Elgar on a ghetto blaster. A sea of flags and tributes to Charlie Kirk. VERY rude chants about Keir. Then the bottles and fists began to fly… IAN GALLAGHER attends the 110,000-strong ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London

From all corners of the land they came, bearing flags and banners and pride – or was it rage – in their hearts. 

Hard-Right activist Tommy Robinson and his supporters are definitely not everyone’s cup of tea but it was they who gave the most vivid expression yet to the despair felt by many over the migration issue.

Not all among the 110,000 protesters who brought London to a standstill in his ‘free speech’ march and rally on Saturday would call themselves his disciples, of course. 

Many were there, said one man, because ‘patience with the migrant crisis has reached breaking point’ and this was an opportunity to vent frustration. Enough is enough came the simple, commonly expressed refrain.

This was also a chance to express outrage over the assassination of influential MAGA cheerleader Charlie Kirk at a Utah campus last week.

The day began with blue skies and optimism but ended with bruise-coloured clouds, rain and fighting.

Despite fears of bloody fights with anti-racism protesters, Robinson’s supporters mainly just scrapped with the police – or among themselves. 

As evening approached, more than 100 officers on foot, wearing protective gear and backed up by dozens of police horses, clashed with demonstrators as bottles and pieces of wood were thrown at them.

What did the unsuspecting tourists in the capital make of it all? At 11am, an open-top double-decker crammed with folk from all over the globe shuddered to a halt near Waterloo Station. Blocking its path, a sea of flags and what seemed like a forest of tattooed legs.

‘Welcome to England, 2025,’ laughed the tour guide mordantly. Then, from the top deck, the bemused tourists, on a sightseeing tour of the capital, found themselves taking in the extraordinary sights, sounds and smells of what Robinson called, with wild exaggeration, the ‘biggest demonstration in Britain’s history’.

‘Wow! There must be tens of thousands,’ said Jessie, 72, a retired radiologist from New Jersey. ‘It looks like they’re preparing for a battle, like in medieval times.’ In a way, they were.

Earlier Raphael, 27, a roofing contractor from Derby said: ‘There must a million of us. We’ve travelled from all over the country. We’re brothers in arms!’

Certainly, this was a predominantly male crowd. And an abundance of broken noses and gold teeth suggested many were veterans of battles of old. Perhaps some of the tourists thought they had chanced upon some good old British pageantry when they had earlier spied the Union Flags in the distance.

Some in the crowd would have you believe they had done. Just not of the pomp and circumstance variety. ‘Look at this! Look at the flags! This is amazing – Britain at its best,’ exclaimed a man draped in a cross of St George banner. Then he let off flares of red, white and blue. Scents of sulphur and marijuana were now sharp and sickly on the late-morning air.

A man waved a ‘send them home’ placard and swigged from a can of beer. And there were banners bearing slogans such as ‘We want our country back’ and ‘Save our kids’. Three women who said they ‘follow Tommy Robinson wherever he goes’ showed off their red ‘Make Britain Great Again’ caps. 

What they said next was drowned by an obscene chant about Prime Minister Keir Starmer that soon found wider favour, whereupon the driver of the stranded double-decker gave up and started reversing. ‘What a day to pick to go sightseeing,’ shouted Jessie.

And what an advertisement for Britain. The Met deployed 1,600 officers – including teams from as far afield as Nottinghamshire – which as one protester observed ‘must have cost a bloody fortune’.

It was now two hours before the march was due to begin and thuggish-looking protesters were swarming along the South Bank, home to some of the country’s most celebrated cultural institutions.

Outside the National Theatre, a 30-something man from Exeter sniffed cocaine off the back of his hand, tattooed with a mermaid. His friend said proudly that they’d started drinking on the train at 6am. ‘Hopefully we’ll be able to keep going.’

Back on the front line, the crowds were waiting restively for the signal to begin the march on Whitehall. A framed photograph of Charlie Kirk was held aloft to cries of ‘Charlie, Charlie, Charlie’.

A woman clutching the hand of a small child peeled away from the front of the crowd and, as if she’d let her comrades down, said apologetically: ‘He needs a wee.’

It was now 1pm and time to move off. As they marched, an elderly gent leaning on a stick looked on and said: ‘I don’t have much time for this lot but they’re right about Starmer – he’s ruining this country.’

Turning on to Westminster Bridge, the protesters were treated to Edward Elgar’s stirring masterpiece Nimrod courtesy of a ghetto blaster. As if they weren’t fired up already.

By 2pm Whitehall was overflowing in anticipation of the speeches. First, though, a rousing rendition of Land Of Hope And Glory.

Then former actor turned political activist Laurence Fox took the stage. He said: ‘I live in hope, and pray for Charlie Kirk. I pray for America and you wonderful people who have come here to support our nation. This is our home. We have nowhere else to go.

‘We will defend it. We will not be defeated. We will be proud. We will honour those who came before us. I believe in you, and I believe in Tommy Robinson. The next generation is a golden generation. We must be united against those that wish to destroy it We must unite the kingdom. Freedom.’

Others offered similar exhortations. Petr Bystron, who represents the Alternative for Germany party in the Bundestag, told the rally: ‘Your enemies are our enemies, your fight is our fight. We do not want our daughters, our sisters, getting raped. We do not want our brothers, our friends, getting stabbed when they are defending them.’

And then came the star turn, Tommy Robinson, but not before bare-chested members of the Destiny Church in New Zealand performed a traditional haka. Their leader, Brian Tamaki, told the crowds that ‘Christian ethics’ had been ‘traded for secular humanism’ which he said was ‘Satan’s tool’.

Robinson told supporters: ‘Feel your strength, you are part of a tidal wave of patriotism that is sweeping across this country… Today, is the spark of a cultural revolution in Great Britain. This is our moment. The traitors in Westminster right now, they are cowering, they are trembling. Keir Starmer, the revolution has started.

‘We are sending shockwaves through the corridors of power.’ Courtney Wright, 13, whose decision to wear a Union Jack dress to a culture day at Bilton School in Warwickshire caused massive controversy, joined Robinson on stage. Wearing the same dress she told the crowd: ‘I want to talk about my culture, British culture, and why it is important to me.’

She praised Britain’s ‘courage and sacrifice’ and its long history of ‘Kings and Queens and William Shakespeare’ and added: ‘It can feel like being British does not count like a culture just because it is a majority. I think culture should be for everyone.’

Speaking via videolink, X owner Elon Musk told the crowd that there was something ‘beautiful’ about being British.

He added: ‘There’s so much violence on the Left, with our friend Charlie Kirk getting murdered in cold blood this week and people on the Left celebrating it openly.

‘The Left is the party of murder and celebrating murder. I mean, let that sink in for a minute, that’s who we’re dealing with here.’

He said the British public were ‘scared to exercise their free speech’ and claimed that the BBC was ‘complicit in the destruction of Britain’.

Inevitably fighting broke out soon afterwards with police reporting that nine people had been arrested as officers tried to stop the protesters moving away from their designated area in Whitehall.

The Met said: ‘When officers moved in to stop them they faced unacceptable violence. They were assaulted with kicks and punches. Bottles, flares and other projectiles were thrown.

‘Nine arrests have been made so far for various offences, but many more people have been identified as committing offences. We will find them and they will face action.’