Questions from protests, where are we going?
where will we meet?
Images taken at the Unite the Kingdom March 2026
People talk about how hard it is to look away from a car crash. The immediate loss of control followed by the long hard aftermath. I thought about that a lot photographing Stephen Yaxley Lennon’s march. How there is something mesmerizing about the force of the impact and the permanence of the destruction. Completely written off, never again fit for purpose. The sheer scale of it is what really got me. I had come prepared to partially integrate. In a sea of forty thousand fighting aged men I was to be neutral at worst, boot cut jeans, knackered trainer and a Fred Perry polo done all the way up. Polite, but not enough to raise suspicion. It wasn't a polite kind of affair. Not quite a car crash either though, the metaphor doesn't actually work. It implies a decisive split second that tears through daily life, close your eyes real tight and it's over. This wasn't spontaneous. It was orchestrated and artificially engineered. Funded by those who believe civil war to be a safe investment. Those betting on which car will crash the hardest.
My political background is in class solidarity, understanding the root of a problem and hating the wrong side for capitalizing on it. This is all painfully predictable. Sustained economic disregard and institutional ineptitude to its rectification leads to scapegoating or revolution. One sadly tends to be more successful than the other. So when things get bad it's always the fascists and the commies. My sympathies lie with the latter. But like any good commie attending a working class movement angry at the establishment, a bit of me sees it for what it could be, what I want it to be. But this becomes hard to express in ways absent of condescension, anger and disgust. I understand that you don't understand. I understand that your stupidity is my problem. I understand that you think that you understand that I don't understand but that's not true. Because I do, and I hate the government. They poison themselves to appease you, and they, like you, don't actually understand. Be it via incompetence or choice, the message doesn't touch the sides. And I get angrier. There is no middle anymore, only the average of you and me. Soon only what's left. We rev at each other, blinded by headlights and fumes, till we go. And when we finally crash into one another, egged on by an unwinnable culture war. It brings me no pleasure to say, but I’ll have been right all along.
I'll be on the smug side of the wreckage, where we didn't fall for the lies that made you cruel and the fear that made you violent. How safe were our women and girls around you? Are you dangerous? Are you willing to accept that you might be wrong? I'm not. But you are wrong and neglected. Now vicious. I know I hate you in a way that is condescending and counterproductive. I know you have become evil in a way I am not immune from, environment, upbringing, exposure. I recognize systemic failure has led us here, to madness, but the anger isn't taken out against the system. Its people. The victims are far more tangible than the big bad painfully abstract system. The fear is tangible. And it's disgusting how they’re pandered to, how quick and eagerly the dehumanization of the other is embraced. They played Queen on the loudspeakers at the march, We Will Rock You, the words of an immigrant bastardized by the people shouting them into a boiled down statement of anti-immigrant violent intent
And it's slippy. The worse it goes, the quicker it's gone. I don't want to be in a crowd of 40 thousand violent racists. I don't think they are homogenous or hold beliefs made of stone. This is what decline and stagnation does. They say Britain doesn't feel like Britain anymore. They lurch at nostalgia's tubby grimace and give it a sloppy wet kiss. Lots of tongue. Heavy petting. Maybe Britain used to feel like a high street. Maybe it used to feel like progress. Maybe Britain used to feel like something other than a vape shop and 5 different places offering you 200 free spins. Offering a way out of the shithole. That's what it's all about. A desperate search for pride from the mud. Sickly and loutish and bleak and dull. The way things are. Capitalism sinks its teeth into the natural order. Not the way things have always been but the way they've always been going. Once we allow the accumulation of mass wealth we must expect degeneracy and the enforced humiliation of the working man. London isn't threatened by multiculturalism because their growth and vibrancy doesn't exist in contrast to its own. The resent of the other is austerity's baby. And the people, deindustrialized and abandoned, are left with only misremembered myths of Britannia and Empire to lie awake with.
We betray our identity in our identity’s name and return to who we've always been. Not the gentleman. No longer polite in our resentment. Still frothing and stupid and incoherent. Still lying. The power that gave the empire permission to present itself as something higher, something sophisticated, something to aspire to, was only achieved via insipid and sustained violence. This has rusted over into a nationwide delusion of grandeur that misunderstands itself. Misunderstands where things started going wrong. The systems that seem to have betrayed us, beaten us down and sided with the outsider are the same systems that have always been there. They don't have your interests at heart, they never have. Mass deportation will not improve the quality of your life, it will only make you an active participant in the latest of a long line of English atrocities. You are not the empire. Your time and your labour belong to the empire but the empire doesn't belong to you. You'll never walk in the boots you lick. The people who are warning you about people are the people they are warning you about, your racism is their weapon. The establishment. The system. Dulwich College educated. The never ending grift. Asking for your money. The hardman. The working class martyr paid for by Elon Musk, by Robert Shillman, by zionist think tanks. Your hate is the commodity and you won't see a penny. It doesn't touch the sides.
