Richard Donnelly, author of ‘We Are The Counter‑Revolution’—Tommy Robinson and the Making of British Fascism, spoke to Camilla Royle about far right ideology today
By Camilla Royle
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Sunday 10 May 2026
Anti-immigration protest called by Tommy Robinson last September was the biggest in British history (Photo: Guy Smallman)
Why do you call Tommy Robinson a fascist?
Fascism has always been ideologically adaptive. It’s something that changes over time and it never creates its own ideology out of nowhere.
It’s always a parasitic ideology. And that means that in different contexts, fascism has taken different ideological forms. Nazism was in some ways very different to Italian fascism.
So the presence or absence of swastikas isn’t a deciding factor over whether an organisation is fascist or not. What makes it fascist is that it’s a movement from below of reactionary parts of the population who are trying to build a street movement.
And they’re doing this to physically attack the left, migrants and Muslims. That’s precisely what Robinson is doing.
There’s a reason he’s called a demonstration on Saturday 16 May—when there is a Palestine protest for Nakba Day. He is trying to go up against the Palestine movement.
Over the past two and a half years, he’s emerged as a street leader of the fascist movement. He’s done this by positioning himself as the person who can lead the physical force needed to put the Palestine movement back into the box.
His aim is often to violently harass the Palestine movement. That sits within his broader history of attempting to mobilise on the streets against progressive movements.
It’s why he mobilised for the so-called defence of statues during the Black Lives Matter movement.
So, for the Palestine movement, I think it’s a question of self-defence and it’s an existential question. Are you going to stand up and protect the movement against people who want to physically force it off the streets?
The 16 May is an important crystallisation of a lot of the stuff that’s going on in Britain today.
There’s also the question of the way the state is acting.
Police have allowed fascists to have Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, while at the same time cracking down on the Palestine movement, cracking down on the ability to even assemble in various parts of London.
Why do you think Robinson embraces Zionism?
I think he’s attracted to Zionism for opportunistic reasons. Essentially, he believes that if he wraps himself in an Israeli flag, then it means that people won’t be able to accuse him of antisemitism.
Of course, Zionism and antisemitism are compatible. Some of the historical and present-day leaders of the Zionist movement, often they are led by antisemitic people.
Pastor John Hagee, for example, in the US, the leader of Christians United For Israel, is extremely antisemitic, but also a supporter of Zionism.
The value of strategic Zionism, for Robinson, is deniability. He emerges from this fascist tradition in British politics. He was a member of the British National Party (BNP).
But he has sought, since he left the BNP in the 2000s, to try and distance himself from that tradition.
He does it in a really clichéd way, by literally saying “I have black friends, so how could I possibly be racist?”
He does it by claiming that he’s a defender of liberalism against Muslims and against Islamism.
And he does it by claiming that he’s a firm supporter of the state of Israel, which means he couldn’t possibly be an
antisemite or a neo-Nazi.
The other part of it is that all the time he’s trying to position himself as a node within this international far right network.
That’s why he’s been in the US positioning himself as the person through which the money and political influence can run.
And of course Israel is a society dominated by the far right. It has a far right government, it has quite a few established far right parties and they’re an important part of that network.
Do you think there’s a possibility of the right going into electoral parties like Reform UK and Restore Britain and trying to build there?
Robinson has always had a focus on building a physical street force that is capable of dominating the streets and intimidating its political opponents as well as migrants and Muslims.
But he has taken an interest in developing an electoral vehicle as well.
They have usually not been successful. They started with the British Freedom Party, that was a group of people who had been in the BNP mostly, but attempted to become a sort of electoral vehicle for the EDL in the early 2000s.
He sent many of his supporters into Ukip to infiltrate, to be part of the leadership. He’s now pulled out of that and he’s thrown his lot in with Advance UK, the party founded by Ben Habib, former deputy leader of Reform UK.
But the problem for him in terms of building a political party as a vehicle for his movement, is the level of is demoralisation and fragmentation inside the far right.
What is causing this fragmentation?
It has partly arisen out of the fact that in local areas they have actually been pushed back by anti-racists.
But there are also huge strategic and ideological debates within the far right about what sort of organisation and what sort of ideology it should have.
They discuss it in terms of civic nationalism and ethno-nationalism. Civic nationalism is the strategy represented by Reform UK and Robinson himself. It says, “We’re not biological racists—we’re against people who come from different cultures and won’t integrate into British society.”
Obviously it’s actually about skin colour. The people they are talking about are always black and Asian people.
On the other side there’s the ethno-nationalists who include neo-Nazis and people who preach ideas about
biological race.
There’s been a touchstone debate among these people about whether a black anchorperson on GB News can regard herself as British or not.
The civic nationalists say that she can. The others say that she couldn’t possibly be British because she’s a black person.
That debate points to a fragmentation within the far right, that has now crystallised into two separate organisations.
Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain becoming a magnet for the ethno-nationalists.
It has support from the network of activists who recently left Homeland, which is a neo-Nazi party that comes out of the BNP. It has attracted support from Mark Collett, who’s an open neo-Nazi in Patriotic Alternative.
Then, on the other hand, this sort of civic nationalist milieu, which is tied up with Robinson. The fragmentation means that Advance UK is going nowhere. However, Restore Britain is looking more dynamic.
One poll predicted that it would take 9 percent of the vote in the 7 May elections. I don’t believe that 9 percent of the population knows what Restore Britain is, but they’ve taken that as meaning they are a challenge to Reform UK.
This was never really going to happen. But it does underline the fragmentation that’s taking place.
What are the tensions between Reform UK and Robinson?
The anti-racist movement has put this wedge into Reform UK, where we’ve said you cannot work with Robinson because he’s a fascist.
Nigel Farage has been trying to create a respectable party with a front bench of ex-Tories that’s going to be a good guardian of the British state.
He’s consistently said that he won’t share platforms with Robinson, he won’t let him into Reform UK. That has created big tensions between the most extreme parts of the Reform UK base and the leadership. This is the background to why Lowe left the party.
But since he left, there’s also been a fragmentation. This is over Robinson and Lowe’s ability to exist in the same organisation because of the influence of antisemitism and neo-Nazis in the movement.
Restore Britain is worrying, but the fragmentation of the far right is really good for us.
The Together alliance demonstration on 28 March shows that our side can be really strong, particularly when the anti-racist movement and the anti-imperialist movement come together.
Tens of thousands of people were joining the dots between the struggle against the far right, Reform UK and racism.
If we have a fraction of the people who went on that demonstration in central London on 16 May, it could be a really important day for us to push back Robinson.
If his supporters don’t feel able to attack us, don’t feel confident, then all of those questions around the fragmentation of their side are going to come home to roost for Robinson.
Buy ‘We are the counter‑revolution’— Tommy Robinson and the remaking of British fascism by Richard Donnelly, in International Socialism Journal 190, at Bookmarks bookshop, bookmarksbookshop.co.uk, £6