The recent “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London shows how easy it is for the radical right to mobilise a mass protest by repackaging a perennial issue as a moral panic. It did so by fusing together fears of migration and crime with a rising distrust in government.

There were calls for “remigration”, mass deportation and even the dissolution of parliament as well as violent clashes with police. There was also a level of confusion among some of the thousands of people who attended as to whether they were protesting for freedom of speech or lending their voices to a racist cause.

Although the scale of the demonstration was surprising to many, far-right activism has a long history in the UK.

In the contemporary era, it dates back to the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. But it was the increase in immigration in the 1950s – the Windrush era – that saw a new generation of far-right activists emerge.

In the years that followed, Britain’s far right switched its focus from antisemitism to opposing migration from the country’s colonies and former colonies. This was captured best, perhaps, in the infamous “rivers of blood” speech delivered by Conservative MP Enoch Powell in 1968.

By the 1980s, the British National Party (BNP) emerged, growing to make considerable electoral headway in the 1990s and 2000s before its base ultimately crumbled due to its toxic image.

In its wake, the far-right morphed into street protest movements like the English Defence League (EDL) and the Football Lads Alliance. Extremist “direct action” groups like Combat-18, a neo-Nazi group that grew out of the BNP in the 1990s, would also be replaced by National Action and the Patriotic Alternative.

These violent fringe groups were banned but others have replaced them and grown in influence. They include the cultural nationalist movement coalescing around former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known popularly as “Tommy Robinson” – the man behind the Unite the Kingdom rally in London.

Extremism expert Chris Allen has noted how the re-emergence of radical right protest activism had its medium-term origins in the 2016 Brexit referendum. This relates to how some pro-Leave politicians promoted issues that had “a clear resonance with the traditional and contemporary radical-right” – such as border security and sovereignty.

Rightwing extremist activity ranged from the murder of Jo Cox MP a week prior to the Brexit referendum to street agitation whipped up by other fringe far-right groups, like Britain First. According to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, these groups attempted to “dominate the narrative on key political and social issues, including immigration, Brexit and Islam”.

The anxiety around immigration had already found its way into mainstream political discourse on the doorsteps during the 2015 general election. Narrative tropes about “taking back control of our borders” became part of everyday political rhetoric. In the aftermath of the election of that year, prime minister David Cameron made cracking down on immigration a priority.

As antagonism towards the EU began to recede in the years after the Brexit referendum, the fear of irregular immigration came much more to the fore. So too did a rise in racism and race-related hate crimes.

Many of these hate crimes happened in the wake of Islamist terror attacks in 2017, though the arrival of the COVID pandemic superseded fears surrounding terrorism. And as the UK re-emerged from COVID lockdowns, little consideration was given by the British state to the growing security challenge posed by irregular immigration.

It was in this context that a tipping point was reached. In July 2024, after the murder of three children in Southport, radical-right social media influencers and other bad actors stirred up riots across 27 towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland. Thousands of people were radicalised by the language of a moral panic, played out in the new domain of social media.

Illegal immigration as a form of moral panic

Sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” in his important 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. He described how a “condition, episode, person or group…emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” and is then presented in a stereotyped fashion by the media.

Perhaps the most famous of these moral panics came in the immediate aftermath of a huge 1964 brawl in the seaside town of Clacton between mods and rockers, two rival youth counter-cultures. Cohen’s argument was that the reaction ended up being wildly disproportionate to the severity of the original incident. Local authorities in towns and cities as far away as Belfast were forced to issue statements reassuring the public they did not have a “hooligan problem”.

In 2002, Cohen demonstrated how the same phenomenon was being playing out in relation to immigration. He remarked that the once morally untouchable category of political refugee was becoming “deconstructed”. In Cohen’s opinion, British governments were starting from a broad consensus that “we must keep out as many refugee-type foreigners as possible” and that “these people always lie to get themselves accepted”. To be accepted, they must be “eligible” and “credible”.

It was in the ensuing decades, one could argue, that moral panics centring on the triumvirate of migration, crime and security began to emerge in Germany, Italy and the UK.

The British tabloid media led this new moral panic, greatly aided by two intersecting and overlapping empirical realities: the rising tide of concern over increasing immigration in the UK – and Europe more broadly – and the repackaging of ethnically competitive politics as a new form of everyday reality. In the far-right worldview, politics is about the zero-sum nature of power relations between different ethnic groups.

Old tropes, new moral panics

What we are now seeing is a new politicisation of a long-running issue. Humanitarian responses to asylum seekers have been replaced with the trappings of a moral panic about irregular immigration.

Moral panics do not, as Cohen reminds us, necessarily reflect the reality of the situation, only the anxiety of those who spread it. That does not mean there are no serious concerns underpinning these issues, only that they have been magnified and, importantly, amplified by the far-right’s sophisticated embrace of new technology. This situation is, at its core, a crisis in confidence between a section of the population and the government.

As we move towards towards the next UK election, further disillusionment is more likely to manifest itself in increased electoral support for parties like Reform UK and Advance UK, particularly if they continue to play to hardline supporters. In a recent YouGov survey, 44% of those surveyed said Reform’s immigration policy, which includes mass deportation was about right or not tough enough.

While radical-right demonstrations promoting the totemic policy of “remigration” remain largely peaceful, there is a danger that the mainstreaming of such extremist rhetoric will only serve as a driver towards radicalisation for a new generation of far-right extremists.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Aaron Edwards, University of Leicester

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Aaron Edwards does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.