You’ve almost certainly seen the filmed footage of a woman being viciously attacked by a mob of violent hooligans at Nigel Farage’s party conference in Birmingham last weekend. But it is the people in the background who really chill the blood.
The faces filled with glee are somehow more upsetting than the ones contorted with hate. In the UK in 2026, a woman who dared to heckle an elected politician is being brutalised and battered in the middle of a crowd while attendees of the conference of a supposedly respectable and mainstream political party look on with visceral delight.
Last year, the same conference cheered a woman who had been rightly jailed for urging murderous violence against entirely innocent people. This year, senior party figures like Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson competed to see who could treat the victims of genuine political violence at the hands of their own cultish followers with the most contempt. Hashtag save our women. Hashtag protect our girls.
The photographs of the few hundred black-shirted, “fighting age” men who descended on Dover the next day and Portsmouth the day after merit rather less scrutiny. Their faces are completely covered, rendering their identities even harder to clarify than their motives. Some pseudo-patriotic nonsense about protecting communities by descending on them dressed like ersatz paramilitaries, or somehow repelling refugees by showing them that this is a country where mob rule and violence are as common as they are in the countries they have fled.
