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In the endUKUKIPUKIPYour browser does not support the element. the protest was, a bit like the weather, a damp squib. On October 26th the first major rally organised by the extreme right since in late July and early August took place in central London. Perhaps a few thousand protesters turned up, fewer than the number who attended a similar rally in July. But the riots and their aftermath have been added to the list of grievances nursed by demonstrators.There was no violence on the march, which at one point was abruptly stopped by the police. Frustrated protesters grumbled as they waved flags professing their allegiance to various parts of Britain, to Donald Trump and even to Israel. A man of South Asian heritage, dressed in a Just William-style schoolboy uniform, ranted about how Sir Keir Starmer had pushed the country “to the brink of civil war”.When the marchers did eventually reach their destination outside Downing Street, the awaiting band led a chorus of “Oh, Tommy Robinson”. The man himself—an Islamophobic firebrand who organised the march and whose real name is the somewhat less chantable Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—was not there. He was being held on remand, after turning himself into the police; two days later he was imprisoned for 18 months for violating an injunction to stop making libellous comments.Mr Robinson’s absence may be one explanation why the march at the weekend was a relatively quiet affair. But it is not the best one. Many of those engaged in violence over the summer were youths looking for a bit of anarchic fun; the crowd in London was considerably older. The more than 1,500 arrests and 1,000 charges that followed the earlier riots have doubtless dampened enthusiasm for civil disorder.Mr Robinson himself is better thought of as a social-media influencer than as a leader of the extreme right. His target audience is Britons who do not consider themselves extremists but feel economically and politically disenfranchised; his diagnosis of their ills is that Britain is being overrun by a wave of criminal Muslim immigrants whom the authorities bend over backwards to accommodate. The announcement this week of additional terrorism-related charges against the man accused of carrying out the murders of three young girls in Southport in July, the spark that kindled the violence in the summer, will fuel such theories.Some well-known far-right activists were present on October 26th, but extremists were far less visible than during the riots. The murders in Southport provided them with a focal point, says Jacob Davey of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think-tank that monitors extremism. Posts in extremist Telegram channels increased by 327% in the ten days after the killings compared with the ten days before. But activity has since tailed off. The extreme right is more fluid than it used to be and highly organised activist groups hold less sway, Mr Davey says. In moments of crisis, like Southport, they “come together a bit like a shoal of fish” but soon go their own ways again.The sense of grievance they feed off has not gone away, however. The riots themselves are now adduced as evidence for the claim that the criminal-justice system treats white Britons more harshly than others. That argument was made again and again at the protest on October 26th. Peter Lynch, a man who died in prison after being convicted of violent disorder outside a hotel sheltering asylum seekers in Rotherham, has become a martyr.One big beneficiary of this inchoate discontent may prove to be the Independence Party (), a hard-right populist party. Nick Tenconi, the party’s interim leader, gave the most attention-grabbing address at the demonstration. Speaking without notes in a fiery tone, he said that was coming for the “liberal elite traitors” and that Sir Keir Starmer will “bend the knee to the British people”. “Fear no longer controls us,” he bellowed. “We control fear.” By then the crowd had thinned and the local pubs had filled up. But those who remained were enraptured.
