The changing face of right-wing protest
Dispatches from the Respected Newsman
In July of last year, Hadush Kebatu, a 41-year-old ‘asylum seeker’ from Ethiopia, approached a 14-year-old schoolgirl with her friends on the streets of the sleepy Essex town of Epping. According to court documents, Kebatu told the girl that she was ‘very pretty’, and that he wanted to have babies with her. He sought to entice her and her friends back to the Bell Hotel, the asylum centre where he was staying at the south-western edge of the town, telling them he had alcohol. He attempted to kiss the girl, but she rebuffed him. The following day, after spotting her again in her school uniform, he placed his hand on her thigh and made her kiss another boy, at which point he became ‘visibly aroused’.
Kebatu was swiftly arrested and charged with the sexual assault of the teenager. Word got out about the incident, and it erupted. One week later, the eyes of the nation turned towards Essex and the Bell Hotel in Epping. On 17 July, what could reasonably be described as a small riot kicked off, with police vans attacked, rocks thrown, and fireworks launched. It was immediately reminiscent of the Southport riots, and I should know.
I didn’t make it to Epping that first night, or the following evening when leftist activists made their way up from London, eventually being shuttled back to the tube station in police vans after the locals became rightfully angered by their presence, but I was there by the weekend. It was the first visit of many over the next few months, as the energy of Epping flooded the streets across Britain. More and more incidents of asylum hotel residents molesting and attacking the good people of this country hit national headlines. From Norwich to Nuneaton, the Isle of Dogs to Waterlooville, British citizens of all social classes and groups took to the streets to protest against the housing — at eye-watering expense — of irreconcilably alien men, hailing from backwards countries, with backwards attitudes and the conviction rates for sexual assault and other offences to prove it, right in the midst of our towns and cities. Ordinary, law-abiding British people and their children were expected to live, cheek by jowl, alongside them without any measures to ensure their security.
While covering these plucky locals with my phone and a janky mic setup finally gave me my big break as a reporter, these aren’t the first protests I’ve covered in my time. Since 2018, I’ve covered marches organised by Tommy Robinson, anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protests, Black Lives Matter protests, and the associated counter-rallies in Parliament Square — to name just a few. The day after Axel Rudakubana brutally murdered three innocent children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party (a year prior to the Epping protests), I hit the streets of Southport, just a short train ride away from my then-abode in Manchester.
I have never felt more like a ghoul in carrying out my job than when I started taking pictures at the memorial service in the town. Hundreds of people turned out in front of the town hall to pay their respects. Friends and families hugged and cried just metres away from me. The face of a young expecting mother standing next to a pile of flowers that I photographed is still forever burned into my memory. I had to keep reminding myself of the importance of my work — that people needed to see the impact of these crimes, and the brutal reality of mass migration — such was the sense of imposing on what should be the private grief of a bereaved community.
Just twenty minutes down the road was the location for what I expected to be a protest, near where the attack had actually happened. When I turned up, the riot was already in full swing. I’ve still never seen anything like it. Police vans beeped in desperate screeches as they were set on fire. Bricks were flying over my head, crashing straight into a mosque on the corner of the crossroads. Ordinary members of the public cheered on young men as they tried to fight with riot police. There is no stranger situation for someone used to the impenetrable social order of rural, middle class England than the eruption of chaos and violence all around, the shattering of that stability which is often taken for granted. Though the first night in Epping was riotous, Southport was a different level entirely. I eventually got the stuffing knocked out of me (and half a tooth), as a number of the protesters assumed that, as a journalist, I was part of an enemy outlet — but that’s a story for another time.
The riots then spread across the country. In some areas, Muslims counter-protestors made a stand against whites. Some all-too-excitable corners of the internet forecast that a race war had begun in England; instead, it fizzled out in around a week. The level of violence in Southport, Sheffield and Middlesbrough burned hot and fast, but never had the momentum to continue indefinitely. What was far more significant at Southport wasn’t how everyone acted, but who acted. Yes, the majority of the actual violence was conducted by young white men. Yet the people on the streets where it all kicked off were of all ages and, in particular, there were far more women in attendance than ever before.
Historically, right-wing street protests in Britain were completely dominated by one specific demographic: highly politicised working-class men from their twenties to fifties. These were the people who hit the ground backing Tommy Robinson’s EDL marches in the early 2000s, and the same basic pattern continued when Britain First sprung up onto the scene. Recently, some of the ‘For You’ page right have gone out of their way to attack football hooligans, claiming they are falling for some kind of ‘bread and circuses’ operation to hold the British people down, foolishly dispersing their energy fighting each other rather than focusing on the real enemy. This has absolutely zero connection to the truth, as anyone who has done the slightest of research into right-wing street movements would know. In reality, it was precisely this demographic who were among the first in Britain to react to the scourge of the grooming gangs. That is not to say their activities were particularly effective, but to claim they were all too distracted by football matches is absurd.
Infamously, one drunken young man slurred his words during a television interview at one of these protests. A reference to (very much real) ‘Islamic rape gangs’ was instead understood by the chattering classes to actually be a reference to (obviously fictional) ‘Muslamic ray guns’. This became a leftist meme that you can probably see on BlueSky still today, though the more intelligent left-wingers have probably already hastily deleted their old posts mocking this young man in fear that someone might dig them up and release them into the much-changed political and social environment of 2026. These men were rowdy, violent, and ready for a fight, just like they’d be with their rival football team on a Saturday.
Just as these men would follow their local club to away matches, the men in the EDL, the DFLA (the ‘Democratic Football Lads Alliance’, a splinter from the original Football Lads Alliance), and Britain First would also tour around the country. When away from their home bases, such as Luton or Manchester, the right-wing protesters in a town would not have garnered their strength primarily from the local population; instead, ranks would be filled by whichever organisation was on the move to the location of protest for the day. For the various post-EDL Tommy Robinson marches I covered in London in the late 2010s, this remained true. The same faces popped up again and again every time that Robinson whipped up a crowd to march on Downing Street. This pattern would still mostly hold for the counter-rallies against the left-wing extremists who had toppled the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and defaced other statues and memorials (including the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square and, unsuccessfully, the Cenotaph) across the country in 2020.
While those who attend right-wing street protests will still constantly see the same faces from the alternative media sphere — the people who, like myself, are there to cover the protests, rather than to protest themselves — the ranks of the protestors are now mostly comprised of actual locals. This is a big change. Anti-immigration protests now have a fundamentally different character, chiefly because they are no longer driven primarily by a small cadre of activists moving up and down the country. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to during my time on the ground told me they had never been to a protest before this summer. Many told me that they did not care about politics at all until the consequences of mass migration knocked on their door. This has made the protest organisation itself very grassroots, as I noted in my article for The Critic last year:
The protests of 2025 are also organised in a way that literal communist “community organisers” could only hope to dream of. Sometimes, known activists in the community are responsible for bringing everyone together, like James Harvey and Sydney Jones, who organised the protest in Norwich last weekend. Other times, a Facebook group or WhatsApp chat will be set up, along the lines of “X COMMUNITY SAYS NO TO Y LOCAL HOTEL,” by a completely random local resident, who just decides to start organising protests, despite having absolutely zero experience doing so.
The difference from how left-wing ‘street protestors’ operate could not be more stark. While it is true that the EDL was an organisation that organised big marches in specific areas, with attendees travelling in from around the country, it was nonetheless a completely grassroots effort when it was created, without powerful backers — just British people who were angry at the situation in front of them. By contrast, organisations like the Socialist Workers Party and Stand Up To Racism receive hundreds of thousands of pounds from trade unions, and sometimes even the government. Your average left-wing ‘street protestor’ (though even describing them as such is potentially misleading) will be rounded up from universities and other far-left groups, given pre-printed placards to hold, all assembled beforehand, and will chant exactly the same slogans time after time. When you report on enough of these, you end up learning them by osmosis.
Not only do they travel as complete outsiders to different towns, but if the distance is great enough, they will get sponsored coaches, all paid for by their powerful backers, in order to give the impression that everyone in that locale was behind them. A now-infamous instance of this took place in Epping, when Stand Up To Racism activists took the tube from the middle of London, holding their placards declaring that ‘Epping says no to racism’. To my knowledge, quite literally none of these people were from the town. They were, quite rightly, despised by the locals.
Because the supporters of Stand Up To Racism are both few in number and highly geographically concentrated, this summer saw them meet more than their match in town after town. When Britain First would organise an event somewhere in the country, the forces of the left would ferry their activists to confront them on the streets, hopefully in equal (or greater) numbers, but at least with enough of a show of strength to not be embarrassing. That’s easy to do when you have one or two national groups to oppose wherever they turn up, pre-announced. But when you have basically spontaneous protests popping up all across the country with practically no notice, they showed themselves to be incapable of putting up a serious show of force anywhere outside of a small number of urban areas and university towns. No longer could the pretence that angry right-wing street protestors were matched by their equally passionate left-wing counterparts hold. One particularly stark example of this new dynamic took place during the protests in Nuneaton, when what could not have been more than two dozen or so Stand Up To Racism activists were literally hounded out of town after around one thousand local protestors decided they’d had enough of them.
Just as the organisation of right-wing street protest has shifted, so too have the demographics of those who turn out. One useful comparison would be the differences between the people who turned out to protest the Britannia Hotel on the Isle of Dogs and the Bell Hotel in Epping. The protestors against the Britannia Hotel were more diverse, with at least a few visible minorities present every time I went. The majority were people who had lived in London their whole life — often the remaining Cockneys resisting demographic replacement. I would suggest that most of them were probably former Labour voters, and the great majority of them were working class. One of the leaders of the local protest, Lorraine Kavanagh, once told me that instead of spending taxpayer money on asylum hotels for illegal immigrants, this money should be redirected towards the NHS and for benefits for disabled people who can’t work — not exactly the priorities of your average Conservative or Reform voter. Other attendees were people who moved to work in Canary Wharf, including people from the finance and tech sectors. The result is that the people protesting in the middle of London hardly possess the instincts of traditional right-wing voters.
The views of the people protesting the Bell Hotel in Epping were different. The crowd were basically what you would expect from Essex, with many small businessmen and middle-class commuters into London. While not bereft of working-class protestors, I would be shocked if the average salaries here were not significantly higher than the average salaries of those protesting the Britannia Hotel. And this is the rub: it is no longer true that anti-migration protests in Britain are something attended by the same kind of people who would also have gone to EDL, DFLA, or Britain First protests — people who, yes, do have very real demographic strength in certain areas, but are certainly not predominant in all of (or even most of) the country. Attending one of these protests is increasingly a class-neutral signifier. The attendees do not represent a narrow ‘football lads’ demographic, but genuinely reflect the makeup of the town in which they happen to be taking place. A protest in Surrey and a protest in Lancashire will look pretty different to one another.
Left-wing street protest never had the class barrier that previously afflicted protest from the right. Both middle-class and working-class people on the left would happily turn out to a Stand Up To Racism rally; accordingly, the typical rally will have a mix of ageing trade unionists, hippie students, fresh-off-the-boat Boriswavers, and Green-voting London grannies living in million-pound houses, all turning up to the same event. Now, they might not exactly mingle with each other if there are enough of them, but it is still fair to say that ‘protesting’ was always something that the left could brag about. An oldhead left-winger in 2026 could brag about their history of marching with the CND in the 1980s, or against the Iraq War in 2003 and, in the company of polite society, would probably get pleasant nods of approval in return. Some right-wingers might tell similar stories of protest, but would probably look upon it as the folly of youth. They would certainly never dream of boasting about taking to the streets in support of any kind of right-wing political view (except perhaps, in certain company, the defence of rural interests). While I suspect that the ‘metropolitan elite’ (for lack of a better word) would still look down upon right-wing street protest, this taboo is breaking in the social circles of the more provincial middle classes. Certainly, both left and right have similar-looking faces at their protests nowadays.
But the biggest shift in demographics of all is the number of women. Women now not only attend the protests, but often lead them. The creation of the Pink Ladies, which sprang up simultaneously outside the Bell Hotel and the Britannia Hotel, and is now led nationally by Orla Minihane from Epping, was perhaps the best example of this change. Women often held back the more rowdy protestors from drinking, fighting, and, in some instances, even had entire female-only protests, standing up against the migrants who were committing the awful crimes against them. In terms of optics, this was the biggest win for the right. It’s rather hard to label a crowd of women of all ages saying ‘I’m in danger of being attacked by scary men’ as ‘far-right extremists and racists’.
In fact, there was only one demographic that was generally not present at all at the most recent wave of protests: women in their twenties. Every other age group of women would turn up everywhere I went. It’s likely that this has something to do with the fact that these women are the most left-wing demographic in their cohort to begin with, that schoolgirls have been regularly targeted by the migrants, and that the mothers (usually at least in their thirties, and generally in their forties) and grandmothers would then come out worried for their daughters and granddaughters.
So what does all of this mean? The biggest consequence, in my eyes, is that politics is now for many more people, no longer conducted only at the ballot box. This is a shift away from protest as an activity only a small cohort of radicals engage in, to something that you could see your mum attending every week with her friends from the coffee morning. When ‘normies’ are taking to the streets of this country in their thousands, often having never even thought about the political system before, you know that we’re in an era ripe for radical change.
I expect that the protests will return this summer. Everyone knows that summer is far more febrile for protests, riots, and generalised anti-social behaviour than winter — whether it is right-wing or left-wing protest, football-related disorder, or hordes of euphemistic ‘teenagers’ causing mayhem in parks and beach towns. The obvious reason for this is that no one wants to go out and protest every week when it’s freezing cold and raining. But it is often forgotten that another reason for the protests dying down in the winter months is that the number of incidents inciting protests also went down. After all, these protests against asylum hotels erupted because, in practically every town, an illegal immigrant actually sexually assaulted or attacked somebody — the mere presence of the hotel alone was generally not sufficient. Just like us Brits, the residents of asylum hotels don’t like going out in the cold and rain. Now that the weather is turning back, we’ll once again begin to see Afghans roaming our streets, our parks, and near our schools, with predictable consequences.
Now that the barrier to right-wing protest has been broken, I believe it will be hard to put back in the bottle. The only way that we will ever see these protests stop is if this country engages in a policy of securely detaining and deporting these illegal immigrants who have subjected the British public to terrible crimes despite the fact that they never should have been here in the first place.
This article was written by Jack Hadfield, Respected Newsman and friend of Pimlico Journal. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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