Screaming into the void: the class politics of right-wing protest

Recent weeks have seen a spate of demonstrations outside Home Office asylum seekers’ accommodation, and national flags hung throughout England, largely in expression of anti-immigration and anti-government sentiment. Similarly to the ‘summer of discontent’ last year, which saw riots related to much the same issue, this newest wave of protest was sparked by reports of a crime – though in this case actually committed by an asylum seeker, rather than rumoured to have been. With hard-edged anti-immigration sentiment increasingly achieving mainstream success and electoral expression in the form of Reform UK, it is worth examining the class politics of this protest movement in relation to that party.

When discussing such a diffuse movement, it is necessarily discussed in generalisations. Some of these characteristics - such as the proportion of locals represented vs. committed activists who travel in, especially at protests at individual asylum hotels - may not be entirely the case at every single demonstration, but I think they nonetheless illustrate the general dynamics of the movement. As a journalist, I have covered anti-immigration protests in English towns for several years, and have seen them range from embarrassingly small turnouts to gatherings in the many hundreds. My analysis here is based largely on these experiences, as well as the reporting of others from elsewhere in the country.

No political movement can be understood without first understanding the environment in which it lives; or, more appropriately, the void in which it occurs. In the posthumously published Ruling the Void (2013), Irish political scientist Peter Mair argued that contemporary politics is defined by the presence of this ‘void’. This void is the gap between state and society, left by the mutual retreat of political parties into the world of the state and institutions, and of the public away from politics and into private life. The emergence of this void has left parties of Left and Right detached from their traditional social bases, and diminished the extent to which they can serve their traditional representative function of channelling the views of a constituency upwards into the state and realm of policymaking.

In the void, politics itself, especially party politics, confronts the public entirely as something other – a separate world, about the specifics of which they know and care little. Political parties and organisations themselves appear to the public not as a part of society which can relate to the state on their behalf, but as part of the state itself. This is expressed neatly in a quote from Rudy Andeweg which Mair uses, that parties have become ‘the government's representative in the society rather than the society's bridgehead in the state.’[1]

Parties themselves have very few members today compared to their mid-century peak. Labour and the Conservatives claimed about 1 million and 2.8 million members respectively in the early 50s.[2] Even accounting for the likely exaggeration of these numbers, party membership now is vastly lower, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the population - with likely less than a million in total across the country. Party membership is eccentric, relative to much of the public. Protest is at least as unusual, if not more so.

 The sights and sounds of the anti-immigration protest scene have changed in the past 15 years or so. With the EDL nonexistent, the National Front a rump, Britain First still hungover from its peak success being a wide Facebook reach, and UKIP a shadow of its former self, modern right-wing street politics is cohered mainly through slogans transmitted via social media. The rise in illegal immigration since the mid-2010s, from mere hundreds to tens of thousands, has meant that ‘stop the boats’ is now the rallying cry.[3] The habitat of this movement is not the musty function room of a skinhead-associated pub, but the Facebook group, or for the more extreme and organised sects - encrypted messaging channels and the like.

 The absence of structured and cohering political organisation to this movement is apparent to anyone who attends one of the protests. The flags and members of extreme right parties, especially newer ones like Patriotic Alternative, are a very occasional sight. However, they are seldom the commanding presence, and indeed likely have so few actual members they could not credibly organise demonstrations of much significance if they relied exclusively on them. 

 The dynamics of organisation and attendance at far-right rallies seems similar to that of the Left, in terms of the level of organisation and uptake by sympathisers who are not necessarily members of organisations. Committed members of organisations or parties often form only a very small core, with the bulk of attendees being drawn from the ranks of sympathetic locals and smaller numbers of people who are on-side from increasingly further afield.

 Many locals in towns beset by protests will feel the attendees of all sides to be a ‘rent a mob’ of outsiders drawn from elsewhere to participate. It is both genuinely believed and ideologically useful for protesters to feel they are the organic and real representatives of a community, with their number disproportionately comprised of locals. However, there is usually at least some truth to the suspicions of uninvolved residents, as a non-negligible proportion of protestors do indeed travel to attend them.

 All political movements can draw ideological legitimacy from a claim, often genuinely believed rather than cynical, to be a legitimate representative of “normal people” - implicitly or explicitly opposed to perceived foes, who are not. This is the basic dynamic of populism which, far from being a phenomenon exclusively of the national-populist Right, is omnipresent in the self-consciousness of parties and movements. There are very few political actors and forces which are self-consciously patrician or sectional.

 Nigel Farage has said many of the protestors are ‘genuinely concerned families’.[4] Tom Slater of Spiked has praised the prevalence of “mothers and grandmothers” as opposed to ‘pathetic far-rightists.’[5] While there is something to be said about many recently drawn into these demonstrations not understanding themselves as far-right, and of the recent wave at asylum hotels having an above average representation of previously uninvolved locals, the idea of them being comprised of normal families is essentially another way of claiming that they are the salt of the earth normal people.

 Support for serious reform to immigration law and a reduction in immigration is clearly widespread and popular. But the idea that those specifically who go and demonstrate about it are particularly representative of the public en masse is risible. Attending these things one is overcome with the feeling that those on the right-wing demonstration scene are often not of the maligned, silent majority which some implicitly lionise them as. The most prominent single social demographic which sets the tone of these affairs is in fact the lumpenproletariat. 

 More so than the broadly conceived working class, the lumpenproletariat are a genuine underclass. In modern Britain we can take this to mean those who are often extremely poor, sometimes involved in or at least in proximity to crime, sometimes dependent on state benefits and either unemployed or permanently underemployed. While people fitting those strict categories may not be an absolute numerical majority at protests, and most movements are a patchwork of classes and class fractions, they form the stereotype of attendees owing to their visibility, and essentially govern the overall ‘vibe’ of the right-wing protest scene. 

 The extra-parliamentary Right in Britain has long been bedevilled by stereotypes of football hooliganism, thuggery, violence and alcoholism, infused with racial bigotry. This stereotype lives in the pop-cultural memory of the National Front in their 1970s hey-day, and the EDL more recently. Indeed the latter grew directly out of the coalescence of politicised hooligan firms. Many of those who attempt to organise local anti-immigration demonstrations are clearly alive to this stereotype of their movement - injunctions to have ‘no face coverings, no alcohol’ and the like are fairly common in pre-protest social media promotion and communication. 

 The stereotypes of ignorance and lack of education, and corollary poor spelling, grammar and vocabulary, susceptibility to social media rumour mill hysteria and misinformation, ill health and an uncouth manner are sometimes patronisingly employed in the discourse of the Left in relation to say Brexit or Reform voters. While clearly an unfair generalisation in that context, all caricatures are derived from reality, and this one originates specifically in the image and atmosphere of anti-immigration street protests. 

 The stereotype of disorder and rowdiness is not helped by recent events. In Epping, where the current conflagration began, three were arrested at protests on various charges, including inciting racial hatred. At similar protests in Canary Wharf, four were arrested for charges including assault and possession of drugs.[6] One video circulating on social media shows a local man interviewed by Sky News outside an asylum hotel in Bowthorpe, who criticises the protests as disruptive. He is gradually encircled and intimidated, then eventually chased off by anti-immigration demonstrators, who shout “paedo” at him.[7] One man has been charged for shoving a reporter in the same place on that day.[8]

 Not only do the protests themselves frequently end up involving crime or disorder of varying degrees, but they have clearly emboldened those who are both wont to involve themselves in crime and disorder, and enthused by a sense of the moment’s political content. One British-Asian businessman who has lived in Britain for almost all of his life was racially abused by passersby during an interview.[9] In Basildon, a Mosque was vandalised with a St George’s Cross, in Halifax a man threw water over a woman ‘while appearing to ask if she arrived by small boat,’ and in Canary Wharf a food courier was surrounded by men in balaclavas.[10]

 All these actions are indeed those of a disenfranchised minority of a sort, but they are certainly not representative of the majority of British voters who want reductions in immigration and are very concerned by illegal immigration and its effects. A more popular anti-immigration sentiment finds its home instead in Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.

 It almost barely warrants saying that as a parliamentary political force, Reform UK’s members are drawn from sections of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. Of all of their elected MPs (including two that have since lost the whip), there is Farage himself, an ex stock trader, former property market professional Richard Tice, Sarah Pochin who had a nebulous ‘successful career in private business’, former banker and football club owner Rupert Lowe, and former banker James McMurdock.[11] Lee Anderson is something of an oddity as a former miner and then Citizen’s Advice professional - and also a former Labour and Conservative member at different points.

 Reform UK has made explicit appeals to this class, for example in their full-throated support of the farmer’s protests earlier this year, and several of their election pledges last year: tax cuts for small business, tax relief on private school fees, an explicit manifesto pledge to “free up small entrepreneurs from red tape” by raising VAT thresholds, and so on.[12] This economic message is twinned with socially conservative cultural positions which are widely perceived to be more popular among the working class. As Dan Evans has argued, the petty bourgeoisie was the core class of Thatcherism, with support from parts of the working class - and so too with Reform UK, which shares much Thatcherite DNA.[13] Reform claims over 240,000 members as of writing this - and it does not seem like an ungenerous assumption that this membership, as with other parties, will be disproportionately middle class.

 The barriers to actual institutional involvement in political parties, such as being an elected councillor, are so significant that across all parties they filter out the vast majority of members by necessity. In general, to even reach the level of standing for office you are likely not the sort to punch someone in the face at a protest. But at some of the new wave of anti-immigration protests, the tension between the scene’s tone-setters and the more aesthetically moderate actual politicians can be apparent. One demonstration in Kent saw local Reform councillors interrupted by a pair of attendees readily employing racist slurs, to the apparent discomfort of all involved.[14]

 While Reform UK and its outriders may feel the current protest movement to be expressive of a widely felt sentiment, those with sense know they cannot associate too directly with it. Parties to the right of the Tories which have had any staying power are precisely those which have kept right wing street politics at arms length. The only mild aberration was the brief success of the BNP in the mid-2000s, and even they were manifestly hobbled by association with their National Front progenitors. Thus whilst Reform UK and the revitalised protest movement may embolden each other, they are likely to remain in a state of permanent push and pull - as most political forces are with their more radical outer edges.

 A party which manifestly stands for the interests of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, seeking to appeal to the working class through conservative social and cultural positions, and in an inchoate relationship with a rowdy street movement of the lumpenproletariat; these features will lead some to say this is a new fascism. However, this anachronism does not properly capture the nature or context of these forces. 

While Reform’s rhetoric and likely future policy on immigration and other issues can slide into authoritarianism, it is nonetheless not extreme or violent enough to warrant being called fascist. Though, if ‘mass deportations’ are to occur as Nigel Farage suggests, policies explicitly designed to be spectacular could indeed snowball into something very sinister.[15]

Furthermore, the fascism of the twentieth century was borne of highly politicised and militarised societies, where socialist revolution was genuinely on the cards. Even the most excitable sectarians would be pushed to say any such upheaval seems imminent. We instead live in an age of what Anton Jäger calls ‘hyper-politics’, where ‘everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics.’[16] Without meaningful mass politics and the institutions required to constitute it, unruly protest movements are a howl into the void, heard by all those who loiter at its other boundary, but never filling it. 

While emboldened and potentially larger than before, participants in the anti-immigration protest movement remain extremely few, and extremely unrepresentative of the general public. The new generation of protestors are creatures of the void, but have caught the eye of those across the chasm. What remains to be seen is whether existing parties, including Reform UK, will be able to take oxygen from their fire with plans for immigration control, or whether this new incarnation of right-wing street politics can outlive the issue which birthed it.

Aaron Wells is a political journalist and writer based in South-East England

[1] Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, Verso, 2023, p94.

[2] Matthew Burton & Richard Turncliffe, Membership of Political Parties in Great Britain, House of Commons Library Research Briefing, 2022.

[3] ‘Government Admits Illegal Immigration Of At Least 135,000 Since 2017 But Number Likely Much Higher', https://www.migrationwatchuk.org, 2023.

[4] Tara Cobham, ‘Farage defends protesters outside Essex asylum hotel as “concerned families”’, The Independent, 21 July 2025.

[5] Tom Slater, ‘These migrant-hotel protests are just the beginning’, https://www.spiked-online.com/, 23 August 2025.

[6] Daniel Sandford, ‘Three arrests as Epping protestors clash with police’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news, 31 August 31 2025; ‘Four arrested at Canary Wharf anti-asylum protest’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news, 1 September 2025.

[7] ‘#LocalLad attacked at Brook Hotel Bowthorpe Norwich 24 August Sky News coverage’, https://www.youtube.com/@RageAgainstTheBinBags, 5 September 2025.

[8] Shaun Webley, ‘Man charged after reporter shoved at Brook Hotel in Norwich’, Norwich Evening News, 5 September 2023.

[9] Paul Britton, ‘Businessman, 32, racially abused live on TV during Sky News interview’, Manchester Evening News, 4 September 2025.

[10] Anoosh Chakelian, ‘Douglas Carswell has sunk to the gutter’, https://www.newstatesman.com, 2 September 2025.

[11] Geraldine Scott, ‘Who is Sarah Pochin, Reform’s first female MP?’, The Times, 2 May 2025.

[12] Reform UK, ‘Our Contract with You’, https://www.reformparty.uk/policies, 2024.

[13] Dan Evans, A Nation of Shopkeepers: the Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie, Repeater Books, 2023, p74.

[14] Daniel Esson, ‘The awkward moment for Reform councillor during the Great British National Protest in Dover’, https://www.kentonline.co.uk, 29 July 2025.  

[15] Steven Swinford, ‘Nigel Farage: This is a massive crisis, we need mass deportations’, The Times, 22 August 2025.

[16] Anton Jäger, How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics, Tribune, 3 January 2022.