London’s Day of Creeping Extremism
London #London
How do you decide who owns a country? At 10:30 this morning in London, a group of black-clad men were gathered about 100 meters from the Cenotaph, Britain’s most famous war memorial. They were chanting. “We want our country back,” went one refrain, followed by “You’re not English, you’re not English, you’re not English anymore.”
This group was—as another of their chants put it—“Tommy’s Army.” That refers to Tommy Robinson, the pseudonym of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a convicted mortgage fraudster who is the former head of a far-right, anti-Muslim group called the English Defence League. Robinson was here, somewhere, in person—and as of last week, he was back on X (formerly Twitter), five years after being “permanently suspended.” Violence and disorder follow him around, so London’s Metropolitan Police had drafted reinforcements from around Britain to deal with the situation. Walking down the Mall, a long, open road stretching from Trafalgar Square to Westminster, I saw police vans from Durham and Northumbria, in the north of England, and some officers wore caps reading HEDDLU, the Welsh word for police.
The police had penned Tommy’s Army into a narrow stretch of sidewalk, from which they were roaring and throwing the occasional bottle. Today is Armistice Day, which commemorates the end of World War I. Less than half an hour before Britain was due to observe two minutes of silence for its combat dead, I watched as the right-wing group charged the police line and broke through it, then seemed unsure what to do next.
“Are you from the media?” a woman asked me, as she followed the line of rebels. “Tell people that the police attacked us.”
“When did that happen?” I asked.
She looked at me again: “Are you from the mainstream media?”
“Yes.”
She gave me the thumbs-down gesture and walked away.
What was Tommy’s Army doing at the Mall? Robinson later tweeted that he and his band of “veterans and patriots” had paid their respects before leaving peacefully—apart from a “tiny scuffle.” As I watched, some of his followers waved Union Jacks and the cross of Saint George, but a disciplined force this was not. Beer cans lay discarded on the ground. One young man in a balaclava had a flag representing the West Ham soccer team, which as far as I know wasn’t a combatant in either of the two world wars. The stated intent of Tommy’s Army was to defend the Cenotaph from another event happening in central London—a pro-Palestine march running from Speakers’ Corner to the American embassy. But that march wouldn’t start until the afternoon, and its route would not take it past the Cenotaph.
After breaking through the police line, Tommy’s Army ended up farther away from the Cenotaph that its members were supposedly protecting. I stayed by the war memorial, and when a crowd observing Armistice Day fell quiet at 10:54 a.m., the sound of the hooligans’ distant chanting floated over the quiet at the memorial. Someone near me called out, in an East End accent: “Oi, shut the fuck up.” I briefly wondered if a fight would break out between the veterans surrounding me—many wearing their combat medals—and a group that claimed to revere Britain’s military but was hijacking its rituals to preach against immigration.
When Suella Braverman, the country’s Conservative home secretary, had warned about a “hate march” taking place this weekend, she wasn’t talking about the scene I’d just witnessed. She was referring instead to the protest against Israel’s action in Gaza. In an article for the London Times, she warned about a double standard being applied to protests, but her own silence on Robinson’s demonstration suggests she finds one side easier to condemn than the other. In reality, each of the protests that I saw today in London—the xenophobic one and the pro-Palestine one—contained some disturbing elements. Taken together, they showed how the conflict in Gaza is polarizing Britain and emboldening both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Organized by a coalition of leftist and Muslim groups, the pro-Palestine march was only the latest in a series of events on the theme. In the weeks since the October 7 Hamas terror attack, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, the old left-wing machinery set up to oppose Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq has come back to life. Pro-Palestine activism is a mixture of general anti-imperialists, critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, peace activists, trade unionists, and a large contingent of university lecturers and students. It commands broad support among British Muslims, who make up 7 percent of the population. This alliance of minority Britons and left-wing academics is what makes pro-Palestine activism so triggering to Tommy’s Army—and to many mainstream right-wing opinion columnists, who believe white leftists have become useful idiots for Islamists who share none of their values.
Braverman has gone further than this, accusing the police of being too soft on pro-Palestine protesters. In her telling, the police—who have rounded up climate protesters and, last time I encountered them en masse, were dragging feminists away from a vigil commemorating a murdered woman—are too sympathetic to the left.
As it happened, at a press conference before the marches, the Metropolitan Police refused to even call Tommy’s Army the “far right,” instead sticking to the neutral term “counterprotesters.” They also declined to enforce a ban on face coverings in the area around the Cenotaph. But Braverman wanted more: Last week, in her Times article, she criticized the police for their reluctance to stop the Palestine “hate marchers,” as she described them, from gathering at all on Armistice Day. “I do not believe that these marches are merely a cry for help for Gaza,” she wrote. “They are an assertion of primacy by certain groups—particularly Islamists—of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland.”
This was an extraordinary thing for a British home secretary to say, particularly a Conservative one. Most marches in Northern Ireland are led by pro-British unionists, who are the traditional allies of the Tory party, rather than Irish Republicans. Either Braverman did not understand that, or she was peddling misinformation, or she was changing the British government’s position on the legitimacy of unionist protests. (Her allies later claimed that she had meant to criticize Republican marches.) It then emerged that she had refused to tone down the article when the prime minister’s team asked her to do so before publication.
As I walked from the Cenotaph to Hyde Park, where the Gaza protest was starting, I began to see signs referencing the home secretary’s remarks. Suella, this is a love march, read one. We hate Cruella Suella, said another. At Hyde Park Corner, a woman in a headscarf was giving out neon-yellow vests with WE DON’T HATE JEWS printed across the back. It was simultaneously a sweet gesture and one that raised a lot of questions supposedly answered by the vest.
Because there is no getting around the fact that the pro-Palestine cause does sometimes shade into anti-Semitism. After the Hamas attacks on October 7, some leftists celebrated the atrocities, while others excused or minimized them as an understandable act of “resistance.” Many invoked the language of colonization to do so, or parsed the situation as a racial conflict between white Israelis and people of color in Gaza and the West Bank. (In fact, half of Jewish Israelis are of Middle Eastern or North African origin, and many descend from families expelled from Muslim countries.) The world stands with Palestine. The Imperialists stand with Israel, read one sign. A thief never becomes an owner, read another. No peace on stolen land, declared a third. Someone had even managed to squeeze all of this onto a 12-by-18-inch placard: You can’t convince yesterday’s colonizer that today’s colonizer is wrong.
Having just come from watching a group of white men shout about how their land was being colonized—by Muslims—this discourse struck me as intensely unhelpful. So, too, was the widespread use at this march of the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Many British and American Jews, among others, hear this as an anti-Semitic demand to obliterate Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. In the United States, Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American, was censured for defending the slogan, while here in Britain a member of Parliament for the left-wing Labour Party was suspended for alluding to it.
At Hyde Park corner, I saw a stall run by the hard-left Socialist Worker newspaper, which had put the phrase on its cover. I asked one of the activists selling those papers how he understood those words. Harold, who only wanted to be identified by his first name, described himself as a nonpracticing Jew and told me that he did not find the slogan offensive. “It’s about one state,” he said. “Equal for Palestinians and Jews in one state. You won’t hear that mentioned in the mainstream media.” What about those Israelis who would say that the October 7 attacks show that they aren’t safe in a single state? “The answer is: Stop murdering the Palestinians.” Shireen, a Londoner out marching with friends, had a similar answer: For “everyone that I know that chants it—Palestinians, English, many Jewish friends—it literally means peace and justice for the Palestinians in that land.”
The sincere belief of many marchers is that Israel is a “terror state” conducting a “genocide” in Gaza. Posters with captions referring to murdered children were plastered on bus shelters, and the leaders of one bloc carried tiny bundles in white shrouds. The marchers want a cease-fire, and then a political solution. I asked one woman if she thought Hamas wanted that too. “I don’t care about Hamas,” she said.
I followed the march for two hours. People had brought their children, and most were happy to carry the ready-made signs that the far left supplies to any march like this. (The Socialist Worker had translated its slogans into Arabic for the occasion.) But although you could attribute the “river to the sea” chants to ignorance rather than malice, that wasn’t the only disturbing element. Spectators reported some hateful imagery, including a sign depicting a “puppet master” wearing a Star of David.
I caught up with a woman in a headscarf who carried a sign showing the faces of Hitler and Netanyahu, the latter thoughtfully labeled in case of confusion. What you’re doing is no different! it proclaimed. I asked her why she had brought the sign and she seemed confused: “It’s exactly the same. What they’re doing is the same.”
One of her friends turned to me and asked, “How is it different?”
“Well,” I said, “Hitler killed 6 million Jews.
“Are you on the march?” she replied.
“No, I’m reporting.”
The woman dragged her friend away, saying, “Don’t talk to journalists.”
Outside Embankment station on the way home, I ran into another police line—two groups of hooligans had started a fight in a bar and were now being kept apart. On the train back to South London, I watched clips of some Tommy’s Army types who had finally found some pro-Palestine protesters to fight on Vauxhall Bridge. Eighty-two people were arrested nearby “to prevent a breach of the peace,” according to the Metropolitan Police, and a few hours later, after the official Palestine march had ended, about 150 people in a breakaway group were also detained and searched for throwing fireworks and refusing to remove their face coverings.
Since October 7, Britain has felt feverish, the result of a conflict 3,500 miles away over which Britain has little influence. British Jews are understandably alarmed over the rise in anti-Semitic incidents since then—and the way that anti-Semitism has been dismissed by some of those who are normally on high alert for offense. The least that protesters could do to address this is abstain from chanting “From the river to the sea,” whatever they intend it to mean.
Islamophobia has increased, too, as the far-right has latched on to the conflict to advance the argument that Muslims don’t belong in Britain. Even some commentators who write for the mainstream right-wing press have flirted with this idea; The Spectator’s Douglas Murray told the American podcaster Dave Rubin that Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf, who is Muslim and whose in-laws were only recently able to leave Gaza, did not care about Scotland. Instead, according to Murray, Yousaf’s social-media posts revealed him to be the “first minister of Gaza,” and someone who had “infiltrated” British politics.
Amid this tinderbox, politicians have been found wanting. Braverman made the police’s task more difficult by prejudging their actions and accusing them of bias. She might now usefully reflect on the contrast between the tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators in the pro-Palestine march and the ugly scenes at the Cenotaph caused by agitators who might have taken encouragement from her words.
After watching both protests, I realized something. Britain has been consumed by dueling symbols, in real life as well as in our social-media bios. Many of Tommy’s Army carried large banners decked with poppies, a symbol of World War I patriotism, while the red, black, and green of the Palestinian flag was everywhere in Hyde Park. Each symbol would have looked out of place at the other event. Some see the red poppy as a totem of enforced patriotism for an imperialist vision of Britain—one that gets involved in foreign conflicts—rather than a neutral way to remember the war dead. On the other side, the Palestinian flag has been wielded by actual anti-Semites—those who say “Zionist” when they mean “Jew”—and is taken to imply a callous disregard for the events of October 7.
These divides in understanding will be incredibly difficult to bridge while the extremists on each side feed off each other. Britain should be a country where the poppy and the Palestinian flag can coexist.