London’s Rally and the Failure of Politics
By Manu Shrivastava
London’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally, swelling to a staggering 1,50,000 under Tommy Robinson’s lead, wasn’t just an anti-immigration protest. It was a gauntlet thrown at the heart of Britain’s political establishment.
What unfolded on the streets was less about policy and more about identity, less about governance and more about grievance.
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| Tommy Robinson’s 1,50,000-strong rally spotlights Britain’s political turmoil and far-right surge |
For a nation that prides itself on its liberal parliamentary legacy, the sight of seas of Union Jacks, St George’s crosses and even MAGA hats waving in tandem was both telling and troubling.
The scale is what stuns. This wasn’t a fringe gathering; it was a movement commandeering public space in numbers that Westminster’s technocrats can no longer ignore.
Behind the chants of invasion and loss of “Britishness” lies a simmering perception that migration is no longer a policy issue but an existential one.
And here is the peril: when legitimate concerns over jobs, housing and integration are ignored, they are recast as fodder for demagogues who thrive on easy scapegoats and hard rhetoric.
The moment Elon Musk beams into the rally urging protesters to “fight back or die,” the charade of parochial grievance collapses.
London is not alone. This is global.
For the police, it was yet another dance on a tightrope - bottles and flares hurled, officers injured, arrests made, counter-protests corralled away.
If they clamp down hard, they feed the far-right’s narrative of victimhood; if they stand back, they risk turning the city into an amphitheatre of rage.
Either way, the state seems outmanoeuvred, caught between defending democratic freedoms and protecting democratic institutions.
The irony, however, is sharper. A Britain that once sold the world on free speech, tolerance and inclusivity now finds itself torn apart by its own inability to address precisely those values at home.
Robinson and his allies have succeeded not by offering answers but by forcing questions onto the streets—questions the establishment preferred to brush aside.
The parallel with India is glaring. Whether in Assam’s fears of Bangladeshi migration or in the debate over refugee influx at India’s borders, the vacuum left by dithering governments is inevitably filled by loud, divisive voices.
In both London and Guwahati, the lesson is the same: sidestepping uncomfortable truths only gives them sharper teeth.
This rally is not an aberration. It is a milestone. It signals that what was once considered fringe has marched, flag in hand, into the mainstream.
Britain, and by extension every democracy watching, now faces a defining choice. To confront the anxiety with clarity, honesty and inclusion, or to allow fear to metastasise until the very institutions designed to protect democracy are consumed by it.
That Robinson could marshal such numbers, and that the establishment could look so unprepared, is not just a failure of policing. It is a failure of politics. And politics, unlike street protests, cannot be kettled away.
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