Numbers don’t lie. So says Tommy Robinson, who claims his ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally was ‘the largest protest in British history,’ bringing ‘three million patriots on to the streets of London‘.
The Metropolitan Police reckon he’s wrong, by a factor of almost 30, putting the actual crowd size at somewhere in the region of 110,000. Other estimates vary from 75,000 to around 150,000.
Whoever you choose to believe, attendance figures aren’t the only topic of heated debate in the aftermath of Saturday’s pro-free speech, anti-immigration event.
Both supporters and opponents of Robinson have spent the week sharing lurid conspiracy theories about the whole thing, many of them pegged to faked social media videos or misleadingly edited footage of proceedings.
Disputes over the nature and atmosphere of the event in Westminster meanwhile continue to be fought on the airwaves and in the news pages, where claims and counter-claims involving racism, violence and elaborate cover-ups continue to do the rounds.
Robinson, a former BNP member who founded the English Defence League, blames the hysteria on ‘legacy media, politicians and Leftists’ arguing that his political opponents have been sent into ‘a meltdown of lies, attacks and manipulation attempts’ by the lively protest.
Critics, for their part, argue that the 42-year-old former football hooligan, who boasts a string of criminal convictions, is the one telling porkies.
So was this a proud celebration of British values? Or a something less wholesome? Here’s what the evidence shows…
While the exact attendance numbers are disputed, there’s no doubt that thousands turned up to Saturday’s Unite the Kingdom march in London
Tommy Robinson, a former BNP member who founded the English Defence League, at the march
The logistics
Robinson began planning the event on May 29, after his release from HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes, where he was jailed for seven months after breaching a 2021 injunction barring him from making false allegations against a Syrian refugee who successfully sued him for libel.
On a video posted to X, where he boasts 1.6 million followers, he declared: ‘On 13th September, we don’t just Unite the Kingdom, we Unite the World. Every patriot is invited to take part in the biggest patriotic free-speech rally to hit the earth.’
The clip, which clocked up half a million views, contained footage of rural churches and war memorials interspersed with mugshots of Asian grooming gang members, plus a photo of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner ‘taking the knee’ during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests.
‘Our freedoms are slowly being eradicated,’ Robinson said. ‘Freedom of speech is taking huge hits, we will not surrender it!’
On the day, organisers, who included a group called ‘Football Lads Against Grooming Gangs’ asked supporters to meet on Stamford Street, near Waterloo Station, at 11am, before walking across Westminster Bridge to Whitehall, where speakers would address the crowd.
A ‘Stand Up to Racism’ counter-protest, supported by the PCS and other trade unions, was staged at the top end of Whitehall, adjacent to Trafalgar Square. A thousand police officers used barriers to create a ‘sterile area’ separating the two.
Was it 110,000 – or three million?
The Metropolitan Police used CCTV and helicopter footage to estimate the number of people. They said ‘Unite the Kingdom’ attracted 110,000 protesters, while ‘Stand Up to Racism’ managed 5,000. Media estimates put turnout as high as 150,000.
Robinson reckons the real figure was ‘THREE million patriots,’ a figure equivalent to a third of the population of Greater London. If true, it would mean one in 20 people in England was at the event, making it between two or three times bigger than any protest in British History. So who’s right?
The Metropolitan Police used CCTV and helicopter footage to estimate the number of people. They said ‘Unite the Kingdom’ attracted 110,000 protesters, while ‘Stand Up to Racism’ managed 5,000. Media estimates put turnout as high as 150,000
Accurately gauging crowd sizes is notoriously difficult. But one of the most qualified experts is Professor Milad Haghani, founder of Crowd Safety Summit, which aims to reduce preventable deaths at large-scale gatherings.
He told reporters that the best way to estimate turnout is to use aerial photographs to establish how big an area the attendees covered. In a densely packed crowd, there are generally four people covering every square metre.
Video footage taken by the Guardian shortly before 11am shows Stamford Street clogged with protesters stretching from the IMAX cinema in Waterloo to the Mad Hatter hotel in Southwark – a distance of 700 metres. The road is approximately 20 metres wide. ‘That gives about 56,000 [protesters],’ he said.
‘Including an additional 10,000 [protesters] at each end… we only reach roughly 76,000.
‘However I run the numbers, it’s very difficult to make it to 100,000.’
It’s possible that large numbers of extra people arrived after 11am. Or that the Guardian’s video didn’t include footage of crowds converging from different areas of London. But it seems fanciful to conclude that millions of people attended Saturday’s event.
Violence and arrests
Robinson called on attendees not to wear masks, drink alcohol or be violent, stating: ‘It’s not a time for riots. It’s not a time for violence. It’s a time where you come and you stand proudly for your country… We have to control ourselves.’
Not everyone got the message. At 3.02pm, police were ‘attacked with projectiles’ by ‘Unite the Kingdom’ protesters attempting to ‘enter the sterile area in place to keep the two protests apart,’ the Metropolitan Police said. ‘Officers were attacked with projectiles and have had to use force to avoid their cordon being breached.’
At 3.40pm, they said violence was occurring ‘in multiple locations’ with ‘officers assaulted’.
At 3.02pm, police were ‘attacked with projectiles’ by ‘Unite the Kingdom’ protesters attempting to ‘enter the sterile area in place to keep the two protests apart,’ the Metropolitan Police said
Officers then ‘faced unacceptable violence,’ the Force claims. ‘They were assaulted with kicks and punches. Bottles, flares and other projectiles were thrown.’
The Met said that the injuries to the police included ’11 minor injuries, 11 moderate, four more serious, including an officer who had their teeth knocked out, and another who suffered a prolapsed disc and a head injury’. A total of 24 people were arrested.
Whether this amounts to widespread violence is a matter of opinion. In 2020, 25 people were arrested at a Black Lives Matter march in London, with the BBC describing the whole thing as ‘largely peaceful’.
Meanwhile, last month’s Notting Hill Carnival saw 423 arrests, meaning that 4.3 people were detained for every 10,000 that attended. The equivalent figure for Saturday’s protest was 1.7, making Robinson’s event roughly 2.5 times more law-abiding than the annual street party.
Racism?
Crowds were entertained by an eclectic array of speakers, from such noted rabble-rousers as actor turned political commentator Laurence Fox to a string of hard-right European politicians.
France’s Eric Zemmour told the crowds that the ‘freedom of our peoples is in danger,’ while Denmark’s Morten Messerschmidt said: ‘Wanting safe streets and secure borders does not make us villains, it makes us patriots. Loving your country and protecting your community is not a crime, it is a duty.’
At one point, a preacher from New Zealand called for the banning of non-Christian places of worship and halal food.
At another, Petr Bystron, who represents Alternative for Germany, suggested that mass immigration resulted in ‘our daughters, our sisters, getting raped’ while ‘our brothers, our friends, are getting stabbed when they are defending them’.
Speaking via video link, Elon Musk called for the ‘dissolution of Parliament’ and a ‘change of government’, saying: ‘Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.’
On a lighter note, crowds were entertained by renditions of Elgar’s Nimrod, Land Of Hope And Glory, plus a black gospel choir singing ‘Jerusalem’ and a troupe of Maori dancers performing a ‘Haka’ while ripping apart flags of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and a jihadi banner.
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Views differ as to whether any of this amounted to racism. Diane Abbott, who attended the ‘Stand Up to Racism’ counter-protest, described the behaviour of Robinson’s supporters as ‘racism, pure and simple.’
She wrote in the Guardian that she felt threatened by ‘the sea of men(and they were nearly all men) defiantly waving their St George’s flags, some of them attacking the police and spitting at people like me.’
London Mayor Sadiq Khan issued a statement saying that proceedings ‘take me back to how I felt in the ’70s and ’80s when far-right political parties marched on our streets’, adding that he saw ‘fear, hatred and division being sown’ at the event.
Other prominent minority figures disagree, however. Sir Trevor Phillips, who attended Saturday’s event, said: ‘This was hardly Britain at its most diverse but it was no gathering of white supremacists’, noting that ‘there was a sprinkling of black and brown faces’ and dubbing the crowd ‘the kind of people you would meet at a country pub’.
Conspiracy nonsense
With grim predictability, social media was filled with fake footage purporting to show the event.
One supposed video of proceedings turned out to be a doctored image with the Champs Elysees in the background. Another claimed, falsely, that police footage of crowd violence had actually been taken at Black Lives Matter protests five years ago.
On X – where else? – a prominent Left-wing account posted a behind-the-scene clip of Robinson in which it was alleged that he was using his phone to ask for ‘some more gear, bruv’. The clip, which got almost four million views, was accompanied by a caption suggesting that it showed Robinson ordering cocaine. In fact, the clip showed him telling an associate to ‘park up and walk here, bruv.’
Other wild conspiracists claimed, again falsely, that Sky News had deleted from its social media feeds a video of Trevor Phillips, who has a Sunday morning programme on the channel, talking about ‘how normal the majority of the marchers actually were.’ No such deletion occurred and the clip in question remains on the channel’s website.
