“We are the counter-revolution”: Tommy Robinson and the remaking of British fascism

On 13 September 2025, Britain saw the largest far-right rally in its history.1 Around 110,000 people marched through central London, dwarfing all previous mobilisations, including the British Union of Fascists’ (BUF) infamous Olympia rally of June 1934.2 The march was the culmination of months of intimidatory racist protests outside asylum seeker accommodation across Britain, which had soon evolved into violence against suspected “lefties”, and arson attacks on mosques and other targets.3 At the heart of the huge demonstration stood one man: Tommy Robinson.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has been the key figure in Britain’s fascist movement since the emergence of the English Defence League (EDL) in 2009. He belongs to a long lineage of British fascist leaders—figures that academic Graham Macklin has described as “failed Führers”—including Oswald Mosley of the BUF, John Tyndall of the National Front and Nick Griffin of the British National Party (BNP).4

Yet, Robinson also differs from his predecessors in important ways. Above all, he has been more successful in certain senses, achieving levels of street mobilisation of which earlier fascist leaders only dreamt. He has done so by distancing himself from the most discredited elements of British fascism’s ideological tradition: overt admiration for Hitler, Nazi symbolism and explicit antisemitic conspiracism. In their place, Robinson has reoriented the movement around a radicalised and conspiratorial rearticulation of the Islamophobia long embedded within British political discourse.

This shift has encouraged widespread misunderstanding of Robinson’s politics. Many commentators and antifascists reject the idea that he can be described as a fascist at all, detaching his project from the history of British fascism. In 2017, the antifascist research organisation Hope Not Hate set out this position explicitly: “To avoid straw-men arguments, we want to be clear. We don’t consider Lennon a ‘Nazi’, a ‘fascist’ or a ‘white supremacist’. Misuse or overuse of such terms risks devaluating them beyond usefulness and, more importantly, miscategorisation reveals a lack of understanding, which inevitably prohibits effective opposition”.5

As Aaron Winter argues, contemporary debates are frequently shaped by a “reactionary redefinition of fascism” that confines the term to explicit Nazi ideology or formal authoritarian rule.6 This redefinition is often advanced by far-right forces that wish to exempt themselves from the charge of fascism. However, it does not always require reactionary intent; it can also emerge from efforts to avoid exaggeration and rhetorical inflation. Its political effect is to render fascism visible only in retrospect, once its adaptive variants have already taken root and fascists feel confident enough to stop denying their affinity with historical fascism.

This narrowing feeds directly into how contemporary far-right movements are responded to in practice. It shapes how antifascists understand the terrain on which they operate—and therefore how they act within it. The claim that Robinson and the movements he animates cannot be described as fascist because they lack overt Nazi symbolism, formal fascist organisation or self-identification rests on an implicitly ideological definition of fascism: one that treats it as a fixed set of beliefs rather than as a political strategy or social process.

For instance, antifascist writer Dave Renton has argued that identifying Robinson-aligned mobilisations as fascist is politically ineffective, since participants do not recognise themselves in the term and mainstream politicians refuse it.7 As a tactical point, this has some force. However, it mistakes resonance for reality. Fascist movements have never relied on self-identification, nor on elite recognition. On the contrary, their capacity to embed themselves in “respectable” political discourse has often been central to their growth.

The hesitancy among journalists and commentators to refer to Robinson as a fascist often leads to an underestimation of his ideological ambitions. He is often simply seen as a racist with an extreme hatred of Muslims, and that is certainly a central plank of his ideology. Yet, that reading radically understates the scope of Robinson’s project.

When we listen closely to what he says, a broader picture emerges. Across his speeches, videos and posts, Robinson weaves transphobia, homophobia, anti-feminism, anti-migrant racism and hostility to the left and progressive movements into a single conspiratorial worldview—one that imagines Britain under siege and legitimises violent and authoritarian solutions.

At the very front of the September 2025 demonstration, holding a banner reading “Remigration Now!”, Robinson declared: “We are the counter-revolution.” Later, addressing the crowd from the stage, he elaborated: “For the past 20 years, there has been a globalist revolution. They have attacked the family. They have attacked Christianity. They have opened the borders. They’ve flooded our nations. We are the start of a counter-revolution”.8

The language of counter-revolution runs through Robinson’s public pronouncements. His politics are structured by hostility to the limited gains of the post-war period—multiculturalism, formal gender equality, secularism and even today’s hollowed-out forms of liberal democracy. He reimagines these not as products of popular struggles and governmental responses to these, but as the outcome of a top-down elite project imposed on the nation. What Robinson offers, then, is rollback: an attempt to reverse the historical direction of social change.

Robinson is often dismissed as a thug, grifter or demagogue. Each label captures something real, but none explains either the scale of his mobilisations or the political project he articulates. Above all, they obscure the extent to which he understands his movement in explicitly counter-revolutionary terms mirroring core features of classical fascism.

These misreadings point to a deeper problem in how fascism itself is conceptualised. Within British academic and media discourse, fascism is often treated as a fixed ideology, defined by reference to interwar regimes, biological racism, explicit antisemitism and totalitarian state power. Because Robinson does not lead a Nazi-style party, does not openly celebrate Hitler and does not command the machinery of the state, he is often placed outside the category altogether.

This article proceeds from a different premise. I will argue that Robinson should be understood as a fascist not because he ticks the boxes on an ideological checklist, but because of the function his politics performs and the dynamic it represents within the crisis-prone configuration of Britain’s contemporary political economy. My starting point includes classical Marxist analyses of fascism—most importantly those developed by Leon Trotsky—which understand fascism as a strategy of counter-revolutionary mobilisation and as a symptom of a broader crisis of mainstream political legitimacy and elite governance. Marxism is used here not as a doctrinal litmus test, but as a way of analysing the concrete relationship between crisis, mass mobilisation and counter-revolutionary strategy.

Robinson’s claim to be counter-revolutionary may seem anachronistic when organised labour and mass social movements are relatively subdued. However, counter-revolution does not have to wait for imminent revolution; it can act pre-emptively, rolling back past gains and disciplining resistance. Fascism is such a politics, relying on extra-parliamentary force to suppress the left and impose control in the streets.

Seen in this light, Robinson’s politics become easier to read. His stress on street mobilisation, his deliberate cultivation of confrontation, and his attempt to rally sections of the lower middle class and socially atomised wage-earners against the left and racialised minorities place him firmly within the British fascist tradition. So too does his insistence that social gains must be driven back in the name of national renewal. Robinson is neither a break with, nor a crude throwback to, earlier articulations of British fascism. He represents a contemporary recomposition of fascism, shaped by its historic defeats at the hands of the antifascist movement and adapted to the political, cultural and technological conditions of the present.

The article begins by outlining a Marxist framework for understanding fascism as a form of extra-parliamentary, counter-revolutionary mobilisation. It then traces how the defeats of party-based British fascism produced the EDL and, later, Robinson’s “post-organisational” and digitised model of leadership. The final sections examine the role of conspiracism, deniability and street mobilisation in Robinson’s project, before considering what these developments mean for antifascist strategy today.

Marxism, fascism and the foreclosure of the future

Marxist theories of fascism generally begin from a different premise to most mainstream accounts. Rather than treating fascism as a self-contained ideology, they understand it as a social and political process: a form of mass mobilisation that emerges in conditions of deep crisis, when the established mechanisms of elite governance struggle to contain intensified social conflict. Fascism, in this sense, is defined less by what it claims to believe than by what it actually does. This matters all the more because fascism, as historian Robert Paxton argues, involves a “radical instrumentalisation of truth”.9

None of this means downplaying the importance of ideology to fascist movements. Ideology remains a glue that holds together fascist groups, as well as a source of tensions within them. Moreover, broad ideological outlines are relatively persistent across different forms of fascism because they reflect aspects of the material conditions under which fascist politics becomes possible. Nonetheless, fascism has an inherently opportunistic and hence malleable relationship to ideology. Therefore, understanding fascist ideology requires recognising its capacity for change over time. In the words of John E Richardson, a political scientist with a rich body of work about British fascism, “fascist discourse is not consistent (even when examining the discourse of a single organisation, a single person or an isolated period of time), is inherently duplicitous, and stands in dialectical relationships with wider material relations”.10

Historically, fascism’s emergence was inseparable from counter-revolution. In the aftermath of the First World War and the 1917 Russian Revolution, European ruling classes confronted situations in which working-class uprisings threatened regimes based on consent and routine forms of coercion. The liberal democracies that emerged from the social collapse caused by war, while themselves forms of capitalist rule, rested on a degree of accommodation with working-class organisation—trade unions, parliamentary representation, and legal rights to assemble and organise. Fascism represented an attempt to eradicate those concessions altogether. It offered a solution to crisis by mobilising a mass movement from below to destroy independent labour organisations and other centres of collective opposition, leaving state power and capital unchallenged.

This understanding was developed most clearly by Leon Trotsky in his writings on the rise of Nazism in Germany.11 Trotsky insisted that fascism was not simply an especially reactionary ideology or an authoritarian style of government. Rather, it was a strategy. Its goal was the construction of a street movement capable of breaking the organisational and cultural infrastructure of the working class and its potential allies: trade unions, socialist parties, the left-wing press, ethnic minority communities and any institutions capable of collective resistance. Fascism, Trotsky argued, functioned as a “battering ram” against the working class when more conventional forms of repression were no longer sufficient.12

Crucially, this strategy depended on the mobilisation of forces from outside the established labour movement. Interwar fascism drew its energy primarily from sections of the middle classes—small business owners, the self-employed and others facing downward mobility—who typically experience capitalist crisis as economic dislocation and also as social humiliation.

These groups are drawn to fascism not because it offers a credible economic programme, but because it furnishes an explanation for social decline that displaces blame onto enemies above and below. Despite limited data on the contemporary social base of fascism—especially in Britain—its rhetoric continues to fuse resentment at advances made by less privileged groups with fear of downward mobility. Anger is directed upwards at “globalists” and corrupt elites, and downwards at migrants, racialised minorities, organised workers and the left. Class antagonism is recoded into national and civilisational conflict, creating what Alberto Toscano calls “a simulacrum of class struggle” that functions as a “pseudo-insurgency”.13

This is why Marxist analyses have typically stressed that fascism cannot be reduced to its ideological features. Racism, antisemitism, misogyny and extreme nationalism are typically central to fascist movements. However, they are politically effective because they perform a counter-revolutionary function.14 Fascist ideology is eclectic and adaptive.15 It wears a pseudo-revolutionary mask, presenting itself as a radical break with the existing order, yet in practice intensifying its most violent features. Fascists portray themselves as insurgents against a corrupt system even as they prepare the ground for a brutal reassertion of the existing order. As Hitler put it at his 1924 treason trial, “I stand here as a revolutionary against revolution and criminality”.16

This emphasis on process and function sharply distinguishes Marxist accounts from dominant British academic theories of fascism, which define it primarily as an ideological current. Roger Griffin, for example, centres fascism on “palingenetic ultranationalism”—a commitment to national rebirth through an ostensibly revolutionary rupture.17 Such approaches capture important elements of fascist self-presentation, but they risk reifying fascism as an intellectual artefact, identifiable through texts, symbols and doctrines rather than its political practice. The result is a narrowing of the category, in which movements that do not conform to an interwar ideological template are excluded even when they perform analogous political functions.

Once the analysis shifts from doctrinal checklists to political function, the fascist character of Robinson’s politics becomes clear. His prioritisation of street mobilisation over electoral strategy reflects a commitment to building a force capable of exerting physical control and political pressure in public space. His rhetoric constructs Muslims, migrants, feminists and the left as existential threats responsible for social decay, and simultaneously denounces “globalists”, political elites and state institutions in the name of a betrayed people. This dual orientation—anti-elite in form, violently anti-left in substance—is central to fascist strategy. When Robinson declares his movement to be a counter-revolution, he articulates precisely the logic identified by Marxist theory: the mobilisation of social forces to reverse real or imagined gains made by oppressed groups and the left, through intimidation rather than democratic persuasion.

Nor does Robinson’s lack of a formal party place him outside the fascist tradition. Fascist organisation is also historically adaptive. Where parties are constrained or exposed, fascism can operate through movements, networks and charismatic leaders. The early Nazi Party itself functioned as a small nucleus within a wider constellation of paramilitary groups and esoteric religio-political sects.18 What matters analytically is less organisational form in the abstract than strategic direction of travel: the attempt to construct a mass force capable of reshaping politics through violence. Robinson’s reliance on decentralisation, deniability and spectacle reflects contemporary conditions, not a departure from fascist logic.

To describe Robinson as a fascist is not to suggest that Britain stands on the brink of dictatorship. It is to analyse the role his movement plays within a period of crisis: channelling anger generated by systematic failures into a physical force directed at minorities, women and the left. Fascism in the 21st century will not reproduce the forms of the 1930s. Its symbols, rhetoric and organisation have changed—its political function has persisted.

Still, an understandable objection remains: if fascism is a counter-revolutionary politics, how can it develop in a period when working-class struggle is low and no immediate revolutionary challenge exists? The very notion of a counter-revolutionary political project appears to presuppose a revolution that has not occurred.

The mistake lies in assuming that counter-revolution is only intelligible as a response to an already existing revolution. In fact, fascism can operate as counter-revolution without revolution: a pre-emptive strategy aimed at foreclosing future rupture, disciplining society in advance, and rolling back past gains before renewed challenges from below can coherently emerge. Moreover, this suggests that fascism can develop as a reaction to moments of intense and systemic crisis that merely open the possibility of the emergence of revolutionary forces, even when no such forces are yet operative.

The Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács’s notion of the “actuality of revolution” provides some conceptual resources for understanding this. When speaking of revolution’s “actuality”, Lukács did not mean insurrection is always imminent.19 Rather, he meant that the crisis tendencies of capitalism have reached a point at which the possibility of a real rupture in the existing social relations is placed on the historical agenda, and therefore becomes the touchstone for judging “all questions of the day” in relation to the socio-historic whole. For Lukács, the possibility of revolution is a spectre that haunts our entire historical epoch, implicitly structuring the positioning of all political forces. The point is not prediction but orientation: the possibility of rupture is unevenly grasped, but it is real enough to structure political strategy. Hence, counter-revolution need not wait for a revolution to arrive; it can be anticipatory.

We might wish to question the grand conceptual implications of Lukács’s framework. Nonetheless, it is true that far-right ideology often identifies the threat of radical change implicit in immediate social and political developments. This mirrors Marxists’ perception of the radical possibilities inherent in these moments, albeit in a distorted, paranoid and fantastical form. The result is often the construction of conspiracy theories that see the danger of rupture implicit in every progressive social development.

Robinson’s claim that recent decades constitute a “globalist revolution” is just such an expression of this anticipatory counter-revolutionary consciousness. Social changes arising from political struggle, economic transformation and institutional reform—the erosion of patriarchal authority, secularisation and formal equality for minorities—are reimagined as a single revolutionary project imposed from above and against the nation. Robinson mobilises against the possibility of further transformation: the sense that existing hierarchies are unstable and that past gains might yet be extended. Such fears are common across the far right, but Robinson’s recourse to extra-parliamentary mobilisation and physical force marks him out as fascist.

His politics are therefore oriented towards foreclosure. Robinson’s project is best understood as counter-revolution without revolution: a movement built to reverse past gains and close down future possibilities in advance of any renewed challenge from below. This helps explain Robinson’s re-emergence as a major street leader in response to the mass Palestine solidarity mobilisations in Britain since October 2023, which highlighted the potential for wider transformation through collective social movement organising. Lukács’s concept of the “actuality of revolution” allows this dynamic to be grasped without exaggerating the level of social antagonism or imputing revolutionary intent where none presently exists. Robinson’s project is structured by crisis and fear of future rupture.

Indeed, the historical record shows that counter-revolution has frequently not required an imminent revolutionary breakthrough. State and elite actors often act in advance, escalating coercion when consent frays, crises deepen and past gains appear reversible. What matters here is anticipation: fear that instability or partial reform could reopen the question of power. Lewis Brownstein’s concept of “anticipatory counter-revolution” and Herbert Marcuse’s notion of “preventive counter-revolution” both capture this logic. However, both mostly treat this as occurring through state strategy—coups, repression and authoritarian restructuring—rather than through mass political mobilisation from below.20

The interwar period shows other possibilities. Fascist street movements repeatedly developed in lulls after working-class defeat, not at revolutionary peaks. In Germany after 1923, France in the early 1930s, and cases such as Finland, Romania and Spain before 1936, extra-parliamentary forces emerged to ensure that renewed rupture was foreclosed. Their function was preventive: mobilising middle-class and declassed layers into intimidation and violence, smashing left organisation and minorities as proxies for disorder, and reshaping political space through coercion rather than persuasion. Whether later absorbed or contained by authoritarian states, their purpose was to narrow horizons and discipline society in advance of renewed political contestation. Fascism, then, need not respond to revolution. It can function as a pre-emptive strategy for disciplining society when crisis is real, struggle uneven and the future contested.

The English Defence League: reinventing British fascism

If fascism is understood as adapting its organisational forms in response to crisis and antifascist resistance, then the emergence of the EDF in 2009 is best seen as a strategic reconfiguration within British fascist history. The EDL arose out of a prolonged crisis of British fascism produced by repeated failure, sustained antifascist resistance and the exhaustion of the party-political forms that had defined the fascist tradition for decades. It represented an attempt to overcome obstacles that had proven fatal to earlier projects, particularly the National Front and the BNP.

For much of the 20th century, British fascism was organised primarily through political parties seeking mass membership or electoral legitimacy. From Oswald Mosley’s BUF to the National Front and later the BNP, fascist leaders attempted to build disciplined organisations capable of exerting political influence or at least dominating the far-right milieu.21 Yet, each encountered the same structural constraints: the lasting discrediting of Nazism after the Holocaust, chronic fragmentation on the far right, sustained antifascist mobilisation, and the tension between electoral respectability and ideological militancy.

By the late 2000s, these constraints had crystallised into a strategic impasse. The BNP’s attempt to break through electorally under Nick Griffin exposed the contradictions at the heart of the party-based fascist model. Griffin’s modernisation strategy—abandoning overt Nazi imagery, emphasising cultural rather than biological racism and prioritising local community politics—was electorally rational, delivering some stunning successes in the form of council seats, London Assembly representation and nearly a million votes in the 2009 European elections.22 Yet, it also intensified internal tensions and heightened vulnerability to antifascist challenge, revealing the limits of party-based fascism under sustained opposition.

The BNP’s electoral advance was inseparable from ideological moderation. Seeking mainstream legitimacy, the party downplayed antisemitism and reoriented its racism towards Muslims, presenting Islam as culturally incompatible with British values. This shift mirrored wider changes in British political discourse, where biological racism had become increasingly unacceptable due to the antiracist struggles of the 1970s and 1980s.23 Yet, Griffin’s strategy proved destabilising. Antifascists and journalists continued to expose the party’s fascist core. At the same time, rivals within the fascist movement denounced the BNP’s leadership for opportunism and capitulation.24

These tensions were the result of a structural contradiction in post-war fascist politics. On the one hand, fascist parties pursuing electoral success must operate within a political field that penalises overt neo-Nazism. On the other hand, retreating from hardline positions risks alienating an activist base for whom militancy and street confrontation are central. The BNP’s history is marked by this dilemma. The rise of violent splinter groups such as Combat 18 in the 1990s—denouncing the leadership as sell-outs and state assets—demonstrated how attempts at respectability could provoke destabilising backlash from within.25

Antifascism compounded these pressures. The BNP’s limited electoral gains were met with sustained campaigns of exposure and counter-mobilisation. The Anti-Nazi League, Unite Against Fascism and local groups mobilised thousands to confront candidates, disrupt meetings and delegitimise the party. This attritional struggle drained activist energy, eroded morale and fractured organisational coherence. By the early 2010s, the BNP’s electoral project ran out of momentum. Griffin lost his European Parliament seat in 2014, and the party soon collapsed into irrelevance and internal recrimination.

British fascism faced a stark choice: persist with a party form that had repeatedly failed under pressure, or experiment with new modes of mobilisation. It was in this context of decline and fragmentation that the EDL emerged. It neither revived the BNP’s electoral strategy nor replaced it with a more disciplined organisation. Despite attempts to form a sister party, the British Freedom Party, the EDL defined itself as a street movement, mobilising supporters against Islam and alleged threats to British identity. It rejected electoral politics, publicly disavowed Nazism and insisted it was neither racist nor fascist.

The EDL’s founders, including Tommy Robinson, had absorbed the lessons of the BNP’s defeat. Overt fascist symbolism repelled broader layers and provided antifascists with clear targets, and electoral politics imposed constraints that weakened street mobilisation and exacerbated internal division. By presenting itself as a single-issue movement opposing Islam, the EDL sought to sidestep both problems. Public acts—such as Robinson burning a Nazi flag in a disused warehouse on the BBC’s Newsnight programme in October 2009—drew a sharp line between the EDL and earlier fascist organisations. Islamophobia offered a form of racism that could be framed as defence of liberal values—women’s rights, free speech and secularism—rather than biological hierarchy, resonating in a political climate shaped by the “War on Terror” and years of moral panic around Muslim communities.

The EDL’s embrace of Zionist symbolism and the creation of Jewish, Sikh and LGBT+ divisions served a similar function. Israeli flags featured prominently on EDL demonstrations, and non-white Islamophobes such as Guramit Singh Kalirai were promoted as faces of the movement. These gestures aimed to inoculate against accusations of antisemitism and racism while reinforcing the claim that Islam was uniquely incompatible with British society. In practice, they shielded the EDL from antifascist critique and complicated efforts to portray it as another iteration of the fascist tradition.

This dynamic is confirmed by Joel Busher’s research into grassroots EDL activism.26 Based on extended observation and interviews, Busher shows that rejection of the labels “racist” and “far right” was a key part of how EDL activists sought to break down the ideological barriers erected by decades of antifascist efforts to undermine British fascism. Activists portrayed themselves as ordinary people engaged in a defensive struggle, insisting they opposed militant Islam rather than Muslims as such. These claims sought to distinguish the EDL from overt neo-Nazi groups and discredited racisms. Yet, as Busher demonstrates, this self-understanding coexisted with, and enabled, the routine circulation of dehumanising narratives about Muslims, migrants and the left. Denial of racism did not restrain racial animus but repackaged it as common sense or patriotism, illustrating how fascist politics adapts under stigma and resistance.

Crucially, the EDL’s structure made it harder to defeat using tactics that had proven effective against the BNP. One key blow to the BNP had been the leaking of its membership list, which found its way onto the WikiLeaks website in 2009 after being published by disgruntled former members. The EDL guarded against similar possibilities. Without formal membership or an electoral apparatus, it could not be dismantled through exposure alone. Its more decentralised organisation—partly facilitated by the emergence of social media as a potential organising space—allowed it to absorb police bans, antifascist resistance and internal tensions without collapse. Although the EDL did maintain a hierarchical system of regional organisers and national leadership, local groups could mobilise autonomously through online networks. Moreover, the movement’s energy lay in spectacle and confrontation rather than formal organisational consolidation.

This turn to street politics was also a response to the fragility of electoralism under antifascist pressure. The BNP’s gains had depended on careful image management and proved open to disruption. The EDL dispensed with such ambitions, embracing mobilisation without a programme for governance. It offered confrontation and a sense of agency without the compromises or programmatic contestation required by party politics.

Nonetheless, the EDL was not a simple regression to earlier forms of British street fascism. Its ideology bore the imprint of BNP modernisation, which had sought to mask a neo-Nazi core behind a more publicly acceptable surface. As Richardson’s work on the BNP has shown, this rested on a division between ideological surface and depth: an exoteric rhetoric shaped to evade stigma and an esoteric commitment to racial exclusion.27 Biological racism and explicit antisemitism were downplayed, displaced by a culturalist framing of Muslims as a civilisational threat. In this sense, the EDL continued a trajectory begun within the BNP, stripped of electoral strategy but intensified in populist appeal.

Antifascism shaped this outcome at every stage. Where open Nazism would have provoked immediate resistance, the EDL was constructed to operate in the grey zone between mainstream politics and traditional British fascism, exploiting liberal ambiguities around free speech and tolerance. Its insistence that it was “not racist” and “not far right” was less belief than tactic—a means of survival in a hostile environment.

Between 2010 and 2013, the EDL managed to mobilise demonstrations of a few thousand people in cities such as Bolton, Dudley, Newcastle, Luton, Blackburn and Blackpool. However, the movement was consistently countered and increasingly contained by antifascists. Mass mobilisations by Unite Against Fascism (a forerunner of today’s Stand Up to Racism) halted the EDL’s momentum in places such as Walthamstow, where a 200-strong march led by Robinson was encircled and humiliated by 4,000 counterdemonstrators in September 2012. Attempts to circumvent opposition—including the tactic of small-scale, unadvertised “fash mobs” that could appear without triggering counterdemonstrations—were insufficient to sustain mobilisation. Internal tensions climbed as momentum dissipated, and local organisers became increasingly reliant on hardened neo-Nazi activists to help promote their shrinking rallies. Robinson resigned from the organisation in October 2013, claiming it had been taken over by “far-right extremists”.

Nonetheless, the EDL established a template that outlived the organisation itself, demonstrating that fascist politics could be advanced without a party, that mass street mobilisation could be built around Islamophobia rather than explicit fascist ideology, and that less centralised networks could partially evade antifascist containment. In this sense, the EDL formed a bridge between the failed party-fascism of the BNP era and the even more decentralised far right that later coalesced around Robinson. Robinson’s later reemergence as an independent political operator—reliant on digital platforms, crowdfunding and episodic mass mobilisation—was prefigured in the EDL’s effort to overcome the constraints that had destroyed earlier fascist organisations. Defeat did not eliminate British fascism; it forced its transformation.

The spectacular politics of digital fascism

The collapse of the EDL did not end Robinson’s political relevance. His authority never rested on bureaucratic control or ideological discipline, but on visibility, notoriety and repeated confrontation. Post-EDL initiatives, including the Democratic Football Lads Alliance and attempts to import the German PEGIDA group to Britain, exposed the limits of rebuilding a durable street organisation. They collapsed quickly or remained episodic.28 Robinson therefore reoriented his politics around social media, legal conflict, crowdfunding and spectacle. Leadership was fully detached from membership, and mobilisation was detached from programme.

This reorientation has been inseparable from the new possibilities opened up by the far right’s use of social media platforms such as Twitter/X. In this sense, Robinson’s project reflects the wider emergence of what Paolo Gerbaudo calls “digital parties”: formations organised less through formal membership and programme than through personalised leadership, affective identification and algorithmically amplified mobilisation.29 Robinson does not build an organisation so much as he curates an audience, converting attention into resources through donations, subscriptions and periodic calls to action. As Gerbaudo notes, such dynamics typically tend towards the emergence of charismatic “hyperleaders” who mobilise followers through spectacle rather than stable organisation.

In May 2018, Robinson was arrested outside Leeds Crown Court after confronting defendants in a child sex ring trial, almost collapsing the prosecution.30 The “Free Tommy” mobilisations that followed in central London exemplified his emerging model: large, volatile, social-media-driven gatherings that generated money, attention and grievance. They also revealed Robinson’s links to the international far right, with speakers including Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Islam politician; Paul Gosar, a United States Republican congressman; and Filip Dewinter, a leading light of Belgian fascism. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former White House chief strategist, sent a message of support.31 Characteristically, however, these demonstrations failed to consolidate into a lasting organisation.

In this phase, Robinson also increasingly described himself as a “citizen journalist”. This rebranding allowed him to recast his political agitation as journalistic exposé. His many arrests, court cases and injunctions were reframed as establishment repression of free speech. This tactical innovation has subsequently inspired the development of an entire subculture of far-right “citizen journalists”, “migrant hunters”, “auditors” and livestreamers. These “little Robinsons” now form an important part of the infrastructure of British fascism and were a constant presence during the racist mobilisations outside asylum seeker accommodation across the country in 2025. They represent the sense in which Robinson has restructured the British fascist movement at an organisational level as well as an ideological one.

The conspiracist turn

In the absence of stable mass organisation, Robinson has increasingly sought an explanatory framework capable of sustaining loyalty among his supporters. Episodic outrage is hard to reproduce without a narrative that explains defeat, repression and failure. Moreover, Robinson’s efforts to distance himself from overtly neo-Nazi organisations have limited his ability to draw on the openly antisemitic conspiracism that historically structured British fascism. This does not mean that conspiracism in general belongs to the past—it is still at the centre of his political project.32

Conspiracism here is not simply belief in particular conspiracy theories. It is a mode of explanation in which conspiracy becomes the organising principle of reality itself. Major social transformations are treated as intentionally coordinated by a hidden in-group. As a result, structural forces—such as capital accumulation, geopolitical power and class conflict—drop out of view.33 Abstract social relations are personalised as the conscious will of malign enemies operating behind the scenes.34

The emergence of this form of systematic conspiracism was historically contemporaneous with the emergence of capitalist modernity.35 Its modern origins lie in the counter-revolutionary response to the French Revolution, when reactionary writers explained mass upheaval as the work of secret societies such as the Illuminati. In the late 19th century, this template fused with modern antisemitism to produce the myth of a “Jewish world conspiracy”, most infamously codified in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, produced by the secret police in Tsarist Russia. In the interwar period, these ideas were reworked into “Judeo-Bolshevism”, which framed Communism as a tool of Jewish domination. This ideological move became central to fascist mobilisation, condensing a complex crisis of capitalism into a single moral enemy and redirecting anger away from class analysis and toward counter-revolutionary violence.36

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, conspiracism mutated through successive forms—“New World Order” narratives, Great Reset discourse, QAnon and the Great Replacement Theory—but retained its political function. It preserves an anti-establishment posture, while misdirecting crisis-generated anger away from existing social relations and towards racialised and political enemies. This allows movements to sound insurgent even as they act as the most vicious enemies of social transformation.

Elements of conspiracism were present in Robinson’s politics from the founding of the EDL, particularly in relation to Islam. However, the Covid-19 pandemic marked a qualitative shift. Robinson embedded himself in the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine milieu, launching the Silenced podcast and producing long-form video content in which he interviewed prominent conspiracy theorists and figures from the British Covid-19 denialist movement. These networks supplied audiences, resources and a ready-made explanatory grammar capable of integrating state repression, cultural change and economic insecurity into a single conspiratorial worldview.

Pandemic-era conspiracism centred on the fear of an imminent dictatorship being quietly introduced by liberal governments. In Robinson’s hands, this fantasy fused courts, universities, NGOs, trade unions, public health bodies and the media into a single coercive apparatus. He deployed concepts such as “mass formation psychosis”, imported from the US anti-lockdown far right, to depict movements such as Black Lives Matter as artificial phenomena manufactured by elites to suppress a silenced majority.

This ideological structure closely mirrors classical fascism. Nazi ideology collapsed social antagonisms into a single enemy. Jews were simultaneously depicted as finance capitalists and communist agitators, decadent cosmopolitans and revolutionary subversives.37 The purpose was not theoretical coherence but mobilisation. By presenting the establishment and the left as two faces of the same threat, fascism was able to retain a language of rebellion and disarm class politics. Moreover, this ideological configuration reflected the worldview of the middle classes and other social layers that felt threatened by both big business and the labour movement.

Robinson’s conspiracism performs the same operation. Progressive movements, liberal institutions, organised labour and sections of capital are collapsed into a single hostile bloc; political defeat and marginalisation become evidence of hidden power operating against him. This logic reached its most developed form in Lawfare (2024), a long-form “documentary” premiered on a large screen at Robinson’s London rally in July 2024; racist riots swept England just days later in early August.38

In Lawfare, Robinson presents Britain as an emerging “totalitarian state” in which the courts, police, media and progressive social movements are weaponised to suppress dissent. Legal sanctions are reframed as “lawfare”, prisons as sites of political persecution, and far-right activists as “political prisoners”. Migration is described as an “invasion”, policing as “two-tier”, and repression of the far right as proof that authoritarian rule is already in place. Robinson’s conspiracism operates through a totalising explanatory frame, collapsing disparate crises into the deliberate coordination of a hidden elite whose power is exercised through psychological manipulation rather than social or economic processes. As he states in the video:

With controlled media you can inject propaganda into the population on a daily basis and indoctrinate them all. You can hammer away, pumping out the same messages: Covid’s going to kill you; the vaccine’s 100 percent safe and effective; global warming is going to kill us all; mass immigration and diversity are our greatest strengths. If you can control what people hear, very soon you can control what many people think.39

Great Replacement Theory as organising core

At the centre of this conspiracist worldview sits the Great Replacement Theory. This conspiracy theory argues that migration is no contingent social process driven by global inequality or armed conflict, but rather a deliberate elite-led project to replace the “native” population with culturally alien outsiders, thereby dissolving national identity.40 Although Robinson draws on a range of conspiracist motifs, the Great Replacement provides the narrative spine that integrates them. It appears explicitly in his recent book, Manifesto, as well as implicitly throughout Lawfare and Lawfare 2, and symbolically in his street politics—most starkly in the “Remigration Now!” banner carried at the front of his September 2025 mobilisation. Robinson’s habitual description of migration as an “invasion” or “occupation” on Twitter/X reflects a worldview in which migration is a form of demographic warfare. In this framework, a corrupt elite is deliberately replacing an “indigenous” population in order to dissolve national cohesion and neutralise resistance.

The strategic power of the Great Replacement narrative lies in its capacity to fuse economic grievance, cultural anxiety and political repression into a single explanation. Instead of attributing housing shortages, collapsing public services and wage stagnation to decades of market-driven economic restructuring, it blames demographic sabotage. Antiracism, feminism and LGBT+ rights are recoded as tools designed to weaken social cohesion and drive down white birthrates. Supposed state repression of the far right becomes proof that the process has entered its decisive phase.

Great Replacement Theory also bolsters Robinson’s conception of the role of men as protectors of “our women and girls” against foreign “invaders”, who he routinely describes as sexual predators. His exploitation of survivors of child sex rings through video essay series such as The Rape of Britain is designed to mobilise a violent form of reactionary masculinity that legitimises vigilantism and racist attacks. This also serves to obscure his relationship to the vilest forms of sexism, including his long friendship with the misogynistic influencer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate. Indeed, when far-right activist Lauren Southern accused Tate of raping her during a trip organised by Robinson, he was quick to denounce her, despite Tate having numerous active charges for sexual assault in both, Romania and Britain.

Palestine, moral panic and the return to the streets

Since 2023, Robinson has returned to large-scale street mobilisation. This followed the eruption of the largest Palestinian solidarity movement in British history. The opening for Robinson’s counter-mobilisation was created by a sustained political and media moral panic around the Palestine movement, with repeated claims that demonstrations were inherently antisemitic and provided cover for Islamist extremism. This coincided with the lifting of his ban from Twitter/X after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, which underlines the importance of social media to Robinson’s organising strategy.

Remembrance Day in November 2023 was decisive. Sensationalist headlines claimed that a mass Palestine protest planned for Central London threatened the Cenotaph and British remembrance culture. Within this atmosphere, Robinson was able to mobilise supporters as self-styled defenders of the nation. The then home secretary Suella Braverman amplified this by labelling Palestine demonstrations “hate marches” and accusing the Metropolitan Police of bias against the far right. Robinson’s supporters subsequently attacked Palestine demonstrators—fascist street violence enabled by political cover from above.41

For Robinson, this moment demonstrated the effectiveness of conspiracist politics as a bridge between ideology and action. The Great Replacement narrative provided the bridge; Palestine solidarity was framed as evidence of demographic invasion, elite betrayal and cultural collapse. He followed with a 15,000-strong mass rally in London in July 2024, then another with up to 25,000 participants just a few months later.42

When racist rioting swept England only days after the July 2024 rally, the themes rehearsed in Lawfare—elite betrayal, demographic invasion, selective policing and repression—were activated. Robinson had been key to mobilising the rioters by spreading disinformation about the identity of the spree murderer who killed three children in Southport on 29 July 2024. In Lawfare 2, produced immediately after the violence, Robinson reinterprets the riots as a legitimate popular revolt cynically provoked and then exploited by the state.

Zionism, antisemitism and deniability

One of the greatest sources of the confusion surrounding Robinson’s project is his claim to oppose antisemitism and his public support for Israel. For more than a decade, Robinson has presented himself as a defender of Jews against Islamism, invoking Israel as a frontline state in a supposed civilisational conflict and framing his own street politics as part of that struggle. This posture has generated confusion across the political spectrum. Some liberals take it as proof that Robinson cannot be a fascist. Others, particularly within conspiracist corners of the Palestine movement, treat it as evidence that he is controlled by Israel or by a hidden Zionist network. Both readings misunderstand how antisemitism and Zionism can function within contemporary fascist politics.

Robinson’s alignment with Israel is best understood as a strategic adaptation to the defeats of British fascism. It responds to a longstanding problem: how to mobilise authoritarian, exclusionary politics in a context where open Nazi symbolism and explicit antisemitic conspiracism are heavily stigmatised. Support for Israel allows Robinson to recode Islamophobia as counter-extremism and racial exclusion as solidarity, repackaging fascist politics through the language of minority protection and cultural defence.

This manoeuvre did not begin with Robinson. As Benjamin Bland has shown, the BNP instructed its activists to de-emphasise hostility to Israel as part of Griffin’s modernisation strategy.43 Moreover, some BNP officials experimented with a limited rapprochement towards Israel during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. That year, Lee Barnes, the party’s legal officer, penned an article that largely prefigured Robinson’s politics:

As a nationalist I can say that I support Israel 100 percent in their dispute with Hezbollah. In fact, I hope they wipe Hezbollah off the Lebanese map and bomb them until they leave large greasy craters in the cities where their Islamic extremist cantons of terror once stood. The 21st century is the Islamic century. Unless we start to resist the threat of Islamic extremism then within 100 years the West will have become Eurabia.44

Although antisemitism remained deeply embedded in the BNP’s culture, sections of the leadership sought to downplay it publicly and redirected hostility towards Muslims. Robinson took this further by making ostentatious support for Israel central to his public identity. Where the BNP relied on euphemism and silence, Robinson weaponised support for Israel as proof of moral legitimacy.

This strategy has borne fruit. It has allowed Robinson to dismiss accusations of fascism as absurd, facilitated alliances with right-wing Zionist figures, and complicated antifascist efforts to expose continuity with earlier fascist traditions. All of this has been facilitated by the increasing alignment of the international far right with Israel and the consolidation of the extreme right as a leading force in Israeli politics. Yet, it has never resolved the underlying contradiction. Robinson’s politics remain structured by conspiracism, ethnic hierarchy and fantasies of national purification. Antisemitism has not disappeared. It has been displaced, rendered latent and available for reactivation.

This persistence is visible in Robinson’s saturated rhetoric of shadowy elites, globalist coordination and cultural subversion. These narratives reproduce the structural logic of antisemitic conspiracy theory even when Jews are not explicitly named.

The tension surfaces most clearly in repeated fascist infighting. Neo-Nazi groups such as Patriotic Alternative—headed by former BNP youth leader Mark Collett—denounce Robinson as controlled by Jews or Zionist interests, accusing him of betraying the nationalist cause. These attacks are expressions of a strategic fault line, and they underline the continued importance of ideology to fascists. For neo-Nazi currents, Robinson’s Zionism represents an unacceptable concession to liberal stigma. For Robinson, overt antisemitism threatens the fragile respectability on which mass mobilisation depends.

This conflict has deep roots. In his 2012 pamphlet What Lies Behind the English Defence League, Nick Griffin portrayed the EDL as a “controlled opposition” steered by Zionists and neoconservatives to divert nationalist anger.45 The argument preserved antisemitism as a master explanatory framework while delegitimising a rival organisational form that had proven more effective under antifascist pressure.

Versions of this narrative have since circulated widely within neo-Nazi networks and online subcultures, with memes frequently referring to him as “Tommy Robinstein” and superimposing his face onto antisemitic caricatures. More recently, these conspiracist themes have appeared in parts of the Palestine solidarity movement. Figures such as David Miller depict Robinson as a “Zionist asset”, implying that his Islamophobia is coordinated by Israel.46 This collapses material analysis into conspiracism. Robinson is treated not as a fascist actor embedded in British politics, but as a passive effect of hidden power. The logic mirrors the far right’s own explanatory habits and disarms effective opposition.

The consequences are serious. Explaining Robinson’s success through Zionist control obscures the real sources of his appeal, blurs the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and fractures solidarity by importing far-right modes of reasoning into progressive spaces. It also converges with international trends, particularly in the US far right, where explicit antisemitic conspiracism has been dangerously re-normalised by figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.47

Indeed, Robinson himself often reintroduces more open antisemitic themes into his rhetoric. In 2022, he published an article entitled “Tommy’s Statement: The Jewish Question”.48 Framed as commentary on Kanye West’s extreme antisemitism, the article repeated claims about “powerful Jewish people” having influence in Hollywood, big tech, mainstream media and government. One section was explicitly titled “Do Jews control the media?”, and it contained references to Jewish IQ and racial pseudoscience. Robinson’s subsequent 2025 invitation to visit Israel and meet with Amichai Chikli, its diaspora affairs minister, underlines the bankruptcy of the state’s claims to be engaged in a struggle against antisemitism.

Moreover, Robinson has also repeatedly invoked conspiracy theories centred on the Jewish financier George Soros, presenting him as the hidden force behind migration, multiculturalism and the repression of the far right. Although framed as opposition to a “globalist billionaire”, this reproduces a classic antisemitic structure. As John E Richardson and Ruth Wodak show, “anti-Sorosism” functions as a stand-in for the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy, personalising complex social processes by attributing them to a single Jewish figure.49

Far-right leadership in the social media age

The ideological work performed by conspiracism and strategic Zionism is inseparable from a distinctive organisational form—one designed to maximise mobilisation at the same time as minimising responsibility, discipline and exposure. Understanding Robinson’s politics therefore requires turning from ideology alone to the structures through which it is operationalised.

A distinctive feature of contemporary British fascism is that its most powerful figure does not lead a political party. Robinson mobilises larger street demonstrations, commands greater media attention and controls more financial resources than any formal fascist organisation, but he does so without membership structures, a constitution or a stable hierarchy. This absence is not merely a weakness or a transitional phase. It is a functional organisational form shaped by decades of antifascist pressure.

Historically, British fascist movements sought to overcome fragmentation through centralised organisation. From the BUF to the National Front and the BNP, leaders attempted to impose coherence through hierarchy, discipline and formal membership. These structures enabled coordination and ideological consolidation, but also produced vulnerabilities. They could be infiltrated, publicly identified and held responsible for violence, providing antifascists with fixed targets.

The collapse of the BNP destroyed the viability of this model. In its aftermath, British fascism fragmented into micro-groups, online subcultures, influencers and episodic protest networks incapable of consolidation. Robinson’s leadership style is a response to this terrain. Rather than overcoming fragmentation, he presides over it. His authority rests on control over attention, access and resources, not formal command. Robinson functions as a hub linking activists, organisers and influencers who remain formally independent but politically dependent on his platform. A small inner circle manages media production, fundraising and mobilisation, bound to him by personal loyalty and financial dependence as much as by ideology. Beyond this lies a wider periphery of figures who amplify Robinson’s narratives while competing for relevance. Robinson is able to sit atop this network partly due to his access to funding from overseas donors and his access to the online media ecology of the US far right.50 Appearances on the YouTube shows and podcasts of figures such as Jordan Peterson allow him to circumvent the reluctance of British TV channels to allow him on air.

To some extent, his structure frustrates traditional antifascist tactics. Without membership, there are no lists to leak. Without offices or branches, there are fewer fixed points of attack. Far-right violence is routinely disclaimed as spontaneous outrage rather than coordinated action. Robinson benefits from the atmosphere of menace, yet retains plausible deniability.

If fascist organisation has increasingly taken dispersed and deniable forms, this has important implications for how it is contested. Traditional modes of exposure, designed to target formal organisations with identifiable leaderships, have proven less effective against networked mobilisation operating without membership or command structures. However, over the past year, patterns of resistance have emerged that appear better adapted to this terrain.

In particular, the work of Stand Up To Racism illustrates how locally rooted activity, coordinated through national monitoring, can disrupt far-right organising at the point where it seeks to embed itself in everyday community life. Campaigners have repeatedly documented the backgrounds of individuals active in protests outside asylum hotels—exposing racist social-media histories, links to organised fascist groups and, in some cases, prior convictions for sexual offences—undermining claims that such mobilisations represent spontaneous or legitimate expressions of popular concern. Extensive local organisation means that many fascist mobilisations meet with immediate opposition.

Such work undermines deniability where it matters most: at the point where far-right activists seek to embed themselves in communities and present themselves as legitimate representatives of popular concern. It disrupts recruitment, fractures coalitions and weakens the far right’s capacity to operate under the cover of respectability.

The decentralised dynamic of today’s fascist street mobilisations reflects a feature of the discourse of the wider far right, which political scientist Ruth Wodak terms “calculated ambivalence”.51 Far-right actors advance exclusionary ideas that signal intent to core supporters. Meaning is unevenly distributed; leaders disavow responsibility while audiences supply the implications. A high-profile recent example often discussed in these terms was the Nazi salute delivered by Elon Musk at Trump’s presidential inauguration in January 2025, which he then claimed was merely an awkward gesture that had been misinterpreted by bad faith critics.52 Such ambiguity winks at an ideological hardcore and provides a veneer of deniability to other supporters.

Crucially, the logic of calculated ambivalence extends beyond discourse to organisational form. Structures are designed to manufacture ambiguity, allowing leaders to reap the benefits of mobilisation without assuming the risks of command.

Robinson exemplifies this strategy. He condemns violence while repeatedly producing the conditions for it. He denies racism while constructing Muslims as an existential threat. Strategic ambiguity allows him to address hardened fascists seeking confrontation, sympathisers drawn to anti-establishment rhetoric and a wider public primed to interpret repression as censorship.

Nevertheless, the successes of Robinson’s strategic and organisational approaches should not be mistaken for consolidation. His movement is powerful in moments of mobilisation but shallow in structure—resilient yet brittle, expansive yet unstable. It lacks the capacity for sustained organisation or electoral breakthrough, which helps explain his recent interest in more formal vehicles such as the Advance UK political party headed by Ben Habib, a former deputy leader of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Were such a vehicle to coalesce, it would mark a qualitatively new and potentially more dangerous phase in the development of British fascism. The creation of the Restore Britain party by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe could potentially serve such a purpose, although its connections to activists associated with the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative and Homeland groups will complicate any relationship to Robinson.

At present, therefore, the British fascist movement occupies a contradictory position. On the one hand, the past two years have witnessed an unprecedented scale and geographical spread of fascist mobilisation and violence across Britain. On the other, this escalation has unfolded in the absence of durable organisational consolidation, coherent programme or stable institutional footholds. This contradiction reflects a form of fascist politics shaped by repeated defeat and sustained antifascist pressure. The huge demonstration on 13 September 2025 hence simultaneously expressed the movement’s growing strength and signs of its persistent weaknesses.

Antifascism today

Robinson’s resurgence is unfolding within a broader conjuncture marked by the advance of the far right across Britain’s political landscape. Reform UK’s sustained position at or near the top of opinion polls, the normalisation of anti-migrant rhetoric across mainstream parties, and the consolidation of a far-right media ecosystem around GB News and online influencers have created conditions in which Robinson’s politics can circulate with unprecedented legitimacy.53 One consequence of consistent antifascist campaigning against Robinson is Farage’s reluctance to embrace him, and this has created real divisions inside the far right.54 Yet, despite these tensions, Robinson benefits directly from a generalised hardening of political discourse. In this respect, he and Farage, even if superficially distanced from one another, are able to engage in a division of labour between the streets and the ballot box. Hostility to migrants and contempt for liberal norms have become ambient features of public life. Robinson’s movement is best understood as a sharpened, street-level expression of this wider drift.

The consequences have already been stark. The riots of 2024 and the wave of protests against asylum seeker accommodation throughout 2025 translated far-right mobilisation into intimidation, physical assaults and the terrorising of racialised minorities. These were moments in which the far right briefly exercised territorial power, reshaping social space through menace and exclusion. Any assessment of contemporary antifascism must begin from this reality.

It was against this background that large numbers mobilised under the banner of the Together Alliance on 28 March 2026, as this article went to press. The significance of that demonstration lies not simply in its scale, but in the political terrain it confronts: one in which Reform, reactionary media and street-based far-right movements increasingly reinforce one another. Mass mobilisation can puncture the claim that racism and authoritarianism represent a silent majority, exposing the limits of strategies that seek to neutralise the far right by accommodating its framing rather than challenging it.

However, the political meaning of 28 March cannot be read off from numbers alone. Robinson has already announced a further mass mobilisation in London on 16 May. The critical question is whether the energy released on 28 March feeds into an antiracist movement capable of sustained escalation. The capacity to draw significant numbers from broad, inclusive demonstrations into determined confrontation with subsequent fascist mobilisations would mark a qualitative shift, indicating that unity has not come at the expense of militancy and that resistance is capable of adapting to the scale of the threat.

These questions acquire greater urgency once the prospect of a Reform government is taken seriously. A Reform general election victory would carry immediate consequences for migrants, Muslims and racialised communities: intensified detention and deportation regimes, the criminalisation of protest and the further emboldening of fascist street movements. Trump’s bloody deployment of border agents to cities such as Minneapolis points towards what a future Reform government may look like. In such conditions, the limits of electoral tactics would likely become apparent quickly. Historical experience suggests that defending those under attack would require forms of collective action extending well beyond the ballot box, including workplace shutdowns, community defence and sustained confrontation with far-right mobilisation.

Returning to Lukács’s idea of the actuality of revolution helps to clarify what is at stake. Revolutionary potential does not reside only in moments of insurrection. It exists as a horizon that structures fear, hope and strategy in the present. Robinson’s counter-revolutionary politics are oriented towards foreclosing that horizon in advance, disciplining society before a renewed challenge from below can cohere. Militant antiracist struggle disrupts this project through moral appeal and, importantly, by contesting control of social space and reasserting collective capacity.

Such struggles have historically exceeded the bounds of antiracism alone. In different contexts, resistance to racialised violence has acted as a catalyst for wider confrontation with state power and entrenched economic inequalities, generalising struggle and reshaping political expectations. In Britain, recent mobilisations around Palestine and the Gorton and Denton by-election victory for the Green Party have already revealed a social terrain far more volatile than Reform’s electoral advances alone might suggest.

Coalitions such as the Together Alliance therefore face a strategic tension. Their breadth is a source of strength, but only insofar as it does not become a brake on escalation. Differences between parliamentary, trade union, community-based and more radical actors are inevitable. The decisive issue is which forces set the rhythm of the movement. When caution disciplines militancy, mobilisation tends to stall. Where more confrontational actors set the pace, the boundaries of what is politically possible can expand.

Robinson’s project is best understood as an attempt to rework British fascism around a model that prioritises street mobilisation, deniability and episodic violence over party-building or electoral breakthrough—at least for now. By dispensing with membership and programme, and by operating through conspiracist narratives and street spectacle, he has shown how reactionary politics can be advanced through intimidation rather than democratic persuasion. Antifascism confronts a fascist project that seeks to normalise violence as a political resource and to carve out spaces of fear and exclusion. The central question is whether this project can be disrupted in practice, before extra-parliamentary reaction hardens into a durable feature of British political life.

Richard Donnelly is an academic researcher based in Britain. He writes about the far right, fascism and the history of conspiracy theories at https://theunrecoveredcountry.substack.com

Notes