The piece looks at last week’s Unite the Kingdom rally, who spoke there, how it was covered, and why rising frustration with immigration and perceived censorship is fueling political backlash in Britain and across Europe.
We need to revisit this because I have to hope that our cousins across the pond are not lost, even though more and more evidence suggests they might be. The nation is suffering under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who could be on political life support as Labour suffered a heavy defeat in the local elections earlier this month. Immigration has finally come to a head, and voters are pushing back in ways the commentariat can barely parse.
When government policy and elite consensus shut down debate, people find other outlets to be heard. Protest and public rallies are the obvious pressure valves, and they attract attention when mainstream institutions try to delegitimize them instead of addressing the underlying issues. That dynamic explains a lot of the energy we saw at the Unite the Kingdom event.
Tommy Robinson organized the rally last week and the establishment media smeared it as a right-wing hate event, an easy framing that avoids serious engagement with voters’ concerns. The crowd included people fed up with open borders, rising costs, and the sense that local communities have been ignored by distant bureaucrats. That frustration is what makes these gatherings politically significant, not the headlines designed to discredit them.
When some 150,000 people descended on London in September for a rally organized by Tommy Robinson – an agitator who spreads anti-Muslim bigotry and has several criminal convictions – it felt like a watershed moment in British politics.
“Something in our country changed,” Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said at the time. “This felt different.”
And so when at least tens of thousands gathered again in the British capital on Saturday for the latest “Unite the Kingdom” march, it felt less out of the ordinary. Views that would once not have been expressed in public are becoming commonplace. Marches organized by Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, are becoming a regular outlet for them.
“Millions have got to go,” said Pete, 64, from Derbyshire, in the English midlands. He was referring to unauthorized immigrants. “They shouldn’t be in this country,” he told CNN. “They’re claiming benefits. ‘Benefit Britain’ has got to end.”
At September’s mass rally, the mood was militant. “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you,” Elon Musk told the crowd via video link. “You either fight back or die.”
Oh, please. I almost forgot who was there: Nick Shirley, the independent reporter and YouTuber who uncovered the Somali fraud network and derailed Tim Walz’s plans for a third term as governor of Minnesota. Shirley has a track record of digging into stories that established outlets ignore, and his presence at the rally matters because it underscores how alternative media amplify issues mainstream outlets dismiss. People who feel shut out of polite discourse turn to those independent voices.
“Your media will call you far right, and your prime minister will call you guys dangerous, but the ideas of freedom of speech aren’t dangerous. The idea that you want to know who your neighbor is doesn’t make you dangerous… It means that you have common sense,” Shirley said to the attendees last week.
Michael Shellenberger published a detailed analysis that traces the rise of this populist energy to decades of policy choices by center-left and center-right elites. His piece argues the same rot that voters in other Western democracies are rejecting shows up in Britain as a stew of open-border migration, regulatory overreach, and cultural decisions pushed from the top. Those are the drivers people bring to the streets when the ballot box feels too slow or ineffective.
The United Kingdom’s globalist Conservative governments allowed net migration to rise to a record 906,000 in the year ending June 2023, more than four times pre-Brexit levels. Those same Conservatives passed a “net zero” emissions by 2050 into law in 2019, accelerated subsidies for offshore wind, and failed to tap North Sea oil and gas, even as energy bills climbed. And conservative ministers adopted World Health Organization guidance for Covid lockdowns, masking, and vaccination, and they expanded gender self-identification guidance in English schools.
German and French establishment parties enforced a cordon sanitaire or firewall against the “far-right” Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Rassemblement National (RN) parties, denying them coalition partners and most mainstream coverage, and American voters in 2020 elected Joe Biden, who reversed Trump’s border policies and rejoined the Paris climate accord on his first day in office. Biden restored Obama-era diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks across the federal bureaucracy and revived federal pressure on social media companies to remove disfavored speech.
But then, the reelection of Donald Trump in November 2024 dashed those hopes. Trump returned to power on promises to seal the southern border, deport illegal immigrants, end the electric vehicle mandate, withdraw from the Paris accord, and dismantle federal censorship of social media.
[…]
…the globalists are fighting back in Europe. European Commission officials in Brussels are tightening their censorial grip on the digital public square through the Digital Services Act and a “Democracy Shield” program to demand censorship of the Right ahead of upcoming elections. In Britain, Labor leadership challengers Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have openly called for the United Kingdom to rejoin the European Union. Streeting formally launched his leadership bid in May 2026 by calling Brexit “a catastrophic mistake” and saying “Britain’s future lies with Europe, and one day back in the European Union.” And France’s Marine Le Pen lost her right to run for the 2027 presidency on March 31, 2025, when a Paris court convicted her of embezzling EU funds and immediately barred her from public office for five years.
But right-wing nationalists are not far from taking power in major European capitals.
In Britain, the right-wing Reform UK party gained more than 1,400 seats in the May 7, 2026, local elections, while Labor lost more than 1,300 seats and the Conservatives lost over 500. Ninety-seven Labor MPs last week called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign. Seventy percent of British respondents told YouGov in May 2026 that Starmer was performing “poorly.”
[…]
The Atlanticist establishment has responded to nationalist victories by escalating its persecution rather than reconsidering its policies. Last December, the European Commission fined X $140 million for so-called deceptive practices and insufficient transparency. The Commission demanded that X end user anonymity and grant the Commission full access to American user data.
But that persecution is driving much of the surge in support for the populist right. Seventy-one percent of Europeans now tell pollsters that the EU should give member nations greater control of their own borders. Majorities in Germany, France, and Italy favor a large decrease in new arrivals, with roughly half of voters surveyed supporting a complete freeze and the departure of large numbers of recent migrants.
Sorry, left-wingers, but censorship will not kill us or our ideas. They should know these tactics do the opposite. When officials move to criminalize or delegitimize opposition instead of listening, they create more recruits for the other side and hand them a grievance-fueled narrative to use at the ballot box and on the streets.
“The more aggressively the establishment defends itself through procedural and legal means, the more support flows to the parties and candidates the obsessive globalist PMC [professional-managerial class] wants to silence,” wrote Shellenberger. That sentence lays out the simple cause and effect elites refuse to see: heavy-handed suppression breeds backlash, and the backlash is already reshaping politics across Europe.
Amen.
