It’s weird being on a night shift as events happen around you, like watching from a different time zone. You wake, scroll, and try to catch up on the analysis that has been pumping out all day. But the question won’t shift: was I correct to say what happened on 13 September should end the illusion that “it can’t happen here”? Are we already at a moment of extreme danger? Has the Labour government, in its passivity and cowardice, played a role in allowing the far right to grow unchallenged? And yes, has the assassination of Charlie Kirk across the Atlantic emboldened these people, giving them a swagger that they had lacked?
Because this was not just a mob of pissed-up, coked-up EDL louts cosplaying “the firm.” Or rather—it was, but something more besides. James Ball’s dispatch from the street captured the surface: the urine-slick pavements, the men shouting for cocaine, the Tesco staff barricading themselves in as the marchers demanded more booze. A “drunken, coked-up mess,” as he put it, and yet a mess capable of drawing 110,000 people into the centre of the capital. That number alone shatters the comforting liberal refrain that Tommy Robinson is a marginal figure and his followers an online mirage.
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“A drunken, coked-up mess, yes—but a mess capable of drawing 110,000 into the heart of the capital.”
Christopher Hitchens once wrote:
“The curse-word ‘fascism’ is easily enough thrown around, including by me on occasion, but I give you my oath that it makes a difference to you when you see the real thing at work.”
That difference has now arrived in Whitehall. It pisses against tube station shutters, yes, but it also marches in disciplined ranks, chants in unison, and swells in number.
And the rhetoric is no longer confined to the pub bore or the Telegram channel. It is piped directly into Whitehall via the world’s richest man. Elon Musk told the Robinson rally:
“You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die.”
He declared:
“The Left is the party of murder and celebrating murder. Let that sink in.”
What did the press do? The Telegraph printed his words verbatim. The Times called his audience “protesters”—as if they were NHS staff on a picket line, not a far-right mob hurling planks and bottles at police, leaving 26 officers injured. This is how liberal euphemism sanitises the reality of fascism. “Protest” becomes the vocabulary of denial.
And what of the government? Peter Kyle describes Musk’s incitement as “slightly incomprehensible.” Starmer, belatedly, thunders that Britain will “never surrender the flag” to the far right. Fuck the flag. Flags do not stop fascism; they license it.
In his interview with the Guardian, Starmer managed to condemn assaults on police officers and racist intimidation, but only after prefacing it all with the line that “people have a right to peaceful protest.” Then came the patriotic crescendo: “Our flag represents our diverse country and we will never surrender it to those that use it as a symbol of violence, fear and division.”
This is not forthrightness, it is displacement. It treats fascism as a branding problem—as if the danger were who gets to “own” the St George’s Cross, not the 110,000 people chanting for Robinson while Musk beams in to demand the dissolution of parliament. Starmer has turned a crisis of democracy into a quarrel about the display of the butcher’s apron.
Kyle, meanwhile, went further down the path of accommodation. Figures such as Robinson, he said, were able to “touch into a sense of disquiet and grievance in the community in our society.” He described the demonstration as a “klaxon call” to address “the big concerns that people right across our country have, and immigration is a big concern.” In other words: treat Robinson as a weather vane, his mob as a focus group.
It took Stella Creasy to push back:
“In spirit of free speech I disagree with Peter Kyle – we can defend right of people to protest and still be concerned that for many watching yesterday purpose behind this event is not freedom but fear. They must be able to march and we must challenge message as not who we are.”
The problem is that Labour does not want to challenge the message. It wants to triangulate with it.
Here Hitchens is the guide again. Writing in The Nation in 1992, he recalled a banner that read “Patriotism not Politics”:
“A very old and cherished illusion, dear to the heart of all those who think conservatism and jingoism are common sense. Lucky is the man who has found novelty in this stale idea. Innocent—or deeply cynical—is the man who takes his politics from it.”
Patriotism is not the antidote to Robinson and Musk, it is their oxygen. To claim the flag as “our diverse country” is to play the same game on slightly different terms. It is precisely this confusion between symbols and politics, between flags and power, that has hollowed out Labour’s response. When Labour ministers embraced the flag over the last few weeks (when they nodded along with “legitimate concerns” about immigration) they set the stage for Robinson to seize it.
“Patriotism is not the antidote to Robinson and Musk, it is their oxygen.”
John Harris, normally a sane voice, notes that Robinson and Farage’s “civil war” narrative is warping voters’ minds, fed by TikTok clips of chaos, crime and collapse. He is right that social media now produces a permanent mood of disorder, a society of the spectacle where riots are rehearsed and replayed until they feel inevitable. The far right understands this loop instinctively: stage a clash, film it, feed it back into the algorithm, watch the numbers swell.
But Harris, like so many liberal commentators, stops at diagnosis. He calls it a “problem for orthodox politicians,” as if the only challenge were how to keep up with the digital tide. Yet it is more than that. This is not a distortion of reality—it is the construction of a new political reality, in which fascist narratives become common sense. And Starmer’s patriotic evasions—“never surrender the flag”—do not puncture this illusion, they reinforce it. They confirm that politics has been reduced to symbols, that Labour too accepts the frame of bunting and grievance.
Meanwhile, in the streets, the consequences were plain. The Met, almost overwhelmed, had to kettle the counter-protesters for their own safety. Anti-fascists, trade unionists, ordinary Londoners who turned out to resist Robinson, were trapped in Trafalgar Square, encircled twenty to one, protected only by frantic lines of riot police who admitted they were “being attacked on all fronts.” This was not some pantomime “protest.” It was a show of force.
“Anti-fascists kettled for their safety, fascists free to roam: that is the measure of 13 September.”
It demonstrated that the far right could dictate the geography of the capital for a day, surround its opponents, and leave 26 officers injured in the process. And yet the media still calls them “protesters.” The Telegraph prints Musk’s incitement verbatim, with no push back. The Times writes of “supporters of Robinson” as if they are fans of a Sunday football pub team. Starmer responds by promising never to surrender the flag. In reality, the flag has already been surrendered: not to Robinson, but to the illusion that patriotism can substitute for politics.
The danger is not just in the grotesque spectacle of men pissing through the bars of Westminster tube. It is in the sheer number. It is in the rhetoric that now passes through the bloodstream of the body politic unchallenged. It is in the refusal to name the danger for what it is.
We must be blunt: this is no longer about whether Britain can “go fascist.” The fact of 13 September proves that it can. The only question is whether it will be stopped.
