Campaign group Led By Donkeys pulled off the most effective piece of counter-protest trolling of the year on Saturday, placing a giant portable screen at Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march in London that initially displayed the rally’s own branding before switching to a video showing George Michael, Mo Farah and other immigrant success stories – set to Wham’s Wake Me Up Before You Go Go. One attendee, apparently unable to process the clip, climbed on the truck in an attempt to disable the screen.
The stunt came as Robinson – known legally as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – addressed an estimated 60,000 supporters in Parliament Square, telling them to prepare for “the battle of Britain” and urging them to join political parties and become local activists ahead of the 2029 general election. Police made 43 arrests across the march and a simultaneous pro-Palestinian demonstration, and estimated the policing cost at £4.5 million.
The Led By Donkeys operation
The screen’s deployment was characteristically surgical. Displayed initially as a Unite the Kingdom banner, it attracted marchers who posed for photographs in front of it – unaware of what was coming. When the video switched, it showed immigrants and their descendants who have shaped modern Britain: George Michael, Mo Farah and others set to the unmistakable opening bars of Wham’s 1984 hit.
The visual argument the clip makes is not subtle but it does not need to be subtle to be effective. The people on that screen are among the most beloved and celebrated figures in British culture. They are the products of the immigration that the march opposes. The cognitive dissonance of watching them appear on what marchers thought was their rally’s screen – set to the most cheerfully inescapable pop song of the 1980s – produced exactly the reaction Led By Donkeys intended.
The marcher who climbed on the truck to disable the screen became the image of the day. Unable to make a counter-argument, he made a physical one. It did not work.
The march itself – turnout down, rhetoric unchanged
Police estimated Saturday’s turnout at approximately 60,000. The previous Unite the Kingdom march in September attracted 150,000 by police estimates. Organisers claimed millions attended Saturday’s event. Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascism campaign group, noted the apparent decline in turnout while warning that the scale of Robinson’s movement remained “deeply worrying.”
“Today’s numbers still dwarf anything ever managed by the English Defence League and hundreds of thousands more watched the livestream online,” the group said. “While it looks like the movement’s growth may have stalled, it still remains a significant threat.”
The march had a significant Christian theme. Many attendees carried wooden crosses and chanted “Christ is king” as they waited for proceedings to begin. Others wore red “make England great again” hats. Islamophobic and ethnonationalist material was distributed among the crowd. Flyers circulated claiming to represent a “brotherhood of White Europeans” seeking “a future for white people.”
Starmer blocked 11 foreign nationals described as “far-right agitators” from entering the UK before the rally. Polish politician Dominik Tarczyński, who claimed to have been banned from entering, addressed the crowd via video link. Katie Hopkins, the former television personality turned far-right commentator, also sent a video message.
What Robinson said
Speaking in Parliament Square, Robinson’s address was notably more politically focused than previous rallies – a shift toward electoral mobilisation rather than street protest.
“Are you ready for the battle of Britain? 2029 we have an election. We’re not asking anyone to go out and fight, but this is the most important moment in our generation. If we don’t send a message in our next election, if you don’t register to vote, if you don’t get involved, if you don’t become activists, we are going to lose our country for ever.”
He explicitly directed supporters toward formal political engagement: “We have to get political, we have to get involved. I’m not going to tell you which political party you need to join. We’re a cultural movement. I’m going to tell you that you have to join a political party. I don’t care if it’s Reform, if it’s Advance, or it’s Restore, or it’s the Conservative party. We have to locally get involved in politics.”
The instruction to join multiple parties simultaneously – Reform, Advance UK, Restore Britain, or the Conservatives – reflects the specific intent of dispersing movement energy into the formal political system rather than concentrating it around Robinson himself, who remains a convicted criminal.
Robinson also led chants for Elon Musk, saying: “None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for one man. Thank you Elon on behalf of Great Britain.” Musk has been one of Robinson’s most prominent supporters on X and his interventions in British political discourse – including a video message at last year’s march that contributed to violence against asylum seeker hotels – remain a live political issue.
The Choose Love dimension
Saturday was also the day that Choose Love’s sponsored walk campaign for refugees – which we reported on in our full piece on the charity’s initiative – reached its conclusion. The charity had turned the march into a fundraiser: the further the marchers walked, the more money went to refugees. With over 2,000 donors contributing, the campaign raised more than £100,000.
Led By Donkeys provided the trolling. Choose Love provided the fundraising. Between them, two campaign groups turned the march into something it was never designed to be: a demonstration that Britain’s response to organised far-right activism can be more creative, more effective and considerably more fun than counter-protest.
Official responses
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said on social media: “Thank you to our dedicated Metropolitan Police officers, security services and transport staff, who have worked to keep our capital safe and moving this weekend while protecting the right to protest peacefully. Londoners will always reject those who seek to divide our communities.”
Justice Secretary David Lammy said: “The Unite the Kingdom march organisers are spreading hatred and division. They do not reflect the Britain I’m proud of. Peaceful protest is a fundamental right and one I will always protect. But if protest turns violent, we will act swiftly, with extra court capacity in place.”
Two men were arrested near Euston station after arriving to attend the march – one wanted on suspicion of grievous bodily harm following a Birmingham incident in which a man was run over near a flag protest, and a second in connection with an offence involving encouraging attacks on a police officer.
The bigger picture
The Led By Donkeys intervention sits within a broader context of creative resistance to the politics the march represents. As we noted in our analysis of the Burnham renationalisation platform, the most effective political response to far-right populism is not to compete on its terrain but to offer a genuinely different answer to the genuine grievances that make movements like this possible.
Robinson told his supporters to join Reform, Advance, Restore Britain or the Conservatives. He named them in the same breath. The politics of the march is explicitly a cultural movement seeking electoral expression – not attached to any single party but seeking to radicalise all of them from within.
Whether that strategy succeeds in 2029 will depend, in part, on whether the political parties that reform-minded voters are being offered can make a credible case that they have answers to the specific economic and social grievances – deindustrialisation, cost of living, housing, public services – that have driven hundreds of thousands of people toward movements like this one.
In the meantime: a screen showing George Michael and Mo Farah set to Wham, and one furious man on a truck who couldn’t make it stop. The image of Britain on Saturday 17 May 2026 contains both.
