Starmer finally stands up to Tommy Robinson and his white supremacist friends

In the apparent twilight of his premiership, Keir Starmer sees the danger of Robinson's poisonous brand of politics. Too late, Keir...much too late.

I strongly commend the Prime Minister for blocking eleven far-right instigators from attending the Divide the Kingdom march organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) yesterday.

But it comes tragically late in the game. Robinson’s politics - panic about migration, national decline and demographic “replacement” - has steadily seeped into the mainstream. And Starmer himself has embraced and abetted the broken Westminster political system that has permitted the far-right to fester.

Starmer was right to bar Robinson allies like Filip DeWinter (a Flemish nationalist with an affinity for Nazi slogans and iconography), Valentina Gomez (a far-right Colombian-American influencer who opened her speech last year with “England for the English”), or Joey Mannarino (a US influencer who calls for “remigration” - the forced removal of all non-whites).

And he was correct to describe the march as hateful and divisive. Flyers yesterday called to “secure a future for white people” (eerily close to the Nazi’s infamous 14 words) and placards read “stop white replacement.” Speakers described Muslims and migrants as civilisational and demographic out-groups that could never be British, and they roused the crowd with thinly-veiled threats of civil war.

I’ll accept that there were probably people at that march who were simply misled or manipulated. Frustrated about politics and fed a pack of lies. But I will extend no such courtesy to any of the speakers or organisers.

Robinson has essentially led a trojan horse into the heart of British politics. His movement claims it’s protecting “our women” and “our streets,” that it’s promoting “national unity.” Talking heads will say they have “legitimate concerns about migration” or "genuine critiques of Islamic culture.”

But their defining belief is that different ethnicities cannot co-exist. Like the BNP crossed with 11th century crusaders, they see the world as a civilisational clash between “The West” (white people) and hostile, anti-modern outsiders. They are consumed by a paranoid obsession with racial demographics, and champion a performative cruelty toward migrants, minorities and the multicultural life of modern Britain itself.

And while it masquerades as a grassroots uprising, it’s all astro-turfed to hell by big bankrollers like the right-wing American financier Robert Shillman and everyone’s favourite white nationalist billionaire Elon Musk.

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For all of those reasons, the Prime Minister’s belated intervention this weekend was welcome. But if he really sees this as a “fight for the soul of the country” as he claims, he needs to acknowledge that his premiership has enriched the toxic political atmosphere Robinson and Farage thrive in - it helped that trojan horse make it through the gates.

It was just last November when Robinson himself celebrated and publicly endorsed Starmer’s hardline immigration policy. “The Overton window has been obliterated,” Robinson cheered. “Well done patriots!”

Much to the delight of Robinson, Farage, Rupert Lowe, and others of that ilk, nuance and compassion was all but eradicated from the national immigration debate under Starmer and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Labour adopted the policy and rhetoric of the populist right: “smash the gangs”, tougher deportations, endless rhetoric about borders, control and national decline.

And they didn’t do it for ideological reasons.

They ceded that ground because it was what the hollow game of Westminster politics commanded them to do. It was a cynical, consultant-brained political calculus. And the math was wrong, too - they could never beat the nativists at their own game.

Under First-Past-The-Post, modern British politics has become a frantic competition for a relatively small number of culturally conservative swing voters in post-industrial constituencies. An entire political apparatus - strategists, lobbyists, and consultants - has been erected around that narrow contest. A lot of voters are just left out in the cold - and become ripe for the picking by far-right opportunists.

The bigger problem is that consultant-driven and donor-oriented parties no longer attempt to transform public opinion or articulate coherent moral visions. They mirror anxieties back at the electorate in focus-grouped fragments: tougher borders, bigger flags, crueller slogans, more enemies at the gate.

I remember last summer when Starmer wholeheartedly embraced the online “Raise the Colours” phenomenon - people plastering St George’s and Union flags absolutely everywhere. Starmer thought he was “reclaiming patriotism” (a worthy endeavour), but in practice he just lent legitimacy to a campaign organised by far-right nationalists.

Because it goes against the conventional wisdom of Westminster strategy, Starmer did not truly seek to reclaim the flag - to articulate a deeper, better democratic vision of what loving one’s country actually means. That would be too risky under the perverse incentives of FPTP.

So in the twilight days of his premiership, Starmer has taken a welcome stand. But he still seems to think the far-right is a simple problem of bad people saying ugly things. He doesn’t acknowledge that Robinson is a morbid symptom of the political system he himself inhabits: FPTP-oriented, consultant-driven, donor-pleasing, devoid of moral nerve.

And until that system is fixed - until our leaders can look beyond this hollow politics, build more functional institutions, and make the moral case for decency - the battle for the soul of the nation will rage on.