Tommy Robinson’s much-hyped Unite the Kingdom march and rally in central London failed to live up to the hype and was a low-energy affair.

While Robinson claimed that “millions are in attendance” and it was the “biggest patriotic display ever”, the numbers appeared to be substantially down from the “free speech rally” last September, which drew over 100,000 participants. The Met Police put yesterday’s numbers at 60,000. Other estimates were lower.

Snatch squad

Defining moments of the far-right day out included the arrest of Raise the Colours loudmouth Ryan Bridges at Euston station, before the event began, who was hustled away in handcuffs after a squad of police officers snatched him from among his irate supporters.

The Metropolitan Police said two men were arrested near Euston station – one of whom was wanted on suspicion of grievous bodily harm following an incident in Birmingham, and was spotted arriving in London to attend the Unite the Kingdom rally.

The second man was wanted for a separate offence which involved encouraging people to attack a police officer, the force added.

The arrests followed RtC activists’ involvement in a violent incident on Thursday night when a man’s leg was broken in a hit-and-run, amid angry scenes in Birmingham, which unfolded when a group attached St George’s flags to lamp-posts.

Divine mandate

Videos on social media showed rows between groups of people after men from RtC arrived  to erect flags – the group’s latest visit following confrontations with local residents last year.

Bridge, who was in Stirchley and features in several of the videos, told the BBC he did not know anything about the road crash.

Meanwhile, the ongoing project attempting to cloak Robinson’s Islamophobia and phony patriotism in the holy vestments of Christianity and claim a divine mandate for a platform that thrives on hatred and division was given the hard-press at the Unite the Kingdom rally.

A large pile of wooden crucifixes was laid out along the march route, collected and held aloft by protestors as they passed. A cleric led the Lord’s Prayer from the stage, though his encouragement for the crowd to join in revealed that, for the most part, those gathered either didn’t know it or found it too embarrassing.

On the fringes of the march, neo-nazis plied their poisonous ideologies.

Leading figures from Patriotic Alternative, Mark Collett and Sam Melia, uploaded a picture to social media of themselves at the march, in front of a “Stop White Replacement” banner. With them was Steve Laws, a member of Restore Britain and one of Rupert Lowe’s main nazi promoters.

They bragged they had handed out 15,000 leaflets to Robinson’s followers, but they were “off home before Tommy…makes a mockery of the patriots attending”. A similar banner that read “End Zionist Occupation of Britain. Stop White Replacement” was displayed by fascists from White Vanguard.

At the rally, Robinson laid out his political agenda – fighting the next general election. “Are you ready for the Battle of Britain…If you don’t get involved, we are going to lose our country forever”.  When he name-checked the UK’s right-wing parties, far-right Restore Britain, which includes a fascist faction, got the loudest cheer from the crowd.

Afterward, there was little to energise the crowd. Eleven of Robinson’s star foreign speakers had been banned by the Home Secretary from entering the country.

Advance Party leader Ben Habib was the only speaker from a far-right political party, and he crashed and burned.

Uninspired

After leading the crowd in an uninspired call-and-response of “Keir Starmer is a… wanker”, his microphone cut out, and he spent most of the remainder of his allotted time trying to find one that worked.

The night before Unite the Kingdom, Danny Tommo, Robinson’s sidekick and a wannabe far-right, anti-immigrant influencer, attempted a fire-and-brimstone call to arms in an X post.  “We are not coming to London to wave flags, we are not coming to London to walk down roads. We are coming to London to defend our children, our country, our heritage, and the future of this country…Make no mistake on the 16th of May, things change”.

Except they didn’t.