‘Unity’ is killing our movement whilst fascists claim the streets

The far right is growing, and I don’t mean slowly. I mean, they are in fucking overdrive. With Rupert Lowe announcing his new ‘Restore Britain’ bullshit, I’m seeing a wave of absolute horrors coming out of the woodwork. Not just your average, run-of-the-mill racist who has had too much GB News shoved down their neck. These are a new wave, bolstered by Lowe’s unapologetic racism and misogyny, and they are fucking dangerous.

And how does it appear the left is countering it? With static rallies and tired speeches.

Britain First brought the far right out en masse

I stood in the rain on Saturday, 21 February, and watched the future of the North of England curdle.

I wasn’t at the Stand Up to Racism (SUTR) rally at Piccadilly Gardens, thank God. Come on, if you’ve been to one SUTR demo, you’ve been to them all. They’re all the same. Static, stagnant speeches of unity and hope to a crowd that already agrees. Possibly a little sing-song. They’re cute, and I admit that they have their place, but times have changed, and if our tactics don’t change with it, we are failing as a movement.

Being undercover that day, I had embedded myself deep within the Britain First rally. From the first ten men trying to brawl each other at the start, all the way to Paul Golding’s pathetic, rain-soaked sign off, I saw a movement which is no longer ‘misguided.’

The usual faces were there, the nanas who can’t afford the basics and the mothers drip-fed a rhetoric of fear from Facebook AI slop. But they’re just the shields that hide something a lot more sinister. At least a third of the crowd that I saw that day were hardcore fascists.

And that scared me.

The blood and obsession

These men are rough, drunk and itching for a fight. They use asylum hotels as a mask for pure, unadulterated racism and they don’t even hide it anymore. As I wandered through the masses of Union Jacks (and there were fucking loads) I heard men talking about burning hotels to the ground with people inside them. Laughing about shooting literal children in the channel for sport.

And they seem to actually crave violence. They want a fight and they made it very clear when the mask slipped at the march. They didn’t give a fuck about hiding their racism whenever a person of colour just happened to walk by. It wasn’t just angry words, they openly attacked people there and then.

And we can no longer counter this movement when we are half a mile away, singing kumbaya and preaching to the like-minded about unity. I’m looking at you, Stand Up to Racism.

The SUTR monopoly is failing

Whilst these hardcore fascists are getting up and mobilising, causing chaos and intimidating innocent people all across the country, SUTR is falling woefully short. As an organisation it is failing our movement.

That day in Manchester you had a large crowd of like-minded people, half a mile away listening to Jeremy Corbyn. It was stationary. It was safe. It was sanctioned. And, ultimately, it was absolutely useless.

SUTR has a stranglehold on the UK protest movement and this monopoly on protest is hollowing out our resistance. I am a part of a SUTR WhatsApp ‘discussion’ group and it’s a fucking graveyard. That’s because we have been told we are not allowed to talk about anything unless it’s SUTR-related and there’s positive discussion around it. Admins who do not live in the local area kick out seasoned comrades for nothing more than questioning techniques and offering alternatives.

What the fuck is a movement if we cannot even speak to local activists? If we can’t offer criticism and alternatives to grow? What the fuck has SUTR become other than shadowy, bureaucratic and downright authoritarian if that’s how they treat activists on a local level?

Activists are screaming for change, or even just to be heard, and it’s falling on deaf ears. The organisation seems to treat the movement as a brand to be protected, rather than a force to be deployed.

Lessons from the North’s fight against the far right

We know what works, because we have fucking done it. On 27 October 2025, when UKIP and their egg-looking leader Nick Tenconi tried to march in Newcastle, a splinter group of antifascists refused to stay with SUTR at their stationary protest.

Activists blocked routes, kettled the crowd and generally ruined the energy of the event, causing many of the marchers to fuck off early. The day was a success because we met them where they were, not where police and SUTR told us to stand.

And SUTR couldn’t hijack that one, even though they tried to take the credit. They are happy to count heads in a park, whilst the far-right are smashing skulls on the pavement. And that needs to change.

This monopoly needs to end or those people behind the scenes of SUTR need to fucking listen. We are no longer happy to sit and watch violent racists take over our streets and threaten vulnerable minoritised groups.

Stand Up to Racism, listen to us or prepare for something else to rise and resist the far right.

Featured image via the Canary