Last Saturday approximately 100,000 “Britons” gathered in Central London to “Unite the Kingdom”. As they marched, they held placards in memory of Charlie Kirk, the far-right American YouTuber who was killed in September, flew Israeli flags, and stopped for Indian street food. The huge crowd gathered as they listening to talks from South African Elon Musk, Éric Zemmour, a French far-right politician, Avi Yemini, an Australian-Israeli ex-IDF soldier and a far-right commentator,  Ezra Levan, described as “Canada’s Jewish Steve Bannon”, far-right Czech-born German MP Petr Bystron, Spanish influencer and Donald Trump supporter Ada Lluch, and the far-right leader of the Danish People’s Party, Morten Messerschmidt. This diverse line-up, of people with multiple nationalities, and names most of the gathered crowd would be unable to pronounce, stood in-front of a predominantly white male English audience, warning them off the ills of immigration, the decline of British values and their favourite boogieman of all, Islam.

This symposium of simpletons was organised by none other than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, commonly known as Tommy Robinson, who himself is funded by far-right US billionaires such as Robert Shillman. Shillman, host of a pro-Israel podcast and a former board member of Friends of the Israeli Defence Forces, also and works with Rebel News and right-wing thinktank the David Horowitz Freedom Centre (DHFC), where their aim is “to promote freedom and to expose the lies of the radical left, the Islamist movement, and their allies in the media”. Over the past two decades Robinson has been convicted of multiple crimes including assault, using a fake passport, mortgage fraud, stalking and contempt of court. His billionaire funders, such as Elon Musk have footed his many expensive legal bills including the £100,000 in damages, he was forced to pay Syrian teenager Jamal Hijazi after defaming him online. When Tommy declared himself bankrupt in 2022, he told the Royal Court of Justice that he owed hundreds of thousands of pounds and that he had been “sofa surfing” between seven different addresses. He also confessed to spending £100,000 on gambling in casinos online. When challenged about his financial affairs, specifically about a claim in his 2009 book Enemy of the State, in which he claimed he owned seven properties, but six of them were in his wife’s name, he said: “I like to give off that I am a successful man when I am not.” Robinson was released from Prison in July this year for contempt of court only to be rearrested for assault later that same month after an incident at St Pancreas station. He was bailed and swiftly flew out of the country to Tenerife. It was subsequently revealed that Tommy Robinson would not be charged for the assault as there was not enough evidence, even though the incident was recorded. Tommy, the British patriot, made a video on one of his social media accounts claiming “if there was a war tomorrow, I’d fight for israel”

Tommy Robinson, who divides his time between Spain, Portugal, and Cyprus, with the occasional trip to UK prisons, has amassed a huge following amongst “disgruntled” white British working-class people. To them he represents a beacon of free speech and bastion of British values. yet how can a man who is clearly a prostitute to American far-right groups and a self-professed Zionist represent anything other than the abundantly clear failure of the UK education system. Leading up to Saturday’s demonstration, local anti-immigrations marches were held across the country. One town in Essex became the epicentre of anti-immigration rhetoric when an asylum seeker was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Hundreds of people turned up to protest outside an Asylum Hotel, holding placards that read “Defend our girls.” Last July riots spread across the country in response to the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport. Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, were murdered by British born Axel Rudakubana. Cities across Briton were set ablaze and terrorised by white nationalists’ thugs. Cars, businesses, and mosques were all set ablaze and in Middleborough “race checkpoints” were set up for drivers. Following the riots the police made 899 arrests. A subsequent Freedom of information request revealed that up to 41% of these far-right fascists, who took to the streets to allegedly “protect our girls” had been reported for crimes associated with intimate partner violence.

All of which begs the question, what exactly are British values and what does it mean to be British?

A quick Google search, because no one on this Island actually knows what British values are, will inform you that the five main British values are: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without faith. Not a single one of these was on show at Saturday’s Hate March in London. For one, our media class has completely normalised calling Tommy Robinson an “Anti-Islam” activist. Replace Islam with any other religion and let me know if that is a viable job title or simply hate speech? Would it be acceptable to refer to Hitler as an “Anti-Jewish activist” when he hosted similar rallies in Germany in the 1920’s? It was interesting, for me at least, to notice that all the reporters covering this “peaceful demonstration” were themselves white, as if they had conducted a risk assessment and decided it would not be safe to send out a person of colour. As this mass convention of hooligans took to the streets with their cans of cheap beer, they were seen urinating all over London, shouting racist abuse at people, harassing women (including chanting “get your tits out”), and filmed themselves getting into violent brawls on trains, in shops, parks and with other people at the same demonstration! A Jewish man and a Sikh couple who attended the rally were racially abused and told to “go back where you came from.”

Without doubt not a single one of the 100,000 people attending this racist rally actually believe in this concocted, delusional concept of British values which has absolutely nothing to do with what it actually means to be British. And for that I have to give them credit. They were representing Britishness as it truly is, rather than how it likes to see itself. Because lets me honest, what are British values, other than class, racism, conflict, theft, and hating upon women? The British have never valued democracy, for much of their history they have had a powerful monarchy, and today we have an unelected house of Lords, with positions that can be bought. Not only does the monarchy not pay tax, it also costs the tax payers nearly £510 million a year. Britain continues to run feudal system, with wealthy landowners, including the monarchy, who are governed by a completely separate set of laws, but financed by the peasants at the bottom.

Britain loves to tell anyone who will listen that it is a tolerant nation, but tolerant to whom? People of colour did not arrive to these shores because of the beneficence of the ruling elite, we are here because the British came to our lands first. When they were done pillaging, and after the costly World Wars, which of course they were involved in, and as the sun finally set on the British Empire, they lacked the skills and the workforce to rebuild this nation. The industrial revolution was funded by what they stole from India and the profits they made from the slave trade, but the Wars of the twentieth century left Britain wanting. They needed cheap labour and so they made a call-out to the Commonwealth, a collection of fifty-six countries that they once colonised. Having left those lands in ruins, many of the people that made the voyage to Britain from the Global South did so primarily for financial reasons. They worked long hard hours, were under-paid and were constantly living in fear of racist attacks. Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech was delivered in 1968. The same year the Race Relation Act finally banned signs across the country that read “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish.” In May 1978, Altab Ali, a young Bangladeshi man, was murdered by racists in Brick Lane, East London. Racist policing policies such as the ‘Suspected person law’ gave police the power to stop and search anyone they suspected of committing a crime, which the Metropolitan police used disproportionately against the Black community. In 1993 teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack and in 1998 a report into his death found that the Metropolitan Police Service was institutionally racist. Today we have unwashed, unwaged, and unintelligent thugs roaming our streets in exactly the way their British values have been taught to them.

Earlier in September, almost nine hundred people, mostly pensioners, were arrested for holding signs protesting the banning of Palestine Action. Dozens of officers swarmed around individuals and carried off peaceful protesters, to the chants of “shame on you.” On Saturday, as a sea of Caucacity spread across the city, violence erupted and was filmed at every juncture. Anti-social behaviour was on full view to the entire world. According to the Police, twenty-six officers were injured, four of them seriously, and yet only twenty-five people were arrested. Not only were few arrests made, live facial recognition technology, which was deployed at the Notting Hill Carnival the previous month, was not even used at the far-right rally. Thankfully, many of the delinquents filmed themselves committing crimes and those on stage inciting violence, including Elon Musk, the world’s richest white supremist, who told the crowd, “Violence is coming” and “you either fight back or you die.” Isn’t this a classic British value of divide and conquer? It worked so well for the empire in foreign lands and now it is spreading across Britain. The filthy rich telling the desperately poor, that the problem is in fact the immigrants and the Muslims, not the people profiting from constant conflict.

In July 2024, police chiefs in England and Wales declared violence against women and girls a “national emergency” with two million women estimated to be victims of violence perpetrated by men each year. According to research, 60% of women have faced sexist abuse in person at football matches or pubs. And a study from Lancaster University found a 38% increase in domestic violence incidents when England lost a game between 2002 and 2010, and a 26% rise when they won​. As mentioned earlier, almost 2 in every 5 men who were arrested during last Summer’s race riots had faced previous charges related to violence against women. At Tommy’s march they chanted vulgar and obscene slogans at women, whilst holding handmade placards professing to “protect our girls”. It is of course a very British value to abuse women. In the past when women did not conform to what was expected of them, they were simply accused of being witches and executed. When the British arrived in India, they were horrified to find that women had rights to own property and inheritance (rights granted to Muslim women since 632AD, over 1400 years ago). As they were unable to abide women of colour having more rights than their white counterparts, and of course because they refused to give their own women such rights, they decided to put a stop to Indian women having any rights too. Women across the global south were educated, and Fatima al-Fihriya, an Arab Muslim, established the first University in the world in Morocco. As British colonialism spread across the globe, so did its regressive attitudes towards women. Where once they thrived, they became nothing more than the possession of the men they married, in line with British values. British values are alcohol, slurred speech, and violence against women. As much as the far-right wants to scapegoat asylum-seekers and immigrants, we all know that the call is coming from inside the house. More than a hundred women’s rights groups have written an open letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, warning him about the far-right, anti-migrant protesters ‘hijacking’ women’s safety to push their racist agenda.

Everything we are seeing today on our streets up and down the country is emblematic of Britishness. A nation that has a unicorn and a lion on its coat of arms, one mythical the other foreign, clearly has an identity crisis verging on dissociative identity disorder. Britain has never taken responsibility for its crimes. Winston Churchill, the renowned racist, remains it’s most popular politician. It still hasn’t apologised for slavery, (but we, the peasant class of tax payers, have finally finished paying slave owners for losing their trade!), it continues to hold onto cultural artifacts it looted from other nations under the racist guise that the host countries can’t be trusted to look after such valuable historic items themselves and of course it continues to arm and fund genocides across the globe whilst simultaneously hand-wringing and postulating on peace. Unfortunately for many of us the Brits have never been good with accountability. Theirs is a culture of blame. And as the far-right continue to gain momentum it is the immigrants, asylum seekers, people of colour, women and the poor who will suffer the most. The latter being many of those foolish enough to align themselves with Tommy Robinson last Saturday.