President Donald Trump is arriving in the United Kingdom on Tuesday for an unprecedented second state visit, this time hosted by King Charles III.
The president will be kept mostly behind the walls of Windsor Castle, far from the London streets that just days ago were packed with more than 100,000 “Unite the Kingdom” protesters. The demonstration, which resulted in over 20 injured police officers, revealed the explosive resentment building within Britain’s surging right wing.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has characterized the protest as a display of “plastic patriotism” that nonetheless “sent a shiver through so many of our communities who now feel more scared than they did before.”
“Britain is a nation proudly built on tolerance, diversity and respect,” Starmer said via social media. “Our flag represents our diverse country and we will never surrender it to those that use it as a symbol of violence, fear and division.”
“Unite the Kingdom” was organized by Tommy Robinson, a British political activist whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
Robinson, a preeminent anti-immigration advocate, has galvanized factions of the voter base that are outraged at the continued mass importation of foreign nationals and perceived inaction from the mainstream parties to fix the U.K.’s collapsing social cohesion and fraught economy.
He has made enormous gains through hammering on taboo social ills plaguing the U.K., such as well-documented grooming gangs operated by immigrants, harsh crackdowns on free speech, and slap-on-the-wrist sentences handed down by British judges.
However, the activist’s long history of arrests and controversies, such as last month when he characterized a video of a black grandfather playing with his white grandchildren as predatory, has convinced many right-wing activists seeking an alternative to the mainstream Conservative Party that his brand is politically poisonous.
“He’s got a string of criminal convictions. This is not somebody that you would want to have as your MP,” Dan Hannan, a Conservative life peer in the House of Lords, told the Washington Examiner. “His business model is to be able to go to — particularly American — donors and say, ‘Look, I’m suffering as a free speech martyr.’ So he needs to be convicted from time to time to do that.”
Hannan, who is also a Washington Examiner magazine columnist, continued, “Two things can both be true at the same time. It’s possible that Tommy Robinson has been unfairly or more harshly treated by the criminal justice system than he would have been without his notoriety. That doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t have been convicted.”
This reputation and lack of political maneuvering have created a scenario in which Robinson has been able to mobilize Brits en masse for political demonstrations, but the parties he has attached himself to, currently Advance UK, barely register in voter polls.
In the battle to usurp the Conservative Party, Robinson is eclipsed by the growing strength of Reform UK, a political party led by Nigel Farage.
Reform UK is polling in first place among British political parties with 31%, far outpacing the incumbent government Labour Party in second place with 20% and the Conservatives in third with 16%.
In its official policy platform, Reform UK promises to “stand up for British culture, identity and values,” as well as “freeze immigration” and “restore law and order.”
“Once and for all, we will take back control over our borders, our money and our laws,” Farage personally promises in the document.
Similar to Robinson’s populist movement, Reform UK voices contempt for both Labour and the Conservatives, the latter of which it claims betrayed right-wing voters by continuing to implement policies indistinguishable from those of their left-wing opponents despite over a decade in 10 Downing Street.
Multiple members of the Conservative Party have already defected to Reform out of frustration with their leadership and platform — most prominently, Danny Kruger, a sitting member of Parliament.
Kruger, who also sat as the party’s shadow work and pensions minister, defected in bombastic fashion — declaring at a press conference with Farage on Monday that “the Conservatives are over.”
“There have been moments when I have been very proud to belong to the Tory party,” he explained, but the legislator admitted that “the rule of our time in office was a failure.”
Conservative leadership has accepted the defections with resigned grace, acknowledging that the party is at a low point and that a turnaround is still long off for the once-dominating faction.
“Every leader regrets losing someone to another party,” Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said in a Tuesday interview with GB News, acknowledging that her party faces “a very tough and bumpy time” in the next election.
“There may be some people who are impatient,” Badenoch said. “I’m sorry if they’re not willing to wait, and they just want to rush to whatever is looking good right now, but what I’m doing is going to work in the long-term.”
Hannan, as a member of the Conservative Party, is not planning to defect any time soon. He sees the two parties ultimately working toward the same policies despite Reform UK enjoying a triumphant ascension amid the Tories’ deflation.
Conservatives “are in third place in the polls — this is the oldest political party in the world, a party that was in office for two-thirds of the 20th century,” he said. “[It] was in office for 14 years until last year. So they are not accustomed to doing as badly as this. So a lot of that, I think, is just a psychological trauma.”
The life peer is also conscious of the possibility that Reform could “deflate rather quickly.”
While Robinson and Farage share many policy stances, the Reform UK leader has long tried to steer clear of entanglement with Robinson’s circles.
When Farage’s former party, the UK Independence Party, extended membership to Robinson in 2018, Farage warned then-leader Gerard Batten to be mindful of “what company he keeps” or else risk “total and utter marginalization.”
“I wrote very explicitly into the rules of the party when I first became leader — we did not want anybody in the party that had taints with organizations we deemed to be on the far-right of British politics,” Farage said at the time. “I couldn’t have been clearer. It really upsets me to see the fact this debate is even taking place.”
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The fault line between the movements of Robinson and Farage were highlighted in the wake of the “Unite the Kingdom” rally, at which tech billionaire Elon Musk delivered a video address.
In the message, Musk warned attendees that “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”
Farage was asked for comment on Musk’s statement during a press conference on Monday, and the member of Parliament expressed concern that the billionaire’s directive to “fight” left a “degree of ambiguity.”
“Elon and I have a relationship — wouldn’t say a very good one,” Farage said. “He’s generally rather rude about me even though I do rather admire him in many ways. You know, it would be nice to get some clarification of what ‘fight’ meant in that context.”
He continued, “We are radical, but we are not revolutionaries. If the fight that Musk was talking about was about standing up for our rights of free speech — if it was about fighting in elections to overcome the established parties — then that absolutely is the fight that we’re in.”
It is impossible to separate the current strain of right-wing support in the U.K. from Trump’s Make America Great Again movement on the other side of the Atlantic.
Protesters at “Unite the Kingdom” carried portraits of Trump and signs thanking the president. Robinson himself has deployed copycat phrases such as “Make Europe Great Again” in his activism.
Farage, meanwhile, has publicly celebrated his own friendship with the commander in chief. He had his picture taken with Trump in the Oval Office earlier this month after testifying before Congress that British speech laws have rendered his nation akin to North Korea.
He was forced to admit on Sunday that he broke parliamentary procedure in March when he spoke at a Republican fundraising dinner in Tallahassee, Florida, promising to rectify the situation with the registrar as soon as possible.
The wave of right-wing sentiment will hang over Trump’s visit. The Labour government has attempted to tame resentment by catering to the public’s most prominent complaints, particularly immigration.
Meanwhile, King Charles — an apolitical head-of-state — is more concerned with giving the president a royal treatment as Downing Street hopes to find diplomatic stability with the volatile administration.
“The only real constitutional function of a head of state in a constitutional monarchy is to be the referee in a contested or hitherto unencountered constitutional crisis,” Hannan told the Washington Examiner. “And in order to do that job properly, the only thing you have to do is never express an opinion.
“I might suspect that [Charles] has a certain kind of pro-net-zero leanings or whatever. But since he became king, there hasn’t been a word that could be used to suggest any inclination one way or the other.”
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Trump is an enthusiastic fan of the British Royal Family, heaping praise upon the king and his late mother, Queen Elizabeth — he praised King Charles as an “elegant gentleman” on Tuesday just before departing on Air Force One.
For this reason, bilateral meetings with the monarch are often treated as the U.K.’s very own Trump card.