The Far-Right Has Become a Bit Sad, Hasn’t It?

What I saw of the Unite The Kingdom rally wasn’t strength or patriotism. It was monetised grievance, imported outrage culture and profound second-hand embarrassment.

Photo by dlxmedia.hu on Unsplash

Yesterday wasn’t a particularly good day for a rally. When I think rally, I think hot summer days, not the miserably cold, rainy London that we all had to live through yesterday.

That, however, didn’t stop Tommy Robinson, aka. Stephen Yaxley-Lennnon, aka. Tiny-Tommeh-Ten-Names, from doing his thing, though. The Unite The Kingdom rally happened at the same time as the Nakba counter-protest, so there was a very big expectation that things were going to go sideways. I’m genuinely glad to say it didn’t.

The thing that I noticed most about this miserable protest, though, was just how incredibly over it I am. Not in an active opposition way exactly - I’m just so bored. Things have become incredibly repetitive when it comes to the far right and how they do protests and demonstrations, and the little footage I saw was just a bit... embarrassing, really if I’m being very honest.

I should probably note here for context that I’ve been online a lot less than when you all started getting to know me a few years ago.

I really was very online an unhealthy amount back then, and that all changed significantly after my father died in February this year. Since then I’ve started a new job, and towards the end of last year I picked up a new hobby - Dungeons and Dragons¹.

An unexpected - and I would say very positive - side effect of reducing my outrage intake is that a lot of what I see online now strikes me as far less terrifying and infuriating and more as deeply, catastrophically cringe.

I’m not saying it’s harmless or unthreatening, but it is cringe. Proper second-hand embarrassment cringe. That embarrassment where your body physically tightens, and you reflexively want to close your eyes because somebody else is humiliating themselves in public with so much confidence it’s baffling.

The other thing I noticed most at the UTK rally, though, wasn’t actually the nationalism itself. The United Kingdom has always had right-wing nationalist movements. The BNP, the EDL, parts of the Tory party. Nationalism has always been a thing².

What fascinated me yesterday was just how incredibly American the whole thing has become. Not just politically or aesthetically, but emotionally and spiritually. This wasn’t old-school British nationalism. It was imported, algorithmically optimised, franchise-branded Nationalism™.

There was Make England Great Again, which feels very much like Temu MAGA. Giant flags everywhere. “Save Britain” rhetoric. Endless talk of betrayal and collapse. Christian imagery everywhere, despite the UK being a country where most people treat church attendance with about the same enthusiasm as root canal.

And then you had the live streamers - sweet baby Jesus, the sheer number of live streamers.

Everywhere you looked, another bloke wandering around with a stabilised camera rig and the expression of a man who god-honestly believes that he’s documenting the fall of Rome, instead of just a slightly damp man standing outside Pret near Trafalgar Square in the drizzle.

The whole rally felt less like a protest and more like a networking event themed around “How to be Racist Online and Earn Money!” If you had written this as satire ten years ago, people would have told you to turn it down because it’s too unrealistic.

That’s the thing I can’t stop noticing now - just how much of modern outrage politics feels inauthentic.

Political engagement increasingly feels like live content production, and we saw it with Robert Jenrick last year when he walked through streets talking at his mobile phone about how horrible everything is and chasing down people for fare evasion like the worst, most embarrassing super-hero ever. It felt made for Instagram, by Instagram. The algorithm being fed nice, full-fat, meaty content.

The rallies we’re seeing now aren’t protests anymore - they really are just outdoor studios. Everything is designed for clips. Content that’s shareable, digestible, easily spreadable. The chants, the flags, the confrontation footage. Right-wing activists approach people they think might be left-wing, say provocative things, hope to get a rise. It’s happening at scale and on a schedule now. The whole purpose of the Unite the Kingdom rally felt like it was exclusively for us on the left to get worked up and shout so they could frame us as the threat.

Politics has become entertainment. I said a while ago that politics is my sport, and it still is, but in a very different way. Policy and legislation still interests me far more than should be healthy. The system in and of itself still interests me. But this new brand of performative politics is exhausting and, worse than exhausting... it’s lame.

More than it being lame though, it’s also incredibly predictable - because the delivery system that it’s all built into, rewards it - and not just in dopamine hits anymore, but in actual cash.

Everyone doing a slightly shaky livestream from the ground wants clicks, engagement, eyes, attention - they need those things because they now turn into analytics. Into actual pounds and pence coming into their bank accounts.

So they, for lack of a better word, improvise.

Britain is always on the brink. Civilisation is under attack. Being English is under threat. Free speech is in danger. The immigrants, brown people, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, women - all of them are all at once coming for you. The country, according to this group of people, is constantly moments away from collapse because somewhere in Luton a halal chicken shop opened next to a Greggs and Darren from Kent has interpreted this as the beginning of national extinction.

And they can’t step back from it, because the moment they do - their livelihoods come under threat.

It’s a desperately pitiful place to be, trapped by your own financial incentives. Once you step back from the algorithm for even a little while, you start realising how hollow everything is. How repetitive. How desperately monetised. People aren’t just angry now. They’re content creators. Outrage is their business model. Fear is their product. Every speech, every confrontation, every dramatic “they’re silencing us” moment becomes material to feed into an algorithmic ecosystem that survives exclusively on permanent emotional escalation.

That’s where you really feel the American influence. British far-right politics used to be ugly in a local way. Booze, football hooliganism, some bloke named Gaz screaming outside Wetherspoons before missing the last train home. Now it’s slick and strange. Suddenly everybody’s talking about the West instead of Britain. Everybody sounds like they learned politics from podcasts recorded in Texas.

Everybody’s obsessed with Elon Musk, who has somehow become this messianic figure to men who five years ago probably thought electric cars were communist. The cadence has changed. Dramatic pauses. Emphasis. Endless references to freedom and patriots and betrayal and enemies within. It doesn’t feel British anymore. It feels franchised, like someone’s taken MAGA, removed the firearms and lack of universal healthcare, and dumped the remaining slurry into the Thames for us all to consume.

Before anyone accuses me of mocking working-class people, let me clarify: what makes this genuinely dangerous is how commercially effective it is. Entire careers now exist purely to keep people in a permanent state of adrenalised fury.

Donations, subscriptions, live stream revenue, engagement farming, monetised outrage channels. The line between political activism and influencer culture has completely collapsed. Everything has to feel existential all the time, because if Britain isn’t actively dying, what exactly are all these people live streaming for six hours a day?

Meanwhile, the actual problems in this country continue rotting away in the background. Housing. Social care. The NHS. Stagnant infrastructure. Local councils collapsing financially. None of these issues lend themselves well to dramatic TikTok edits with Hans Zimmer music underneath. You can’t build a profitable outrage ecosystem around regional transport funding or the fact that our care system is in a constant state of near-collapse.

Beneath the satire and the cringe and the second-hand embarrassment, there really is something genuinely dark here. Movements built around fear and threat and identity and chaos don’t end well. And the darkly funny part - the genuinely tragic part - is that these people are trapped in it.

They can’t step back because the moment they do, the money stops. The algorithm has them firmly in its grasp. They’re not cynical operators anymore. They’re caught in a machine they helped build, screaming louder and louder because silence means irrelevance, and irrelevance means ruin.

1. It turns out pretending to be a druid in a cursed fantasy forest is better for your mental health than watching divorced men with Bluetooth earpieces scream about Western civilisation on Twitter for six hours a day. Who would have thunk it, eh?

2. I would add here that I am intimately familiar with nationalism. South Africans invented entire damned political systems out of it. I know the genre.