Belly of the Beast: A Divided Kingdom
By the Armchair Window
Autumn light in Sheffield slipped through my parents’ thin curtains, falling like a faded memory across the armchair where my father sat. Once a steel-worker—broad-shouldered, strong enough to hoist iron beams bare-armed—he was now a frail figure in palliative care, his vast hands resting on the small back of his great-grandson, my two-year-old great nephew, perched upon his lap.
The television murmured in the corner: flags sprouting on lampposts, far-right protests outside refugee hotels, reports of clashes at an Epping hotel where police had been hurt. My father’s gaze moved between screen and child, as though keeping past and future in his sight at once.
I had come up from Birmingham to give my mother a few days’ respite from the work of tending to him. Then his quiet voice—weighted by decades—broke the stillness.
“I always told you: one day they’ll try to kick you out. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here. They’ll never accept you—because of your colour, because you’re Muslim.”
I told him we once believed we had slain the beast of fascism back in the 1980s when I helped found the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement. But the beast had never died—merely slipped into the sewers to bide its time. Now it crawls back into daylight: once lurking at the margins, now strutting the mainstream. As before, the choice returns—pack up our bags or stay and fight for our rights.
I did not tell him I had spoken the previous night at a Sheffield Stand Up to Racism meeting—just as in the 1980s I had hidden my activism to spare my parents worry. The struggle had returned; so had I.
The Gathering Storm
In the weeks before the Tommy Robinson ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march the air itself felt charged with menace. Each day brought fresh reports: Sikh taxi-drivers attacked in the Midlands, Asian shopkeepers abused, shutters of south-east-London takeaways scrawled with slurs, windows smashed after dark.
Then the darkest news: in Oldbury, a young Sikh woman was raped by two men who told her to “go back to where you came from.”
These were not stray crimes but tremors before the quake. Britain’s political centre had tilted toward the same abyss: not only the far-right street agitators but the leaders of both main parties had helped pave the road—Tories and Labour alike shaping the “hostile environment,” competing with slogans such as “Stop the boats” and “Island of strangers.”
Words are never weightless. These words fell like stones—permission slips for the haters, licences to drag the unspeakable back into the square.
The Journey South
Returning to Birmingham to join the counter-protest in London, I felt again the old rhythm of organising: the familiar faces in the dawn chill, banners and leaflets packed into bags, my battered megaphone and the Irish drum—its hide worn thin by years of rallies—painted with the slogan “No Justice, Just Us.”
Two coaches waited outside Moor Street station to take us to London. The news of the Oldbury assault hung unspoken yet heavy among us.
Half-way down the motorway we pulled into a service station—by chance alongside a coach of comrades from Sheffield and Rotherham. We embraced across years and miles, a brief reunion that affirmed the continuity of struggle.
The warmth soon chilled. At the entrance stood a knot of men draped in Union Jacks and St George’s flags, leaning on slot machines, eyes hard with hate. They gritted teeth, hurled obscenities, tried to provoke a fight. The road to London was lined with the faces of the movement of hate we had set out to oppose.
The Day the Beast Marched
In London, women led the counter-demonstration, banners aloft—“Women Against the Far Right.” Police quickly kettled us in Whitehall: barely five, perhaps ten thousand anti-racists, a small knot against a surging tide.
A hundred-thousand-strong far-right crowd—some said one-hundred-fifty-thousand—poured into the city in the largest mobilisation of its kind in British history. Families in day-trip clothes marched beside street-hardened thugs. St George’s crosses and Union flags mingled with Trump banners, Israeli flags, Christian crosses, placards demanding “Remigration Now.” The chants—“Send them back!” … “Oh Tommy Robinson!” … “Whose streets? Our streets!”—echoed off the old buildings.
We saw the breadth of their alliance: Reform UK T-shirts beside veterans of the English Defence League, open fascists and neo-Nazis from the White Vanguard, Paul Golding of Britain First, Nick Tenconi of UKIP, conspiracy theorists waving “Great Replacement” signs, trans-haters marching under banners of racial purity.
The rally called itself “Unite the Kingdom.” The title promised unity; the spectacle delivered division.
Tommy Robinson claimed from the stage that he welcomed everyone, that this was a festival of heritage—yet the chants roared “Send them all back!” A few black and brown faces wrapped themselves in Union flags, imagining they were exempt, yet the logic of exclusion spares no one.
On the platform stood a constellation of far-right figures: Robinson himself—serial offender and former EDL leader—host of this national pageant of hate; Elon Musk by video link, demanding Parliament’s dissolution and warning “violence is coming … fight back or die”; Eric Zemmour of France, preaching the “Great Replacement” myth; Ant Middleton, declaring that under a “British-cultured umbrella” everyone must conform; Ben Habib of Advance UK invoking “constitutional Christian roots” while railing against Muslims and migrants.
Such company unmasks Robinson: shoulder to shoulder with racists, fascists, neo-Nazis, xenophobes, conspiracy-mongers and convicted criminals. Unite the Kingdom was a linguistic disguise, a thin veneer over the politics of hate and exclusion.
By dusk we were escorted toward Green Park station, walking shoulder to shoulder for safety through occasional skirmishes. The day felt less a demonstration than a siege. Looking back at the littered pavements of Whitehall I thought again of my father’s warning: the beast had not merely returned—its teeth had grown sharper.
Capitalism’s Children
Fascism never erupts from nowhere. Its mother is crisis; its father, the hubris of a declining empire. Across the globe wars—in Gaza, the Donbas, the Sahel—seed fear at home and scapegoats abroad.
In Britain, decades of austerity—wages ground down, rents soaring, the NHS hollowed out, lives squeezed by profiteering landlords and energy giants—have bred anger and despair. The far right redirects that anger downward: towards refugees, Muslims, Roma, anyone marked as other. It is an ancient alchemy—pain transmuted into hate, despair into nationalist rage. There is no excuse for it, yet history shows how easily hardship can be weaponised against the vulnerable.
A Call from History
That day in London revived for me the memory of the 1980s when the Asian Youth Movements faced the National Front in the streets of Yorkshire. We learned then that fascism thrives when the oppressed are divided and shrinks when they unite.
The threat today is graver, but so too the potential for resistance: trade unions with six million members; the millions who march for Palestine; networks of faith groups, students, tenants, climate activists—all exist, yet remain scattered.
As Malcolm X warned: “We’re not outnumbered; we’re out-organised.”
Building the United Front We Need
We need a united front strong enough to meet the danger and turn the tide. Stand Up to Racism is not flawless—no mass movement ever is—but it retains both the national reach and the urgency to mobilise. It acted swiftly during last summer’s racist pogroms and continues to rally each weekend against the protests outside refugee hotels.
We cannot afford the comfort of the sidelines. We must step forward—bringing the reach we have in our own communities, offering what skills we carry as organisers, educators, frontline builders, street generals.
The movement must stay open, democratic, collectively owned; only then will people feel it truly belongs to them. Trust and unity are not written into constitutions—they are forged shoulder to shoulder: in the streets, on picket lines, at vigils. There will be peaks and troughs, setbacks and disappointments, yet we must persist—without ego, non-sectarian, bound by common purpose.
Back at the Window
A few days after the march I returned to Sheffield. My father sat once more by the window, autumn light falling across his face, my great nephew asleep in his lap, oblivious to the currents of history swirling around him. The television murmured in the background, echoing the events we had faced—together yet apart.
He looked up and said quietly, “Did you see the march in London? They were there in their thousands. The day they kick us out is getting near.”
I thought of the five thousand who had stood their ground in Whitehall, surrounded and kettled yet unbroken. I thought of those who resisted fascism on these streets before us: who faced the swastikas at Cable Street, who defended Lewisham from the National Front, who marched with us in the 1980s. If only he knew I had stood there too, shoulder to shoulder with strangers who were brothers and sisters in struggle. But as then, I kept silent, sparing him the worry.
Instead, I said what we had always said in the heat of resistance:
“As we used to say—organise or perish. For his sake,” I nodded to the child in his lap, “we will organise. We will pass the baton.”
In that quiet room the arc of generations folded in on itself—the siege of Cable Street, the defiance at Lewisham, the marches of the 1980s, the siege of Whitehall—all mingled with the tender weight of a child asleep on his grandfather’s knee.
The beast may rise again, yet it will find us waiting—unbowed, unbroken. History does not bend to the mercy of the powerful; it moves forward because ordinary people choose to stand, to organise, to pass the baton across generations.
For every child who deserves to grow without fear; for every life threatened by hatred; for every community under siege by the politics of division—we will organise. We will not be moved.
When my great nephew grows, may he inherit not despair but a legacy of courage and resilience, knowing the fight was fought by those who came before him and by those who stood in his own time.
The beast will rise again, but it will always find us waiting—unbowed, unbroken.