Authored by Philip Patrick via DailySceptic.org,

100,000, 150,000, 500,000, a million, three million? An estimate of the size of the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in central London on Saturday is evidently challenging, perhaps impossible. (All these figures have been claimed somewhere.) The drone footage looks like a CGI representation of a massed army from Lord of the Rings.

Then there are the at least one-and-a-half million who were following events on livestreams. But does the figure really matter? Suffice to say the numbers who were there, and those that would have liked to have been there, were extraordinary – historic even – and far surpassed the expectations of the police or the mainstream media.

A better question might be: what does it all mean?

I was there for much of it. So packed did it become that I had to almost fight my way out. (I had a train to catch.) This was a bit of a problem as the police had sealed off most of Whitehall making it very hard to leave. The idea seemed to be to create empty buffer zones to prevent confrontations with rival protestors. Fair enough perhaps, but the cordoned-off area was simply too small, leading to gridlock and a certain amount of panic. I only got out after feigning a heart problem and claiming my wife was on the other side of the thin blue line with my medication. My Oscar-worthy performance worked, testament to what I found was the overall reasonableness of the police. 

But they were close to being overwhelmed at times and one take-away message from the day is that the authorities underestimated the breadth and depth of feeling of people in UK who oppose the direction the country seems to be taking. The rally was called ‘Unite the Kingdom’ and the proliferation of Union Jacks, flags of St George, Saltires and Welsh Dragons evidenced the UK-wide appeal of this event – not just how frustrated people feel, but a renewed spirit of Unionism, too.

The number of crosses and placards proclaiming Jesus Christ our saviour was, to me at least, surprising. “Jesus is King” was chanted from the stage at one point. How real this is (is Tommy Robinson a regular churchgoer?) is questionable but it certainly added a flavour to the proceedings and reinforced the mood of a people striving for a higher, better, ancient authority to appeal to. Proselytisers handed out literature and if they didn’t seem to be making too many converts, they were welcomed nevertheless.

The mood, if it can be summarised, was not angry or aggressive, just defiant, determined and resolutely patriotic. I would summarise it thus: “We are British and proud of it. We quite like our little island and don’t want it transformed. We are sick of being smeared and caricatured, censored and silenced.” If the crowds might not be called diverse – though there were people of every skin pigmentation – no one appeared excluded,  accept, perhaps, Sir Keir Starmer, who is loathed. I even bumped into Piers Corbyn and had a brief chat to him about climate change. Interesting that this old Leftie should see potential for scepticism in this crowd of supposed ‘far-Right bigots’. 

Almost no party political figures seemed to be present (Ben Habib excepted), not from the UK anyway, and interest in traditional politics seemed lacking. Advance UK had a couple of stalls, I saw one UKIP banner, one “Farage for PM” placard, but of Reform as a party virtually nothing. They were no doubt keeping their distance from what many will depict as an unsavoury manifestation of extremism, but I didn’t detect much enthusiasm for or interest in the bookies’ favourite for our next PM. 

And what of Tommy Robinson? He arrived over Blackfriars Bridge within the main body of the endless march enclosed within a phalanx of bodyguards and flanked, apparently, by Katie Hopkins and Laurence Fox. I nearly bumped into him at one point, which brought me up short. I had almost wondered whether Tommy Robinson was real. Such is his mystique that he seemingly exists as much in the imagination or YouTube as in the flesh, a liminal character like Ned Ludd, Watt Tyler, Jack Cade or Robin Hood. 

Whoever or whatever Robinson is, he was clearly idolised by a substantial section of the crowd. But not, I suspect, by all. One of the benefits of actually being there is that you can judge to what extent the generalisations of the mainstream media were borne out. The Tommy chant was struck up a number of times, but never quite took general hold. I could be wrong but I sensed there were many who chose to keep a little distance between the main man and the general themes of the day. Whatever else yesterday was, it would be wrong to characterise it as ‘Tommy-fest’.

Those themes were love of country, of British culture, a rejection of mainstream politics and mainstream media, and a resolute defence of free speech. Charlie Kirk was appropriately memorialised and there were huge cheers for Elon Musk who appeared via a video link to speak with Robinson. Musk spoke of his love of the UK and desire to see it stand up for its core values. Robinson thanked him for his acquisition of Twitter and opening up the global debate. The mainstream media were hardly mentioned at all, which speaks not just to the contempt most there feel towards them but their growing irrelevance to large sections of society.

Were there bad elements?

Plenty certainly had the look.

There were some rough-looking muscle-bound men, skinheads, all-body tattoos, military garb, lager in hand. Aesthetically you can understand why many jump to the conclusion that at least some of Tommy Robinson’s followers are undesirables – particularly when they are told so over and over again by the mainstream media. For the most part, though, I’d agree with the estimable Trevor Philips who described the attendees as “the sort of people you would meet in a country pub”.

I saw no trouble whatsoever, but there were apparently 25 arrests on Saturday and a similar number of police were injured when Unite the Kingdom came close to clashing with an ‘anti-fascist’ group. It’s not clear exactly what happened or how many of the arrested were counter-protesters or indeed what exactly the injuries amounted to. By way of reference, there were 528 arrests at the Notting Hill Carnival this year.

More out of curiosity than anything else, I watched the BBC report of the rally that evening. It focused almost entirely on the one (that I know of) ugly confrontation which it seemed to be suggesting characterised the whole event and everyone there.

The reporter looked a little dazed and demoralised, perhaps overwhelmed by the scale of the event or vaguely guilty about the partiality of his own reporting.

He mouthed the orthodox complaints of ‘far-Right’ violence but his demeanour suggested acquiescence to a deeper truth: that what happened yesterday in Whitehall and what it signifies cannot be so easily defined or so easily dismissed.