Unite the Kingdom!

The optics of the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London yesterday were interesting. The flags were predominantly the St George’s Cross, which was appropriate for a march designed for the former leader of the English Defence League. But there was also the Butcher’s Apron and a smattering of Israeli flags. There were very few arrests (reportedly twenty-five from a crowd of 110,000), presumably because these people weren’t opposing genocide. Last weekend over 900 peaceful protestors were arrested for holding up signs. Two-tier policing, you could say.

‘Unite the Kingdom’ sounds like some Arthurian plotline, but it does rest on the idea of a Britain that exists and can exist, and needs ‘uniting’, all of which seems far-fetched at this stage. Uniting the Kingdom seems like a noble cause at first, until you realise that ‘the Kingdom’ will be ‘united’ by the stench of burnt-out asylum hostels and the rancid rhetoric of Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson and Éric Zemmour.

Some were a bit more philosophical about the whole thing. The left-leaning Labour MP Clive Lewis posted this tweet about his pal who was on the march, telling us: “He wore a Union Jack, not a St George’s Cross as he said that one had been hijacked by racists.”

Such commentary is blissfully unaware of how the Union flag plays outside of England as a symbol of ‘unity’.

Lewis explained that: “He wasn’t there for Hopkins, Musk, or any of the professional ‘grifters’ as he put it. He was there to feel part of something bigger, though he admitted there were a lot of, in his words, “assholes” there. He’s an electrician. He’s smart. He’s not racist, but he’s not “PC” either. He’s not a fan of Keir Starmer but he also believes Farage would be a disaster. Oh yes, he’s a bundle of contradictions! But aren’t we all? I don’t know what ‘box’ we put him or the millions like him in. And I think pretending they’re all racists or fascists would be a massive mistake. Some were. But not all.”

Lewis continued: “That’s what I saw in my friend’s photos. Not just anger, but a demand for belonging. We’ve replaced collective experience with atomisation. Without getting too nostalgic, programmes like the BBC’s Generation Game once pulled in millions every Saturday night, giving us something we could all talk about on Monday morning. Now we watch Netflix, Disney+, Prime, or Paramount, alone, in algorithmic silos. Football used to be affordable and rooted in community; now it’s millionaires playing for the profitability of billionaires. The NHS, the post office, the railways – all chipped away, run down, sold off or centralised, leaving people feeling powerless and disconnected.”

All of this is true, but would make more sense if many of these things hadn’t been done under Labour governments, and would be more compelling if the current Labour government wasn’t clinging to a policy of appeasing and aping the far-right in a desperate attempt to remain in office.

There is a question of agency and choice here. The choice to join such an event can’t be explained away by the loss of Bruce Forsyth or the algorithm, or SKY’s sponsorship of the English Premier League. When you want to ‘belong to something,’ who dons a Union Jack and goes along to a march organised by Tommy Robinson?

The Musk-Robinson Alliance

Yesterday in London, Lampost Climbers made common-cause with Elon Musk who intervened in British politics saying: “Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”

Echoing his former boss, Musk – in a video link to the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, told the crowd that “Violence is coming” and that “You either fight back or you die”. It should be noted that Musk, reputedly the second richest man in the world, actively supports the AfD in Germany, Advance UK and Tommy Robinson over Nigel Farage. For Musk, Farage isn’t extreme enough.

Hope Not Hate reported that Tommy Robinson joined Ben Habib’s Advance UK in August and is urging his followers to do the same. So, while all of the attention has been on Farage’s party’s advances, there is also the potential for a more extreme version to emerge backed with Musk’s money. Even as Farage lays out the most extreme plan for Britain in your lifeline [This is Not Normal – Bella Caledonia] he can still be described by Robinson as full of ‘establishment lies‘.

The trajectory of English politics (and Disaster Nationalism everywhere) is ever-rightwards, with seemingly no threshold, no railguard and no counter-narrative to thwart the advance of the far-right.

Clustered Publics

There are competing explanations for this upsurge of nativist politics, white nationalism, far-right populism, neo-fascism, or whatever words you want to use to describe the protest on Saturday. It’s post-Brexit England where none of the genies let out of the bottle have been put away. None of the dark energy that Brexit released has been satisfied. Nor will they ever be.

There’s certainly the complete failure of the Labour ‘alternative’ to make a material difference to peoples lives, and in doing so, countering the story that ‘the country’s’ demise was down to the people seeking asylum in Britain.

There’s certainly the impact of the tabloid media which has championed Farage and his followers as clickbait for years, as has the state broadcaster (Reform, with 0.6% of all MPs, featured in 25% of BBC’s recent 10pm news bulletins).

There’s certainly also the impact of social media, brilliantly un-packed earlier in the summer by William Davies [TV Meets Fruit Machine: Faragist TikTok]. Davies notes the phenomenon of ‘TikTokisation’, where the goal of every platform is to keep serving up whatever content seems likeliest to retain a user’s attention “for another few seconds, no matter how useless, weird or unpleasant.” He writes:

“TikTokisation deepens an already existing anxiety about the decline of text-based news consumption (manifest not only in falling newspaper sales, but slackening attention to online news sources as well). As early as 2001, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein expressed his fear that the internet would be a cause of political ghettoisation. Algorithmic curation is a powerful mechanism for realising that fear. The political and media theorist Paolo Gerbaudo has argued that platforms such as TikTok shrug at liberal ideals of a diverse and shared public sphere, accelerating our drift towards ‘clustered publics’, in which parallel communities are generated around niche interests and identities, but whose governing logic (what distinguishes the cluster and where its boundaries lie) can never be known.

There is another familiar worry, that social media platforms have an inbuilt propensity to push extreme content, with the result that users are lured into the hands of the radical and far right.”

So it’s a perfect storm, a toxic soup of social alienation, political failure, grotesque social inequality, manipulation by (anti) social media, and exploitation by bad-faith actors and Tech Lords.

There’s also the deterioration of standards in public life, and this doesn’t just mean corrupt politicians and an entire system that people have become alienated from. It also means things like this;

Fox News casually suggesting that we mass murder homeless people

Fox News casually suggesting that we mass murder homeless people.

“Or involuntary lethal injection or something. Just kill them.”

Universal healthcare, housing, and anti-poverty programs are considered more “radical” on Fox News than mass murder.pic.twitter.com/3dPRjoGnqk

— Melanie D’Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) September 13, 2025

Or this:

Oh wow, he really said that. pic.twitter.com/UVRA6Fj04r

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) September 13, 2025

It adds to the feeling of violence that saturates our world today, nothing more than the collusion with ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing does.

But the homeless issue – and the eugenics response – points to a feature of Late Capitalist political culture. As Jason L Myles puts it:

“Homeless encampments have grown far beyond their stereotypical urban landscape and have begun to consume areas of middle class suburban bedroom communities that were designed to shield residents from such sights. This is not the screenplay of the opening scene of a science fiction movie; this is the current state of one of the richest countries in the world.”

The answer, like almost everything is not to confront, resolve or transcend the problem, it’s just to remove it. So the answer to climate crisis is just to change nothing. The answer to fuel poverty is to change nothing. The answer to crushing poverty is Food Banks.

So far, so dystopian.

What routes out of this are there?

So, Now What?

In terms of specific solutions to the crisis of British politics represented by Unite the Kingdom! There aren’t easy answers.

The issue of silo culture and the attention economy described by Paolo Gerbaudo & Co are a global phenomenon, not a local one. They can only be resolved by a mixture of media literacy; an analogue revolution and a takedown of techlord power, none of which seem immediately likely.

It may be that if Musk/Robinson/Farage/Habib succeed in creating an English ethno-state, and taking power at Westminster, such will be the revulsion that a counter-politics emerges. It may well be that such a politics is already emergent in the forms of Your Party or the newly resurgent Green Party. But success for such groups would require a level of discipline and openness, savvy and ‘cut through’ that we have never seen by a British Left for eighty years. Having said that, the collapse of centrism means that ‘populism’ isn’t confined to the right.

It may be that the chaotic and borderline criminal (or not so borderline) characters that Reform and Advance attract are jailed for any number of offences, as we’ve already seen happen. Though that movement’s ability to throw up and fund any number of replacement candidates and figureheads should not be underestimated. These are not really charismatic people, they are well-funded people.

Or, it may be that the emergence of such a putrid form of ‘right-wing populism’ may create the conditions for Scotland to finally unite and leave.  But this is of course, highly problematic, both in terms of the state of the independence movement and the reality of becoming the northern neighbour of what such a state would look like. However, history doesn’t always deal you the hand you want, and if the choice was between being part of a Farage-led British ethno-state, or a Scottish democracy, few would have difficulty choosing.

The problem is that if what we are seeing is systems’ collapse then the only real solution is system change. Scottish independence, in and of itself would not necessarily meet that challenge/criteria. It would be a seismic change to Britain, or the British constitution, but the problems and crisis we face are way beyond the merely constitutional.

Instead of escaping through the escape-hatch of such a hellish scenario, it would be far better to help create the conditions for an alter-England /alter-post Britain to emerge. Instead of this seemingly inevitable slide we would need to fight with radical forces in England, Wales and Ireland for an alternative prospectus: Hope Not Hate, Republics not Kingdoms, peace not violence, joy not fear.