Plastered on T-shirts, hats, and mugs, three slogans made brisk trade among souvenir vendors and street hawkers in central London this past weekend: “Make Britain Great Again,” “Stop the Boats,” and “I ♥ Tommy Robinson.”
The buyers were members of the “Unite the Kingdom” rally, a protest described as a defense of “free speech” by its organizer, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Better known by his alias, Tommy Robinson, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon is a far-right activist who founded the English Defence League and enjoys the backing of tech billionaire Elon Musk.
A crowd of some 150,000 people, largely white, gathered at Whitehall in central London carrying a tide of banners. Demonstrators came from across England. Women waved Union Jacks as a handful of members of Patriotic Alternative, a neo-Nazi group, unfurled a sheet declaring: “Diversity means no more white people.”
Why We Wrote This
In Britain, a nationalist flag-waving campaign targeting immigrants and the hotels that house them has become an expression for grievances over housing shortages, the economy, and a sense the government is losing control of its borders.
The Whitehall rally was the loudest expression yet of a wider unease running through Britain. What began as both spontaneous and organized flag-raising has become an expression for grievances over housing shortages, economic pressure, and a sense that Britain is losing control of its borders.
There is a “broader sense of malaise and a growing sense of disenchantment with the government,” Anand Menon, director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, says of the public mood.
Cut off from asylum process
In recent weeks, nationalist fervor has surged in Britain through Operation Raise the Colours – a summer-launched social media drive urging people to drape Union Jacks and St. George’s Crosses across streets and roundabouts. Supporters call it civic pride; critics see far-right networks weaponizing the flags to sow division. The tension is clearest around hotels where the government is housing asylum-seekers, which have become chronic flashpoints for flag-waving protests.
“It’s about time the government listened to what the British people want,” says a hairdresser who gave her name as Dee. “What they want is fairness for British people. There are people who are coming into this country that perhaps shouldn’t be, who are getting treated a lot better than our own homeless people, our own homeless veterans, and I think they should come first. … [Mr. Yaxley-Lennon] speaks for a lot of people.”
Mr. Yaxley-Lennon’s supporters clashed with police, who struggled to hold them apart from an antiracism counter-rally, which numbered 5,000. The diverse counterprotesters shouted, “This is what community looks like,” and “Nazi scum out,” while calling out the dangers of normalizing hate speech and demonizing migrants who contribute to the economy and health sector. Some drew parallels with Britain’s refusal to accept Jewish refugees in the 1930s.
For many in the Yaxley-Lennon demonstration, the rallying cry was to “stop the boats” – a phrase that has become shorthand in British politics for the small vessels carrying asylum-seekers across the English Channel, a highly visible and politically charged route that successive governments have vowed, unsuccessfully, to shut down.
That was the issue highlighted by Christopher Gillain, a factory worker from Derbyshire. “If they came into the country and did it in the proper way, then it wouldn’t be a problem,” says Mr. Gillain. “But, no, they are doing it illegally. We don’t know their identities or who they are; to protect our women and children. We don’t know what crimes they have committed in their own country.”
In fact, the situation is not as Mr. Gillain envisions it. It is the case that, under British law, entering the country via a small-vessel Channel crossing is illegal. And one must be within the United Kingdom to seek asylum. But the British government has established no legal way to enter the country to seek asylum – arguably in contravention of its obligations under United Nations refugee treaties. So, crossing via small boats has become the only available means to enter into the British asylum process.
And while it is true that the government does not initially know who asylum-seekers are, the asylum process is designed to vet refugees while keeping them under government watch. One way it does so is by housing them at hotels.
The economic argument
Professor Menon says the sudden rise of identity politics and much of the wider mood of disaffection in Britain is rooted in economic issues, which includes immigration. During the 2016 Brexit campaign, Leave campaigners tied immigration to everyday economic concerns ranging from jobs and wages to the strain on housing, schools, and the health service, he explains. By presenting immigration as a drain on resources, they managed to fold it into the economic debate as well as the cultural one, strengthening their case with voters.
“If you think back to the Brexit referendum, one of the interesting sort of myths about that is, everyone said that Remain won the economic argument and Leave won the immigration argument,” he says. “The fact is that Leave won both arguments because the immigration one was an economic argument.”
That framing continues to echo today as disputes over asylum hotels and small-boat arrivals are cast as threats to public services and scarce housing. The same anxieties that fueled the Leave campaign nearly a decade ago have been repurposed in a climate of mounting frustration with government, particularly that of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
“People want to see something done but they don’t want to address the trade-offs,” says Professor Menon. “So, the question here is, would you like fewer doctors, fewer social care workers, fewer foreign students? The answer is generally no,” he notes. “And part of it comes from the fact that people conflate refugees with immigrants.”
Sunder Katwala, director of the independent think tank British Future, says this malaise is being supercharged online. “The most important transatlantic influence is Elon Musk,” he says. “What Elon Musk is doing is amplifying the furthest elements of the far right. … He has amplified the reach of Tommy Robinson ten- or twentyfold.”
Mr. Musk, appearing by video link in London, warned that the country faces collapse from immigration, government failure, and “woke” culture. He argued that Parliament must be dissolved and the people must take charge, insisting that the “reasonable center” must wake up because “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. … You either fight back or you die.”
Hotels symbolize government’s struggles
The tensions in London reverberate in Britain’s suburbs in subtler ways.
The hotel housing asylum-seekers in the village of Stanwell, near Heathrow Airport, has become a point of friction. Protests there have been smaller, but the site is now ringed with fencing and “no trespassing” signs.
Around it, Union Jacks hang from garden fences, and bunting circles the dog park, where a placard reads, “Just say no to all males” – a reference to the gender of asylum-seekers to be housed there. The site so far has been used for families.
“We just don’t want boat people,” said George, a local man walking his dog who declined to give his last name.
Nationally, the U.K. recorded around 109,000 asylum applications in the year-to-year ending in March 2025, the fifth-highest in Europe. The U.K.’s numbers are substantial, but smaller per capita than many neighbors. Adjusted for population, Britain ranks 17th, with roughly 16 applications per 10,000 residents – well below the European Union members’ average of 25.
Mr. Katwala says the controversy over asylum hotels is because of the powerful symbolism.
“The primary reason is the visible lack of control when people see boats in the Channel coming in,” he says. “That’s been localized by the commission of hotel accommodations at scale. That gives people a visible and local symbol of a government who is struggling to control how asylum works.”
Professor Menon concurs, saying asylum hotels are “visible and obvious” and that they feed into the narrative that the opponents of asylum are using. The hotels provide “a very neat symbol of the fact that they are a waste of resources that could be used for something else.”
For Paul, who works at the airport and declines to give his last name, the issue is also one of safety. His mom lives just a few doors down from the hotel, and he is alarmed by reports of violence committed by asylum-seekers residing in hotels that have featured in the media.
“The community feels unsafe,” he says.
For Simon Barrett, the issue comes back to housing pressures and fairness. “If you’re going to build a 100,000 houses this year,” he wonders. “How many of those go to overseas people? How does my son get a house?”
