I suppose many of my UK readers will be up to speed on the rally in London yesterday, organised by the infamous Tommy Yaxley-Robinson, originally known as Stephen Real-Name. But I attach a few remarks, partly for overseas readers wondering what England has become.
The answer to that last question must be, “an increasingly Stalinist state.” The amount of gaslighting about Unite the Kingdom reached new levels this time, involving the Government directly, rather than just the press, local authority and police. The lying may be explained, but not justified, by the current meltdown of the Labour Government, and the rapidly approaching political sunset of Keir Starmer, for whom any distraction is good, including slander.
So as you may have heard, the day beforehand, Starmer directed a broadside against the Far Right fascists who would be attending the event, and the convicted thugs and racists who were organising an orgy of hate against those of other races. As many have reported, the crowds were in fact (like last year) families of every ethnicity and many nations, including some of those who destroyed Labour in the recent elections, who would be more fruitfully wooed than condemned. Many waved crosses as well as the cross-emblems of the nations of the UK. None of the organisers has been convicted of thuggery or racist crimes, making our PM, with access to all areas of Intelligence, a Porky-Pier. The Home Secretary, “My Muslim faith comes first” Shabana Mahmood, also ordered last-minute exclusion of no less than 11 overseas speakers, including a sitting Euro MP and accredited journalists.
The continuing official mischaracterisation of Tommy Robinson and his team, pursued relentlessly since he started exposing state-condoned militant Islamism in Luton two decades ago, has now worn very thin. That is because so many have heard the man himself speak at length, or seen his documentaries, though far too many Guardian-readers still claim they know little about someone who can raise a crowd of hundreds of thousands after repeated imprisonments in solitary confinement.
In fact, negotiations with the Metropolitan Police had been fruitfully ongoing since last year, resulting in the whole of Whitehall and Trafalgar Square being allocated to the event, and every detail agreed. Though strangely, not the whole of Trafalgar Square was set aside, for a large march by Islamists and Leftists, to commemorate the Nakba during the Arab war against Israel at its foundation, was unaccountably moved forward a day from the actual anniversary in order to oppose UTK. It was also permitted by the Met to use part of the Square, thereby risking confrontation as well as stretching police assets.
Assistant PM David Lammy, echoing Starmer, said those attending UTK did not reflect the Britain he is proud of, though it would seem that the counter protestors, masked, tea-towelled and disorderly, and chanting for TR to be shot in the throat like Charlie Kirk, did.
Although after the Stockport riots Starmer has said the Government has no role whatsoever in operational policing, he and London Mayor Sadiq Khan were filmed discussing police tactics with senior officers, which is probably why the police gave last minute arbitrary instructions to close the rally half an hour earlier than agreed. This was maybe just to disrupt the schedule, though imposing sanctions for running over time may also have been a motive. It is hard not to suspect that political pressure was also responsible for the deployment of 4,000 police, facial-recognition technology, and armoured cars, for an event that was not only repeatedly directed by TR himself to be peaceful and celebratory, but had a track record of being so last year. Note that these “extra” measures were not applied to the Nakba march.
The Far-Right Fascist event itself began with the Lord’s Prayer, in which most joined despite this not being billed as a religious event. Several gospel appeals to repent and acknowledge Jesus as Lord were made during the afternoon, as well as the more cultural calls to make Jesus Lord of Britain again. Most of the music, too, had a gospel content. And Laurence Fox, far less on the fence about his faith than of yore, closed his address with a quote from Ephesians that we wrestle not against [the Government], but against the spiritual powers and principalities.
Amongst those voiceless people given a platform to speak were the church pastor recently falsely arrested for street preaching, a Nigerian bishop pleading for support for the actual genocide of Christians there, one of the rape-gang victims chronically silenced by our institutions, and other similar oppressors of decent folk. Other thugs defended from the platform included the women in Iran shamelessly protesting against the blameless IRGC, and the lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich, in “preventive detention” in Germany for 30 months, much of that in solitary confinement and shackles, apparently for the egregious crime of spreading COVID malinformation.
All this was, of course, actually a cover for the stirring up of the crowd to FIGHT… by making sure to register and vote when the next election happens. Such rabble-rousing should surely have been banned?
I’d like to finish this piece by making a direct comparison of UTK with The Festival of Light and Festival for Jesus events of 1971 and 1972, both of which I attended. For although, as I said, yesterday’s event was ostensibly a political meeting, rather than a religious one as the 1970s ones were, there was probably as much gospel-content in both, and the cultural impetus was much the same.
Festival of Light was the conception of some returning missionaries, appalled at the moral decline of the nation. By assembling a large crowd of Christians from the churches, it was hoped to focus attention on Britain’s fall, and provoke a reversal of the trend. It failed in this, and here are a couple of reasons I might conjecture.
The first is that it was largely a project of the nascent Jesus People movement here. There was a lot of gospel music, and a lot of enthusiastic praise, but a majority of participants were young and zealous, but totally inexperienced in life. Furthermore, the dominant influence of Charismatic theology meant that the only real strategy was what Charismatics understood by “Spiritual Warfare.” Over time, the events became prayer marches to command territorial demons to leave Parliament, or wherever – neither prayer marches nor territorial demons being based on the Bible.
The much larger UTK, by contrast, advocates that people become spiritually and physically strong, so that they are ready to back up their voting-rights with a commitment to, and an understanding of, the spiritual history of their nations, and the exact nature of the ideological threat. There is a wider, and older, age range involved, and Christian music, though significantly included, is not put at the centre. To my ears, the gospel message attached to the movement lacks Pentecostal accoutrements: this appears to be a genuine working-class revival of the biblical gospel of repentance and faith – sadly largely occurring outside established churches – rather than yet another NAR revival-through-worship flash in the pan.
There are, of course, dangers in UTK, but they are not fascism, racism, or xenophobia. The denominations, generally, seem to be casting their anathemas at “Christian Nationalism,” saying that the gospel is being hi-jacked for political purposes. If that’s so, then what was the Festival of Light? What was the English Reformation? What were Alfred the Great’s reforms?
The Evangelical churches, as well as the mainstream, ought to be a little cautious that they don’t miss out on a work of God, as many of them did when they rejected the Methodist Revival in the 18th century. Ironically, they don’t understand what is happening because they are trying to recycle revival in the mould of Wesley, the Holiness Movement, and Pentecostalism, as if those were Christ’s template rather than contingent, and flawed, historical phenomena.
One big danger in current attempts to revive Christian culture is the “Seven Mountain Dominionism” arising from the various branches of the Latter Rain Movement. There was one hint of that in a New Zealand group present at last year’s rally. But Tommy Robinson subsequently rejected it openly, and there was no hint of it yesterday. A return to national Christianity is not an attempt at a theocracy.
One other danger is that of taking the shortcomings and corruptions of “the Church” as a reason to reject church as a spiritual necessity in Christ. To be fair, this is unlikely given how many leading supporters are clerics, albeit often in breakaway communions because rejected by their own.
I can envisage risks in, for example, the groups of unchurched men meeting in fields for prayer and physical training, military style. I don’t think the danger is in forming gangs of thugs to torch mosques or form an insurgency. But I can imagine them, without biblical structures, degenerating into cultic groupings, or even homo-erotic perversions like the infamous muscular Christianity of a John Smyth. But there isn’t a Christian work in history into which Satan has not sown tares, so the task of mature Christians, it seems to me, is to advise rather than to disparage.
My overall impression is that I witnessed much truth in Unite the Kingdom yesterday, and very much more untruth in those who condemn it, from the Prime Minister to denominational leaders. Call me old-fashioned, but on balance I’m on the side of truth.
