The first thing to note about the so-called ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally that took place in central London on Saturday 13 September is that there was absolutely nothing “anti-establishment” or “revolutionary” about it. Nor was it a “counter-revolution” to “Starmer’s revolution”, as the state-backed demagogue Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) asks us to believe.
Ultimately, it was called forth, funded and organised by the same forces that promoted Sir Keir Starmer into office – the Anglo-American monopoly-capitalist ruling class. The very same forces that will use the presence of angry ‘white’ workers on the streets waving the Union Jack to instil the fear of ‘rising fascism’ to rally other ‘left’ and ‘socialist’ workers back behind the Labour party – or one of its left-social-democratic handmaidens (the Trotskyite ‘Stand Up To Racism’, perhaps, or the new Corbyn project).
We live within a tightly censored and controlled political space, which daily comes more and more to resemble a pantomime.
In essence, Robinson’s rally was pure conservatism of the Enoch Powell variety. Theatrical fodder for the culture wars. Its fundamental aim was patently not to unite but to divide.
It was also noteworthy that this noisy and much-hyped gathering put forward no meaningful demands. Its leadership are entirely devoid of a programme. Being anti-migration (ie, opposed to human movement) is not a programme; it is akin to being against the tide, or the rising of the moon.
The essence of the platform’s demands was simply this: more capitalism please! More oppression. More poverty. More war. Along with a repeated call to “stop the boats” to reinforce the idea that capitalism only doesn’t work because of a few penniless and half-starved workers crossing the channel in plastic dinghies.
Divide and rule: the essence of successful imperialist control
Great play was made of the inclusion of black Britons in the crowd and on the stage. Apparently, this is supposed to prove that the organisers and their demands are not racist.
But the whole essence of the event was precisely to divide people along racial and ethnic lines. To engender suspicion; to reinforce prejudice; to point the finger of blame; to tie native-born workers more tightly to the coattails of their own exploiters by virtue of some shared “Britishness” that those accused of “destroying our way of life” are inherently incapable of participating in.
What those in the crowd who were mobilised (as opposed to those who were simply paid) have not yet understood is that we live under a dictatorship of wealth. And this dictatorship feeds off the blood of the exploited and keeps itself in power by dividing the toiling masses against themselves.
This is at the root of our misery, not the arrival of other, even poorer and more vulnerable, workers on our shores.
Narrative management
Two aspects of the event were telling regarding the ruling class’s backing for a group that is being presented to us as “dissident”.
One was the appearance of tech billionaire Elon Musk via live link-up. This was both a well-funded and very carefully curated ‘rebellion’ of the type that Musk specialises in helping to stir under the much-abused banner of “freedom of speech”.
Second was the theatrical staging of a ceremony whereby some paint-daubed young men in somewhat ludicrous tribal costumes ripped apart first a ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ / ‘Islamic state’ and then a Palestinian flag while agent Yaxley-Lennon egged them on over the mic, giving away the truly pro-imperialist. pro-zionist and islamophobic character of the entire event.
We should note in passing that both Isis and the Muslim Brotherhood have been notorious in their dealings with the British and American imperialists. The Brotherhood has a long and complex history, but in many instances has degenerated to the level of a security asset of western imperialism. As for Isis, it is an obvious and unadulterated intelligence asset and proxy military force of Anglo-American imperialism, which has been used across the middle east and Africa to devastating and genocidal effect.
This islamophobic, anti-Palestine ‘ceremony’ – conducted, disgustingly, in the very midst of the ongoing Nato/Israeli genocides in Palestine, Syria, Yemen and the wider region – can only be seen as a mark of deepest servility to the warmongering billionaires of Wall Street and the City of London.
This was an act of Tommy’s ‘solidarity’ not with British workers, but with his paymasters. And it mirrors a political shift from his ‘pure racist’, jew-hating roots in the British National party (BNP) toward his present focus on islamophobic rhetoric and agitation in particular.
This anti-muslim agitation is being massively amplified not only by right-wing media moguls like Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch but also by the BBC and the entire corporate imperialist media, not only by Nigel Farage and the Reform party but also by Labour and Tory governments, prime minister Keir Starmer and opposition leader Kemi Badenoch alike. And it dovetails neatly with the wave of colonial wars being fought by Anglo-American imperialism across the middle east, helping to demonise the victims of those wars, since all the targeted lands – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine – are muslim-majority nations.
This narrative also supports the racial supremacism of the zionist settler-colonial state of Israel – a deeply embedded part of the imperialist machinery of regional and even global control.
Moreover, it provides a convenient scapegoat, allowing the ruling class to cast the blame for the increasing exploitation and deteriorating living standards of British workers onto a wholly innocent section of the British working population, while creating a backdrop for isolating and politically repressing the anti-genocide, anti-zionist – and increasingly anti-imperialist – pro-Palestine movement, which refuses to die despite the best efforts of the state and its controlled opposition groups.
The Butcher’s Apron
We note also that there is a growing campaign, repeated by those on the march but embracing almost all our mainstream politicians including Labour ministers, to try to claim that there is nothing ‘far right’ about waving the British Union Jack or the English George’s Cross.
And while that might be true in the context of a football match, it must be recognised that even there, that symbol – like the US flag and the French tricolour – was dubbed by the Irish and is known the world over as the ‘Butcher’s Apron’ because of the sheer volume of atrocities our ruling class has committed under its banner. Many of which were committed against British workers here at home, if we would but remember our own history.
These are not merely ‘historical’ grievances, long buried and left behind. Britain is right now overseeing genocides in Palestine, Ukraine and Congo, to name just three. And our financier ruling class perpetrates quiet genocides in every nation on earth where poverty exists so that profits can be maximised, including right here in the ‘United’ Kingdom.
British workers must ditch supremacism to progress
This is not yet a fascist movement, any more than the crowds that throng British streets for royal weddings and funerals. It is a show of loyalty to the empire and the ruling class.
It is a demonstration of superiority by the kind of ‘ordinary, decent British workers’ who have been brought up on the thin gruel of British supremacy and British exceptionalism, who sense that the old world is falling apart and hope that waving the Union Jack might somehow bring it back.
Workers must learn the lessons that life is trying to teach them. The whole framing of the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally made clear how heavily big capital is investing in the allegedly ‘organic’ and ‘grassroots’ ‘movements’ that are being promoted through corporate media and monopoly-controlled (anti-)social platforms.
The appearance of one of the world’s richest men to lord it over the crowd he had rented for the occasion should have given participants at least a hint of who was pulling their strings.
Big-tech Bro is watching you
Elon Musk, the product of apartheid-era South Africa and Wall Street, doesn’t give a damn about British workers. He was literally live-streamed from his corporate office in New York to address the crowd, wearing a great masonic eye on his chest under the words “What would Orwell think?” The personification of a great global censorship regime claimed to be “defending free speech” while he and his big tech cronies are building a Big Brother machinery whose tentacles of coercion and control far outstrip anything envisioned by the dystopian author himself.
The very promotion of notorious anticommunist author George Orwell, whose dystopian vision is falsely promoted as being a critique of ‘communism’, was a further historical reference to the control of the capitalist class over the workers. Not only in his writings, but in his day-to-day work, Orwell was an assiduous servant of the British imperial state, whether as a colonial policeman in Burma or as an MI5 agent working in the ‘Information Research Department’ (IRD) – a forerunner of today’s Brigade 77, Integrity Initiative, and general regime of media-state psychological control.
The truth is that it is the monopoly-capitalist regime that engages both ‘thought police’ and political police. ‘Unite the Kingdom’ jamboree represents not a break from, but a continuation and escalation of, that very British regime.
And through it all, Tommy was gesturing to his rent-a-mob and obsequiously calling on them to thank Elon for “giving us free speech”. Of course, he who pays the piper calls the tune, but even the shameless Robinson looked somewhat uncomfortable delivering his pre-scripted lines!
Who is Tommy Robinson?
Now 42 years old, Steven Yaxley-Lennon adopted his ‘Tommy Robinson’ alias in honour of a prominent Luton Town football hooligan, who was known for terrorising Luton’s Pakistani community. He started out as a small trader and a member first of the fascist British National party (BNP) and then of the British Freedom party before co-founding the English Defence League (EDL) in 2009, which he led until 2013. He went on to set up the British chapter of the anti-islamic Pediga organisation, and has also been closely involved with Ukip.
Rapper Lowkey has published a useful background on Yaxley-Lennon, from which we have taken the following information. The EDL’s cofounder was ‘Paul Ray’, who had previously worked for Mossad, infiltrating the Palestine solidarity-focused International Solidarity Movement (ISM). (Among the ISM’s number was well-known US martyr Rachel Corrie, who was murdered by the Israeli army in 2003 as she tried to protect a Palestinian home in the West Bank.)
The EDL’s whole foundation and genesis has been deeply integrated with zionism. When Yaxley-Lennon’s personal assistant registered the group as a political party in 2017, she did so under the name ‘The English and Jewish Defence League’.
The party had previously been registered as a financial entity at Companies House by a former Israeli solider, Roberta Moore, who was also the leader of the EDL’s ‘Jewish unit’. This unit regularly collaborated with the Zionist Federation, chaired at that time by one Jonathan Hoffman. Moore and Hoffman were notorious racists who, along with their loyalty to the apartheid settler-colonial project in Palestine, were assiduous promoters of anti-Arab and anti-islamic racism throughout Europe.
Their position was so extreme that they praised mass murderer Anders Brevik, who in 2011 had published a manifesto demanding the expulsion of all muslims from Europe before massacring more than 70 people at a youth camp in Norway. With deep roots in the zionist and Israeli establishment, Moore and Hoffman were prominent anti-Corbyn campaigners, regularly appearing outside his rallies while he was Labour party leader.
In 2012, the EDL’s registered financial name was changed to the Jewish Defence League (JDL) UK Ltd – indicating its status as the UK wing of a group that is actually listed as a terrorist organisation in the USA. The JDL’s US founder, Meir Kahane, was an Israeli fascist who openly advocated for the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine – ie, for the current genocide that we are now witnessing in Gaza to be rolled out across the whole historic territory of Palestine. He was assassinated in New York in 1990.
Who pays Tommy Robinson?
Robinson was able to professionalise his image and rebrand himself as a ‘journalist’ when he received a ‘Shillman fellowship’ – a programme run by the anti-islamic ‘nonprofit’ David Horowitz Freedom Centre (DHFC). The DHFC is a California-based think tank that describes itself as a “school for political warfare”. It shares backers – including billionaire Robert Shillman – with the ‘Friends of the IDF’ and with illegal settlers in Palestine’s occupied West Bank.
Via Shillman’s fellowship, Robinson was paid to work for right-wing Canadian media website RebelMedia, with a salary of around £8,000 a month. He was appointed alongside well-known US zionist Ben Shapiro, who has been omnipresent in Murdoch media over the last two years vociferously defending the genocide in Gaza. According to the Observer, Robinson was paid around £85k in 2017-18 via this connection.
Another US think tank, the Middle East Forum (MEF), based in Philadelphia, acknowledges spending about $60,000 (£47,000) on Robinson’s legal fees and demonstrations staged in London during the same period. The MEF’s head is Greg Roman, a former employee of the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs and ministry of defence, and its anti-islamic output was quoted 13 times by Anders Brevik in his ‘manifesto’ for the ethnic cleansing of Europe.
Tommy Robinson has been on at least one all-expenses-paid tour of Israel, where he was pictured in 2016 holding a semi-automatic rifle while standing atop an IDF tank in the occupied Syrian Golan heights. Simple tourists do not get to play war games with the military.
He toured occupied areas and illegal settlements in the West Bank, and filmed himself after a drinking session stating that he would fight for Israel. In that video he essentially announced having made an agreement with the zionists, after which he had bought “everything”. Clearly, he is being very well paid for his demagogic services to the zionist and Anglo-American imperialist elite.
At the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ event, Robinson told the crowd: “It’s not just Britain that is being invaded, it’s not just Britain that is being raped. Every single western nation faces the same problem: an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens is happening.”
Cohosts of Unite the Kingdom – radical christian and zionist racists
Billionaire backer Elon Musk brought together a host of Europe’s most rabidly racist (extreme far-right islamophobic ‘christian’) political voices to share Robinson’s platform in central London, including:
- France’s far-right journalist/politician Éric Zemmour.
- Dutch racist Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a far-right zionist activist who describes herself as the “Schieldmaiden of the far right”.
- New Zealand’s Brian Tamaki, an ultra-conservative christian fundamentalist of Tainui heritage who leads the so-called ‘Destiny Church’. He told the rally that western countries need to “Ban any type of public expression in our christian nation from other religions. Ban halal, ban burkas, ban mosques, ban temples, ban shrines.”
- Ant Middleton, a former special forces and Royal Marines soldier turned reality TV star turned far-right commentator who is planning to run for London mayor and is linked to the Reform party.
- Australian Avi Yemini, a far-right commentator and former IDF soldier who describes himself as a “proud zionist” and “proudly anti-Islam”.
- Canadian Ezra Levant, a media entrepreneur and founder of Rebel News (where Tommy Robinson was ‘employed’) who is described as “Canada’s jewish Steve Bannon”. At the rally, Levant called for an end to the “bizarre preference for foreign people and foreign ideas over national ideas”.
- Laurence Fox, a former actor and public-school boy from an old British acting family turned right-wing activist. Fox set up the Reclaim party in 2020 and unsuccessfully stood in the 2021 London mayoral and 2024 London assembly elections.
- Belgian Filip Dewinter, a leading figure in the right-wing Flemish nationalist and separatist Vlaams Belang party. This is a rebrand of Vlaams Blok, which was forced to disband in 2004 after violating anti-racism laws. Its ideological roots trace back to Flemish nationalist movements that included Nazi collaborators in WW2.
- Danish Morten Messerschmidt, the far-right leader of the Danish People’s party and a former MEP who regularly speaks about how “unsafe” his country has become owing to immigration. Earlier this month, he said the country’s “new reality” was one of “rapes, assaults, murders and islamic infiltration”.
- Ben Habib, formerly and MEP and deputy chair for Reform UK and currently chair of rival far-right party Advance UK, which was one of the sponsors of the rally. Tommy Robinson joined his party last month, which is also supported by Musk. Being of British-Pakistani parenthood and Pakistani-born, Habib is a curious figure who doesn’t seem to fit the Robinson mould, but he’s also a property investor, with impeccably British bourgeois finances, education and instincts. He was educated at Rugby public school and Cambridge university, and worked for the US-based Lehman Brothers bank before starting his own company – First Property Investment Group. Habib is therefore a multimillionaire, a natural Tory who migrated to Reform and then quit in November 2024, citing “fundamental differences” with leader Nigel Farage over issues including Brexit, the party structure and immigration – specifically that Habib backs “mass deportations”. He is a supporter of the notorious racist Rupert Lowe, who was booted out of Reform in March and now sits as the independent MP for Great Yarmouth. On breaking with Reform, Habib said: “I’m not in it for political advancement … I’m doing this because I have an absolute belief that the country is facing an existential threat.” For him, as with Musk, politics is all business! Addressing the rally in London, Habib opined: “We must not forget” that Britain is “a christian country”.
- Spanish Ada Lluch, a high-profile right-wing influencer and Trump supporter whose social media accounts combine modelling shots with vitriolic rants about how “European females” are “literally terrified” of speaking out against mass immigration. Lluch is a prolific poster, calling for “remigration now”. One of her recent posts stated: “When I see a white person wearing a Palestine keffiyeh I immediately [sic] know they are retarded.” Lluch mocked “Greta Thunberg and her ugly friends”, calling the Sumud Flotilla mission to break the siege on Gaza and deliver aid to Palestinians a “scam”. On 17 September, she wrote that people are welcome to call her far right if that means “I want to live in a country where I don’t have to worry about being raped by third-world migrants.”
Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and Canadian psychologist-turned-influencer Jordan Peterson had been billed to speak, but failed to appear.
All the above leads inexorably to the conclusion that the wave of ‘anti-immigrant’ sentiment we are witnessing in Britain has not sprung organically from within the ranks of working class. It is being systematically seeded there by a ruling elite that is desperate to perpetuate its reign of wage-slavery, genocidal wars and global looting – and which needs to pacify the rising discontent of the British and wider European workers in order to do so.
The working men have no country
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels summed up the situation very well when they wrote: “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.” They did not mean that we have no differences of history, language or cultural heritage. They meant that the modern nation has been built by and for the bourgeois capitalist class, and does not represent or belong to the workers. We are fools to identify ourselves with the structures of our oppressors and exploiters.
Those who brandish the Union Jack are waving the flag of the billionaire elite who own the land, the capital, the press and the politics of this country – and of much of the world. The same ones who make ‘their own’ workers homeless, are forcing a cost-of-living crisis onto them, pay them minimum wages and below, and discipline them via the state machinery if they step out of line.
Today’s flag-waving, roundabout-painting ‘patriots’ are dancing to their exploiters’ tune. They are campaigning against their own economic and political interests. This is, above all, a movement that leads to the continued slavery of those who participate.
If this movement can be compared to any other in history, it most resembles the Black Hundreds of tsarist Russia. In the early 1900s, gangs of empire-loyal workers were mobilised and backed by the Russian state to inflict the most brutal violence on their fellow workers. Much like Mussolini’s Italian blackshirts two decades later, they were intended to crush the growing militancy of a rising working class.
But no such efforts were successful in stopping the great revolutions of 1917 sweeping away overlords and lackeys of all kinds. The Black Hundreds could not save tsarism or imperialism in Russia. Nor could they prevent the Soviet working class from forging ahead with building the foundations for a bright new future for humanity – a planned socialist economy dedicated to providing for the mass of the people, and the enlightened political rule of the workers themselves.
To those who look at such scenes as the Unite the Kingdom rally in dismay: remember that the people’s will for freedom is stronger than atom bombs. When the time comes, we will have no difficulty in commissioning a new flag for the revolutionary People’s Republic of Great Britain, which will settle historical scores with the criminal ruling capitalist elite – a banner that will justly instil pride in the hearts of the working people of Britain and, indeed, all nations.
At that point, when the country, its land, its wealth and its economy (based upon our own hard work and planning) belong to the working people; when we have control over our domestic and foreign policy, no doubt we will be guided by the principle that every person who comes to us with an open heart and good will has one mouth to feed, but two hands with which to work and build.
When unemployment and poverty no longer grind the working people down, we will be able to talk about our border policy – and indeed every other policy – from the enlightened view of the self-interest of the workers of Britain, which is in no ways contradictory to that of the workers of all other nations.
Don’t despair, organise!
