When London Burned: The Day 150,000 Marched

The rain lashed in irregular showers across Westminster Bridge as, on that September Saturday in 2025, a mass of people formed like London had rarely seen. Hundreds of thousands poured through the streets of the British capital, their flags - Union Jacks and the red cross of Saint George - fluttering like war banners in the wind. What had been announced as a demonstration for free speech turned out to be something far more sinister: perhaps the largest march of the extreme right in Britain’s recent history.

Tommy Robinson (born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) is the founder of the English Defence League (EDL), an anti-Islam street movement that has been described as far-right by British authorities and researchers for years. He has been convicted multiple times for hate speech, incitement to violence and incitement of the people, and is on the watchlist of numerous extremism analysts.

Tommy Robinson stood at the center of this storm. The 42-year-old extremist, only recently released from prison, had called for his “Unite the Kingdom” march. But Robinson was no longer just a fringe figure in British politics. Behind him now stood the power of the global tech elite: Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, spoke to the masses via video link and called for a fight. “You must strike back or you will die,” his voice thundered over Whitehall as the crowd roared and chanted his name.

The images created that day burned themselves into the collective memory: a sea of people stretching from Big Ben across the Thames all the way to Waterloo Station, more than a kilometer long. Police officers in riot gear desperately trying to hold the barriers between the Robinson supporters and the 5,000 counterprotesters. Bottles flying through the air and shattering on helmets. A police horse stumbling backward after being hit by a bottle. Blood running down a man’s face as he was led away by officers.

The New International of Rage

What unfolded in London was more than a British phenomenon. It was the visible manifestation of a transnational movement organized through social media and fueled by billionaires. Steve Bannon, the architect of Donald Trump’s first election victory, had been scheduled as a speaker but stayed in the US to send his support from there. The French far-right figure Eric Zemmour spoke of a “great replacement” of European peoples. The message was clear: this was not an isolated protest but part of a larger war for the soul of the West.

The rage that erupted that day had been building for months. The summer of 2025 had been marked by protests outside hotels where asylum seekers were housed. The trigger: the arrest of an Ethiopian man accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. For Robinson and his followers this was proof of what they had always claimed: that migration was out of control, that their own government had betrayed the people.

“The migrants now have more rights in court than the British people, the people who built this nation,” Robinson shouted hoarsely to the crowd. It was a message that struck a chord. The people who had come - many of them ordinary citizens, not skinheads or obvious extremists - carried signs reading “Stop the Boats,” “Send Them Home” and “Enough, Save Our Children.”

The Technology of Hate

Musk’s appearance marked a turning point. This was not some extremist at the margins of society but the man who had bought Twitter and turned it into X, the man whose satellites provided the internet to Ukraine, whose electric cars were seen as symbols of progress. His words were a declaration of war on British democracy: “There must be a dissolution of Parliament and a new election.” The crowd cheered. What Musk and Robinson understood was the power of digital mobilization. Robinson’s account, banned from Twitter in 2018, had been reactivated after Musk’s takeover. Now he could spread his messages without hindrance, could claim that “MILLIONS” had come (the police counted between 110,000 and 150,000), could post videos of young Frenchmen who had come to honor the slain American activist Charlie Kirk.

The irony was impossible to miss: men who claimed to fight for free speech were simultaneously calling for the dissolution of a democratically elected Parliament. Men who claimed to defend British values were taking their orders from a South African-American billionaire.

The Failure of the Center

While violence erupted in the streets of London - 26 police officers were injured, four of them seriously, with broken teeth, concussions and possible spinal injuries - Prime Minister Keir Starmer was sitting in the Emirates Stadium watching his favorite football club Arsenal play. The image was devastating: the head of government at leisure while his capital burned. The Labour government, only recently in office, seemed overwhelmed by the force of the protest. A feeble statement condemned the violence, but the real questions remained unanswered: how could it come to this? Why did so many people feel so alienated from their own country that they followed a multiple-convicted extremist and violent offender like Robinson?

We will be launching our own investigation in the coming weeks – with fresh perspectives and completely different angles.

The answer lay partly in the small boats crossing the English Channel every day, crammed with people seeking a better life. To some they were refugees deserving protection. To others they were intruders destroying what Britain stood for. There was hardly any room left between the two for nuance, for reasonable discussions about migration policy, integration or the economic realities of an aging society.

The Hour of the Demagogues

Robinson was a master at instrumentalizing these fears. With his rough voice and working-class accent he spoke to people who felt abandoned by the political elite. He was one of them, he suggested, even though in reality he was financed by American tech billionaires and far-right networks.

The counterprotest organized by “Stand Up To Racism,” with its 5,000 participants, looked almost pitiful by comparison. Veteran politician Diane Abbott said that racism and fascism were nothing new, that they had always been defeated. But her words rang hollow in the face of the sheer mass on the other side of the police barriers.

As the day drew to a close it was clear that something fundamental had shifted. This was no longer the old far right of shaved heads and combat boots. This was something new, more dangerous: a movement giving itself a veneer of respectability, supported by the richest and most powerful people in the world, using cutting-edge technology to stoke ancient resentments.

The World in the Grip of Rage

What happened in London was not an isolated event. From Washington to Warsaw, from Rome to Rio de Janeiro, similar movements are rising. They all tell the same story: that the native culture is under threat, that strangers are coming to take what is rightfully theirs, that only a strong man - always a man - can save the nation. The true tragedy lay not only in the violence of that day, not only in the injured police officers and the broken barriers. It lay in the fact that reasonable discussions about real problems - migration, integration, economic insecurity - had become impossible. Instead there was only shouting, only rage, only calls for radical solutions to complex problems.

When Robinson left the stage that evening and promised another event, it was clear: this was just the beginning. The forces unleashed that day would not easily be contained. In a world where billionaires can call for overthrow via video link, where social media spreads hate faster than any police can respond, where truth is just one opinion among many, the descent into chaos and violence seems almost inevitable. The 25 people arrested were, as the police said, “only the beginning.” But the beginning of what exactly? This question hung over London like smoke over a battlefield. The battle had been fought, but the war - the war over the future of Britain, of Europe, of Western democracy itself - had only just begun.

In the days after the march politicians would deliver their usual platitudes, speak of law and order, of democratic values and the rule of law. But the 150,000 people who had marched through London were no longer listening. They had found their own prophets, their own truths, their own vision of a future in which the strangers had disappeared and the old order was restored. The United Kingdom was no longer united. It was torn apart, split, on the edge of an abyss. And while the politicians were still debating and the experts still analyzing, Tommy Robinson was already preparing for his next march. The revolution, it seemed, was being live-streamed, sponsored by the richest people in the world, cheered on by millions who believed they had nothing left to lose.

The rain had stopped as the last demonstrators left Whitehall. But the storm, the real storm, had only just begun.