Session Two: 'Unite the Kingdom' Rally — An Ethnographic Deep Dive

The story from inside a rally is rarely the story told outside it.

In the second session of our lunchtime series, Resilience & Reconstruction: An Insightful Deep Dive, Steven Lacey and Dr Olha Mukha presented — for the first time in public — an independent, self-funded ethnographic study of the Unite the Kingdom march of 16 May, when tens of thousands gathered on Whitehall. The session was moderated by Thomas Brayford and sponsored by Peek Content. It was held under the Chatham House Rule, so what follows reflects themes and typologies rather than individual attendees.

Why this project

Most public understanding of a rally this size is built at a distance — media coverage, clips, commentary about participants rather than conversation with them. This study went the other way: diary interviews with eight attendees before and after the day, follow-up group discussions, accompanied visits and intercepts on the day itself, and a control group of former football hooligans and ex-EDL members. The team was explicit that the work wasn't commissioned by any government department, party or campaign — undertaken, in their words, because we believe the questions mattered, and with no brief to reach a particular conclusion.

A pre-shaped space

Before a single attendee arrived, the event had already been structured by the state's presence — a £4.5 million policing operation, thousands of officers, horses, drones and facial-recognition cameras deployed for this march but not for the Nakba Day march running through London the same day. That asymmetry wasn't lost on the crowd, several of whom described feeling watched — and, paradoxically, the atmosphere on the ground was consistently described as polite rather than volatile.

Staged for the image

The stage position, the flags, the repeated act of climbing to plant a Union Jack as high as possible — the researchers read the whole visual grammar as deliberately engineered, with Westminster Abbey and Big Ben framed into almost every crowd photograph. The flag taxonomy itself went well beyond England: Scottish and Welsh flags asserting a pan-British claim, alongside Iranian, Israeli, American, Irish and South African flags — evidence, the team argued, that the movement is increasingly framing itself as civilisational rather than narrowly national.

Religion, family and the child-protection thread

A genuine, not merely instrumental, religious current ran through the day — "Christ is the King" among the most consistent chants, alongside icons, prayer booklets and repeated calls to "rejoin your local church." Running alongside it was a child-protection thread that ranged from organised advocacy groups to individual parents who said, plainly, that they no longer felt their children were safe in the country as it stands — with testimony from a grooming-gang survivor among the most emotionally charged moments of the day.

Five typologies, and two that dominated

The researchers mapped several recurring types among attendees — Race Warriors, Old Timers, the Religious Right, Conspiracy Truthers — but two stood out as the bulk of the crowd:

●      The Lively Lads — late 30s to mid-50s, tightly bound by football culture, deeply distrustful of institutions and largely without hope for the country's direction, but held back from that anger, several said, mainly by family. Interestingly, they weren't especially loyal to Tommy Robinson himself, giving him credit chiefly for his focus on grooming gangs while distancing from his wider politics.

●      The Hard Pressed — a broader, more mixed group including ethnic-minority attendees, driven less by ideology than by cost-of-living strain, a sense of repeated promise-breaking by successive governments, and nostalgia for a stronger sense of community. Many described themselves as movable — some had shifted between Reform, Restore and even expressed continued respect for Labour's Andy Burnham.

A third, newer group — the Debaters — stood out as a departure from expectation: young, university-educated, often from migrant families themselves, arguing in the register of fairness and free speech rather than grievance, and notably reluctant to advertise their presence at the rally at all — including, in at least one case, a civil servant.

What united them

Across these groups, the common thread was less fear of any specific group and more fear for — for family, community, and a sense of being unheard by institutions seen as unserious or self-interested. Trust sat almost entirely with alternative media and figures like Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins and Rupert Lowe, rather than with the BBC or mainstream politicians.

Belonging, not just politics

Perhaps the strongest throughline was that, for many attendees, the day functioned less as protest than as community — described by the researchers as closer in structure to a religious gathering or folk festival than a political rally. Loneliness came up repeatedly as backstory; the rally offered a rare, concrete sense of connection. As the researchers put it in the session's closing discussion, the day itself may function as a radicalising instrument in ways that precede it do not — turning grievance without affiliation into grievance with belonging.

The open question

The session closed without firm prescriptions, but with a challenge: two decades of effort has gone into countering right-wing populism, with comparatively little into competing with it in the emotional territory it currently owns — pride, belonging and hope. That question carries directly into the next session in the series, on conspiracy thinking.

Watch: YouTube