London on 16th May could very much be considered a city of contradictions: 60,000 far-right marchers made their way from the Strand to Parliament Square, while 250,000 Nakba Day demonstrators wound their way to Waterloo Place and, somewhere in between, an FA Cup final. This is what it looked like through my own pictures.
On one side, the far-right and anti-Islam figurehead Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, led his ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march and rally, which last year reportedly drew 150,000 people and was labelled ‘a drunken, coked-up mess‘. Whilst the number of attendees was significantly lower this year, the drinking habits of participants definitely did not change, as evidenced by the rally’s finest climbing on top of a bus stop pictured below.
But beyond drinking habits, the more interesting feature of the photo is the large wooden cross being held, with “saviour” written across it. These crosses were a common sight, having been distributed to many attendees, reflecting the rally’s fixation on Christianity as a defining and redemptive British value. This was particularly driven home by the many animated Christian preachers leading the rally in prayer – a soundtrack I endured while taking photos.
However, they were not the worst people to appear on stage. Instead, women from the far-right and femonationalism (the hijacking of feminist language to promote a racist agenda) French Collectif Némésis are well in the running for that award. 3 members, including their leader, Alice Cordier, wore mock burqas on stage, encouraging the crowd to chant “take it off”. After the event, even the human rights organisation Amnesty International UK commented on Instagram that the performance aimed to ridicule and humiliate, turning Muslim women into targets for public mockery in front of cheering crowds.
Unsurprisingly, the Islamophobia did not stop there. One speaker called to “remove Islam from every single place of authority”, whilst another performer covered himself in bacon to “fight Islam”. The juxtaposition of this vile Islamophobia with Christian values clearly reflects the far-right’s clear faux attachment to and weaponisation of religion as a supposed dominating British value.
But particularly amusingly, and embarrassingly for Mr Yaxley-Lennon, was the fact not all of the speakers were human. In fact, the rally was addressed for a few minutes by the AI-generated persona ‘Danny Bones‘, a front for the influencer collective The Node Project, which the far-right party Advance UK had paid to produce its main campaign video for the recent Gorton and Denton by-election.
Screens streaming the rally stage in Parliament Square stretched all the way back to the top of Whitehall, which was sparse in between, suggesting much higher attendance expectations than reality, as Met Police estimates put this year’s turnout at 60,000, compared to last year’s reported 150,000.
And to top it all off, it was incredibly surprising to see that the group who complains the most about the decline of British values and decency saw no problem leaving large amounts of rubbish strewn everywhere. This led to social media videos circulating the ironic headline that “immigrants are cleaning the streets”.
I also spotted another non-human participant, who you can see below, but I’m not sure how willingly he was involved…
However, the Met didn’t deploy 4,000 officers and spend £4.5 million just to police one protest.
An estimated 250,000 people also gathered for the National Nakba Day march, an annual demonstration marking the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, which is the Arabic word for “catastrophe”, referring to the mass killing, displacement, and expulsion of Palestinians during the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. This year, the march was framed as both a display of solidarity with Palestinians and a counter-mobilisation against Yaxley-Lennon and the far-right.
For me, the contrast in atmosphere was stark. Whilst Parliament Square had been loud and beer-soaked, the Nakba march moved with a different kind of energy, helped by the significantly greater number of attendees and reflected in the radiating passion and emotion.
Importantly, families, students, and elderly marchers stood alongside each other to fill the streets in what represented a much greater display of unity than the ironically named “Unite the Kingdom” march could likely ever achieve.
Ultimately, of all the arrests made across the day, 20 came from the Tommy Robinson rally and 12 from the Nakba march. Make of that what you will.
Teen Politics 
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