UK Protest Movements: Left and Right

Since March 2025, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all seen a sustained run of anti-immigration protests, many of them focused on specific hotels being used to house asylum seekers. By the time of writing, at least 41 police officers had been injured and more than 185 people arrested across the wave as a whole. The largest single event, the September 2025 "Unite the Kingdom" march in London, drew an estimated 150,000 people and alone accounted for 26 injured officers.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, has been the central organising figure behind the largest events. Named far-right groups including Britain First, the Homeland Party and Patriotic Alternative have taken part on the ground at smaller, local protests. Robinson's legal costs have been directly and publicly funded by Elon Musk, who also addressed the September rally by video link.

The genuine grievance underneath much of this is real and predates the current organising: anger over the asylum hotel system, and further back, anger over the 2024 grooming gang scandals. That underlying anger is a separate question from who has since organised around it, and worth treating as such rather than assuming the two are the same thing.

A recurring question about protests on both sides is whether they reflect genuine local feeling or are amplified by outside organisers. The honest answer, based on the documented record, is that both things are usually true at once.

At one London hotel protest in Islington, the Metropolitan Police stated plainly that the demonstration had originally been organised by local residents, but had then been "endorsed by groups from outside the local community" in a way the force said was likely to increase the numbers attending. In Perth, Scotland, the local council's community safety partnership went further and directly accused some protesters of being bussed in.

Across the wider wave, the pattern is consistent: individual protests are usually sparked by a genuine local flashpoint \u2014 a specific hotel, sometimes a specific alleged incident \u2014 but the same handful of national organisations turn up repeatedly across dozens of otherwise unconnected towns. That's a real sign of national-level coordination layered on top of real local anger, not an argument that one explanation cancels the other out.

The organised opposition to these protests is led, to a significant degree, by Britain's trade union movement. The TUC represents roughly six million members and has gone well beyond passive disapproval: its 2025 conference passed a formal motion committing the union movement to coordinating action against far-right ideologies, and it has built workplace training materials for union reps alongside a joint programme with German unions IG Metall and the DGB specifically aimed at countering far-right organising in workplaces.

Stand Up To Racism has been the most visible group on the ground at individual local protests, turning up at hotel demonstrations across the country from Bristol to Liverpool to Perth. At the largest scale, the Together Alliance \u2014 a coalition backed by roughly 500 organisations including unions, anti-racism campaigners and Muslim representative bodies \u2014 organised the March 2026 London march that organisers called the largest anti-far-right demonstration in British history; the Metropolitan Police's own estimate of the crowd was considerably lower than organisers claimed, though both figures describe a very large event by any UK standard.

Unions also have a direct, material stake in this fight beyond opposition to racism: the TUC has been explicitly campaigning against Reform UK's proposed repeal of Employment Rights Act protections, a concrete policy fight over workplace rights rather than a purely symbolic one.

The movement isn't unanimous on strategy, and that internal disagreement is worth including rather than glossing over. At the same 2025 TUC conference, a Unite delegate argued against writing off Reform-curious workers, saying those voters were still "our people" and warning against pushing them further away. A National Education Union delegate directly disagreed, arguing there was "nothing legitimate" about the far-right protesters' underlying concerns. That's a live, unresolved debate inside the labour movement, not a settled position.

The anti-immigration wave has a substantial, well-documented record of disorder: the cumulative 41 officers injured and 185+ arrests noted above, including a single day in September 2025 that alone accounted for 26 injured officers. The 2024 riots that preceded this wave were considerably worse again, with over 360 officers injured and 1,840 people arrested.

The largest counter-protest events don't show comparable disorder in the reporting \u2014 the March 2026 Together Alliance march was met only by a smaller pro-Israel and Iranian-monarchist counter-demonstration, with no clashes reported. At smaller, local hotel protests, however, counter-protesters have had real physical friction with police too; in Bristol, some counter-protesters pushed at police lines attempting to reach the opposing side.

One category of incident is worth separating out from generic protest-clash disorder. In Edinburgh in June 2026, five people \u2014 including worshippers leaving a mosque, a delivery driver and a taxi driver \u2014 were injured in a series of incidents that police treated as serious enough to involve Counter Terrorism Policing, and which Stand Up To Racism Edinburgh described as racist violence and intimidation. That reads as targeted violence against individuals because of their ethnicity or religion, meaningfully different from two organised crowds clashing at a march, and an honest account shouldn't lump the two together.

Since August 2025, Union Jacks and St George's crosses have appeared tied to lampposts and painted on roundabouts across England, under the banner "Operation Raise the Colours." Supporters describe it as a simple, patriotic gesture. HOPE not Hate's investigation found that while many people putting up individual flags are ordinary members of the public acting on social media posts, the key organisers behind much of the campaign are established far-right activists.

The effect on the ground has, in places, gone beyond decoration. In one Birmingham suburb, non-white residents reported being scared to leave their homes after the flags went up, and organisers returned repeatedly to replace flags that local residents had taken down, leading to real confrontations. Polling from October 2025 found that both white and ethnic minority respondents tended to see the campaign primarily as an anti-migrant message rather than patriotism \u2014 a finding that cuts across racial lines rather than splitting neatly along them.

Support for the campaign has come from figures across the Conservative Party, Reform UK and Advance UK, and some Labour members too \u2014 but it's Labour-run councils, including Birmingham and Tower Hamlets, that have moved to remove flags from lamp-posts on safety and community-relations grounds, at real public cost: one council alone, Medway, spent \u00a311,592.50 removing 727 flags.

For balance, it's worth noting the same underlying dynamic has played out from the other political direction too: Tower Hamlets' mayor had already ordered the removal of Palestinian flags from council property back in March 2024, after Jewish residents said the flags made them feel unwelcome in the borough. Flag symbolism causing a community to feel targeted isn't unique to one side of this argument.