The Unite the Kingdom rally that drew tens of thousands to central London on Saturday, concurrent with the Rededicate 250 rally on the National Mall in Washington, produced predictable responses from the governing class on both sides of the Atlantic. Prime Minister Keir Starmer characterized the London march in advance as organized by convicted thugs and racists peddling hatred and division, while American commentators greeted the Washington event with warnings about Christian nationalism and the separation of church and state.
Dominic Green, columnist for the Washington Examiner, contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and fellow of the Royal Historical Society, attended both the Unite the Kingdom march and the nearby Palestine counter-demonstration in London and joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to offer a firsthand account of what he actually saw.
Green said the two events were like looking at two completely different cultures occupying the same city. The Unite the Kingdom march was a mixed crowd of friendly, ordinary people celebrating what they love about their country and expressing deep concern about a drift that has been building for decades. It was not a far-right rally in any meaningful sense. He crossed the park and observed the back end of the Nakba march nearby, which he described as a freak show of malcontents, religious fanatics, demented people with homemade signs, and credulous students. He said the contrast was stark and illustrative, and that what governments across the West fear far more than a small group of extremists is exactly what they saw on Saturday, the vast mainstream mobilizing in organized, peaceful, purposeful expression of dissatisfaction.
He placed the London march in the context of Saturday’s FA Cup Final, the biggest football match of the English year, which was on television at the same time. Despite that competition for attention, tens of thousands came out, which he said is a meaningful indicator of how seriously people are taking the situation. He noted that voter turnout in the recent local elections across Britain was approximately fifty percent, comparable to a slow American presidential year, meaning it functioned as a genuine midterm verdict on the Starmer government rather than the usual low-stakes local exercise about bus stops and planning decisions.
On Starmer’s political future, Green said his days are clearly numbered but that the Labour Party is too incompetent to manage even an orderly succession, contrasting it with the Conservatives who at least knew how to rotate through prime ministers efficiently, doing so at roughly one per year in their final period. He said the Labour grassroots operation has collapsed and that if a general election were held tomorrow, Nigel Farage and Reform UK would likely win a parliamentary majority. He pushed back firmly on the far-right framing, saying the numbers Reform UK is posting are simply impossible to achieve without winning the support of reasonable, sensible mainstream voters asking basic questions about whether their children are safe, their schools are functioning, their hospitals are improving, their borders are secure, and their taxes are justified. The actual far right, he said, is three men and a dog and has never won a parliamentary seat. The English people, he observed, are notoriously slow to anger, but when driven to the point of exasperation they are willing to gamble on an untested party led by someone who was not even in parliament until recently, because the old system is not merely broken but sinking everyone with it.
On the German YouTuber with two million followers who announced he is leaving Germany because he no longer considers it a safe place to raise a daughter, citing women’s inability to walk safely at night, petitions for free taxi vouchers for women in major cities, and calls for women-only subway cars in Berlin, Green said the phenomenon is the same across the West. The failure accumulates in the small things first, the minor civilizational frictions that individually seem manageable but collectively signal something is wrong at a fundamental level. He said fixing the problem requires broken windows policing, serious sentencing, and real determination, but also a willingness to break the taboos of the multicultural framework that has been the governing ideology across Western societies for decades. California, he said, is a particularly instructive example of what happens when an embedded culture of criminality and parallel social structures take root and become entrenched over years of permissive governance.
On the question of religious renewal, prompted by the Rededicate 250 rally’s Christian character and the mockery it drew from the press corps as Christian nationalism, Green said the historical record is not ambiguous. All fifty-six signatories of the Declaration of Independence were Christians of one variety or another, and the English civil war of the 1640s, whose Puritan protagonists are in many ways the ancestors of the American founders, established the template for the republican political culture that both nations share. He said when that cultural inheritance comes under pressure, people are forced to articulate explicitly what they usually take for granted, which is why explicit Christianity in public life resurfaces during periods of civilizational stress. He said the Church of England has become essentially a social work organization with very little religious vitality, but the underlying popular sense of Christian values and cultural continuity in Britain is real and is reasserting itself. He said attempts to demonize or deny the existence of that tradition are almost always driven by fear of its political implications, and that people becoming more aware of who they are and where they come from is a healthy development, not a dangerous one.