Silence about the bigotry inherent in events like Tommy Robinson’s march will be seen by the thugs as tacit approval of their message
I
have been on a great many political marches in my time. But Saturday’s rally, facing up to Tommy Robinson’s 110,000-strong “unite the kingdom” march in London, was the only one where I actually felt threatened.
I was on the anti-racist counter march and we were outnumbered 20 to one. This was startling: on anti-racist marches, we usually easily outnumber the racists. The march organised by Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was billed as “a free speech rally”, but free speech in this case seemed to mean people saying anything they wanted about only one subject: immigration.
Some commentators like to say that mobilisations such as this are only expressions of discontent by people who feel a little ignored. If they had been in central London on Saturday and seen 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, they might want to reconsider that view. The kind of people who were marching usually take exception to being called racists. But it is hard to know what else to call those of them who gathered in the capital to demand mass deportation and insist that black and brown men are a unique threat to white women.
