanker.

Seen through the eyes of tourists and global onlookers, such scenes seem to have seamlessly blended into the “brilliant bonkers Britain” package. This mix of laboured quirkiness and iconic symbols has finally gone fittingly berserk: Paddington Bear, Morris Dancers, and now Unite the Kingdom with its processional danse macabre of dogs in Union Jack bunting and reformed football hooligans. Robinson lifers on their sixth cans were subdued by all the Christianity. One marcher resentfully described it as noticeably more “middle class and established” than September’s inaugural protest, as if this were some undiscovered festival that had been ruined now that word had got around.

One man, a construction manager in his forties from London, was one of the curious newcomers. He was hoping the lineup would include his YouTube favourites: Edward Dutton (aka “The Jolly Heretic”) and the Lotus Eaters who he reeled off like a lineup at a festival. “You see, people are more into their politics these days than their music, so these will end up becoming the new Glastonbury” he said with an air of resignation. 

The Glastonbury analogy worked on many levels. Both events attract a certain demographic from a certain part of the country, who though not exactly united in their taste, are free to pursue their interests in a broadly sympathetic setting. Just as Elbow and new age crusties can co-exist in the fields of Worthy Farm, so too at the Unite the Kingdom can a belief in the restoration of the Shah of Iran and the hero worship of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. 

Britain’s media has yet to really catch up with this novel coming together, still relying on exhausted Brexit era-hermeneutics of the “somewheres” and “left behinds” to prop up interminable studio debates about whether the protestors are “far right”  But this is less a political rally, more a coming together of all the burgeoning YouTube cults, community entrepreneurs and paranoid and conspiratorial civic networks that now thrive in the hinterlands of England. This is a subculture well articulated in a recent piece by Jonny Ball on Liverpool’s “Cosmic Scousers”.  But they can be found across the country wherever there are steadily accumulating folk traumas of grooming gangs, migrant misdemeanours, murky HMOs and an increasingly surreal breakdown and malaise.

Despite the country wrongly being bemoaned as “atomised”, those who have filled this vacuum represent a thriving and self-sufficient world virtually unknown to the public intellectuals who waffle away at conferences on how to reestablish a meaningful sense of top-down social cohesion. Another England, set well on course for the 21st century, is taking shape through this highly localised anti-establishment aesthetic of gaudy patriotism, community vigilantism and God-tinged spiritualism. These are anxieties unlikely to be assuaged by Westminster foibles like “Pride in Place” and even Reform’s pledge to teach a more “patriotic curriculum”. Labour’s Mike Tapp was recently lampooned for an AI video picturing him walking his dog amidst an AI generated blizzard of spitfires on the cliffs of Dover.  But he was at least attempting to work inside the form. 

Something barmier and more metaphysical has awakened in the English psyche. You could watch this tension play out as journalists tried to interview its denizens. DJ Mike, a man who had turned his Brompton bike into a portable karaoke machine was singing a doozy about the “enemy within”. DJ Bob was trying to politely imply he was too eccentric and mentally unwell to parley with a vox popping YouTuber about whether woke had gone too far.  He was too preoccupied with a grander battle unfolding between the forces of Good and Evil.

A novel study in what this New England does to the soul was Brian, a thirty year old post-graduate student from Suzhou who had turned up with all the latest Restore merchandise: a tasteful chrome water bottle and a navy hat that read: Make Britain Great Again. Just a year of living in Wembley had driven him to the streets in protests. Modelling the rhetorical turn of his idol Rupert Lowe, he was upset to discover the England he had grown up watching in China of — James Bond and Paddington Bear — did not really exist. 

By the late afternoon, even Robinson seemed unable to contain these multitudes. Yaxley Lennon, who in his born again reinvention, has taken on the tedious emoting of a theatrical old ham. It’s now possible to imagine a Stephen Frears or even a Ken Loach, lurking off stage, directing him in some dirge about a reformed far-right football hooligan. There was plenty of ripe material on stage: the parents of Rhiannon White, the hotel worker who was stabbed to death with a screwdriver by a Sudanese migrant gave a speech that drew tears. 

By late afternoon an apocalyptic exodus of crowds was taking place across London. Helicopters were lurking in the sky and  there was a roving, unsatisfied mood that recalled the ending of Nathanael West’s The Day of The Locust. The finale is a Hollywood premiere sunk by a vengeful crowd that comes to realise they have been played along. “Their boredom became more and more terrible,” wrote West, “If only a plane would crash once in a while (like in the newspapers and movies)… But the planes never crash.” The rumoured Civil War, the 2nd coming of Christ might not come after all. And all they will be left with is the England that now exists beyond Unite the Kingdom.