LONDON — On Saturday, 16 May, the streets of central London are set to become a dramatic stage for two visions of the United Kingdom. The Palestine solidarity movement has called a mass demonstration to mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948 that saw more than 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homeland. But the rally, organised under the banner of “Nakba 78, Justice for Palestine” and “United against Tommy Robinson and the far right”, faces a formidable obstacle: the Metropolitan Police have effectively handed the political heart of the capital to a far-right hate march called for the same day.

An investigation by this outlet, drawing on statements from organisers, parliamentarians, police, and anti-racism campaigners, reveals a disturbing pattern of state complicity. The Met’s decision to refuse the Nakba Day march its customary route while granting the far-right a parade through Whitehall, Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square is more than an administrative anomaly. It is the latest, starkest expression of a systemic crackdown on Palestine activism, coinciding with the emboldening of a far-right movement whose Islamophobia is now being laundered through the corridors of power in London, Washington, and Tel Aviv.

A Tale Of Two Marches: The Met’s Double Standard.

For years, the Palestine Coalition,  an alliance of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Stop the War Coalition, Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Muslim Association of Britain, the Palestinian Forum in Britain, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, has organised a peaceful, family-friendly march through central London to commemorate the Nakba. The event is a fixture in the British political calendar, a solemn and orderly act of remembrance.

This year, however, a far-right thug has deliberately chosen the same date. Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), the convicted criminal and co-founder of the now-defunct English Defence League, called his “Unite the Kingdom” (UtK) rally for 16 May. Organisers of the Nakba march, who had submitted their route to the Met on 18 December 2025, were shocked when Scotland Yard refused their proposed path from Victoria Embankment to Waterloo, a route they had marched three times before, and instead granted the centre of London to Robinson’s far-right demonstration.

The Met’s justification, that the decision was based on the expected scale of the Robinson demonstration, crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. As the Palestine Coalition pointed out, “many of the recent Palestine demonstrations have been considerably bigger than last year’s Unite the Kingdom demonstration organised by Robinson”. Indeed, the Solidarity marches have consistently drawn hundreds of thousands, dwarfing Robinson’s September rally of around 100,000 to 150,000. Moreover, while the Palestine protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, Robinson’s last major London event ended in violent attacks on police officers and the Palestine movement itself.

The decision sparked immediate outrage. Labour MP John McDonnell, veteran anti-war campaigner Lindsey German, and acclaimed actors Juliet Stevenson and Khalid Abdalla led a delegation to New Scotland Yard to hand-deliver a letter of protest signed by 180 public figures, including musicians Annie Lennox and Paloma Faith. In a scene that encapsulated the state’s contempt, security staff refused to accept the letter in person, telling the group to send it by post.

“This gives the far right the centre of London in which to protest,” Stevenson told The National. “I will march on Nakba Day, of course”. Chris Nineham of Stop the War called the Met’s action “unprecedented”: “Palestine national day has been relegated in favour of a far-right demonstration that is not just Islamophobic, but actually anti-Semitic”.

Tommy Robinson: The “Free Speech Warrior” With A Violent Record.

To understand the gravity of the Met’s decision, one must examine the man to whom they are handing London’s most symbolic public space. Tommy Robinson is not merely a controversial figure; he is a convicted criminal with a documented history of violent assaults, including headbutting a person at a far-right rally, mortgage fraud, and contempt of court. He has served five prison terms. His modus operandi is the incitement of hatred against Muslims: the EDL, which he helped found, was a street movement notorious for violent Islamophobic mobilisations.

Yet in the febrile political landscape of 2026, Robinson has been rebranded as a “free speech warrior”. In February, in a move that stunned observers, he was hosted at the US State Department by Joe Rittenhouse, a senior adviser, who fawned over the British fascist on social media. Robinson also met with Congressman Randy Fine, a Florida Republican with a history of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and far-right influencer Jack Posobiec.

This is the culmination of the Trump administration’s deliberate cultivation of European far-right movements under the cynical guise of defending “free speech”. Vice President JD Vance has repeatedly lectured European allies on their supposed suppression of conservative voices, a dog-whistle for providing cover to racists and xenophobes. The US State Department’s 2024 human rights report even criticised the UK for “serious restrictions on freedom of expression”, citing the enforcement of hate speech laws.

Robinson’s US visit sent a clear message: the far-right has friends in the highest places. And that message has been internalised by Reform UK, the populist party leading national opinion polls for much of the past year. An investigation by HOPE not hate, published on 23 April, revealed that Reform candidates in Norwich and Norfolk have voiced support for Robinson, peddled conspiracy theories about an “Islamic caliphate” taking over the UK, and made explicitly racist comments about the Black community. One candidate, Karl Catchpole, called the arch-racist Enoch Powell “one of the greatest visionaries of the last 50 years”. Reform leader Nigel Farage has himself declared he would ban mass Muslim prayer at historic public sites, singling out Islam as uniquely threatening.

“Criminalising Dissent”: The Crackdown On Palestine Solidarity.

While the far right is indulged, the Palestine movement faces an escalating campaign of state repression. The Met’s ban on the Nakba Day route is only the most visible manifestation. On 10 April, just days after the High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the direct-action group Palestine Action to be unlawful, the Met made a U-turn and arrested 523 peaceful protesters in Trafalgar Square, many of them elderly, for holding signs reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.

Amnesty International condemned the mass arrests as “yet another blow to civil liberties in this country” and “the state criminalising dissent”. One demonstrator told Al Jazeera: “I think Britain has now descended into a non-democratic situation and I think that is very dangerous for free speech”. Qesser Zuhrah, a Palestine Action activist who staged a hunger strike in prison, said the arrests showed the Met “don’t serve us, they don’t protect us, they work only to reinforce what the government wants”.

The repression is not limited to the streets. On 1 April, two of the UK’s most prominent Palestine protest organisers, Chris Nineham of Stop the War and Ben Jamal of the PSC, were found guilty of breaching police-imposed protest restrictions. The judge ruled that Jamal’s speech had “constituted incitement” of the crowd, a verdict campaigners view as a dangerous criminalisation of legitimate political speech. The chilling effect is by design. The government, with the backing of a supine Labour opposition, has passed legislation granting police sweeping powers to restrict the right to protest, measures that Stevenson says were “drafted” by the far right themselves.

Yet despite the repression, the movement is showing remarkable resilience. Over 1,600 candidates standing in the 7 May local elections have signed the PSC’s “Pledge for Palestine”, committing to divest pension funds from companies complicit in Israel’s violations of international law. On 28 March, an estimated half a million people flooded central London for the Together Alliance’s anti-far-right march, in what organisers called the largest such demonstration in British history. Green Party leader Zack Polanski told the crowd: “The message is, when we turn up, in our hundreds, in our thousands, in our hundreds of thousands, we are unstoppable”.

The Ideological Convergence: Islamophobia, Zionism, And The “Clash Of Civilisations”.

The 16 May mobilisation is not simply a local dispute over protest routes. It exposes a deeper, more sinister convergence of interests between the Western far right and the Israeli state. Robinson was recently invited by ministers to Israel, and his followers openly destroyed a Palestinian flag on stage at a previous rally. The Unite the Kingdom movement frames its crusade as a defence of “Western civilisation” against the twin threats of Islam and the left, a narrative that seamlessly aligns with Netanyahu’s rhetoric equating Islam with terrorism and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

This alliance is not accidental. As the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University has documented, European far-right parties are increasingly positioning themselves as Israel’s staunchest defenders, seeing the Jewish state as a frontline outpost in a civilisational war against the Muslim world. The Israeli right, in turn, welcomes these allies, having long abandoned any pretence of concern about anti-Semitism within Europe’s neo-fascist movements.

In the UK, this convergence is producing a toxic feedback loop. The far-right’s Islamophobia is amplified by a compliant media that obsessively frames pro-Palestinian activism as a security threat. Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve KC, who helped craft the government’s new definition of anti-Muslim hostility, has warned that Muslims are being “othered” and treated like “ghouls” in rhetoric that echoes “the Nazis’ views about Jews in the mid-1930s”. A new study found over 25,000 anti-Muslim posts on social media since the war with Iran began, signalling a surge in online hate speech. AI-generated propaganda is being used to depict Muslims as violent and to glorify attacks on police.

On the ground, the consequence is fear. Community leaders in Muslim areas of London are advising people not to travel into central London on 16 May, dreading a repeat of the violence that marred Robinson’s last rally. “She said her grandparents had told her they were witnessing a return to the levels of racism they experienced when they came to the country in the 1950s,” one Manchester protester told Al Jazeera earlier this year.

The Battle For The Streets:

The Palestine coalition and its allies are unequivocal: they will march. “We will not allow the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause on this decisive day,” the coalition stated on 14 April. The PSC has announced that buses are being organised from across the country, and the slogan, “Nakba 78: Justice for Palestine… United against Tommy Robinson and the far right”, has been released.

The organisers’ joint statement is a rallying cry: “For 78 years, Palestinians have been subjected to a racist system of oppression, including ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide… We need every anti-racist, anti-fascist and all people of good conscience to be with us in London on the day.” It calls on people to stand “against racism, the far right and all forms of hatred, including Islamophobia and antisemitism” and to “stand with the Palestinian people whose demand for justice is as important now as ever before.”

The stakes could not be higher. The 28 March Together Alliance demonstration proved the potential for a united anti-racist front involving trade unions, Muslim organisations, and Palestine activists. As a Cambridge protester put it: “He has deliberately chosen that date to try to drive the Palestine movement off the streets. We’re not letting that happen… Half a million people marched on 28 March. We do it again on 16 May”.

The battle for London on 16 May is not just about one day’s protest rights. It is a test of whether the British state, abetted by a transatlantic far-right network, can succeed in criminalising solidarity with the Palestinian people while giving free rein to fascist mobilisation. The Palestine movement has declared its defiance. The question now is whether the wider progressive and anti-racist movement will answer the call in sufficient numbers to ensure that the streets of London belong to the people, not to the forces of hatred and white supremacy.

Aadam Muuse, a trade union activist, captured the mood at the March demonstration: “Racism and Islamophobia have moved from the fringes into mainstream politics… The populist party must be defeated at the ballot box, and Tommy Robinson must be challenged on the streets”. On 16 May, the streets will be the decisive arena.

Conclusion: The Big Lie Of The “Caliphate” And The Criminalisation Of Communities.

This investigation has revealed a state apparatus that does not merely turn a blind eye to far-right mobilisation but actively facilitates it, while simultaneously deploying the full force of the law to crush legitimate dissent in defence of Palestinian life. The Metropolitan Police’s decision on protest routes is not an isolated bureaucratic manoeuvre; it is the operational expression of a political project that has captured the Home Office, the courts, and now the very streets of the capital. That project seeks to recast anti-racism as extremism and to rebrand the violent Islamophobe Tommy Robinson as a “free speech martyr”, a fabrication so audacious it required the imprimatur of the US State Department itself.

But the most insidious weapon in this authoritarian turn is not the police baton or the prison cell. It is a propaganda narrative, carefully cultivated by the right-wing media ecosystem and mainstreamed by opportunistic politicians, that Britain’s Muslim communities are engaged in a conspiratorial project to impose an “Islamic caliphate” on the country. This is the Big Lie that powers the street movements and the policy agendas alike. It is a fiction that has been peddled by Reform UK candidates who speak of London being “lost” to an imaginary Muslim takeover; by far-right influencers who depict every mosque as a forward operating base for sharia law; and by a tabloid press that amplifies these tropes under the cynical guise of “legitimate concerns” about immigration and integration. This narrative is not an exercise in free speech. It is an incitement to hatred, which, as the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve KC has warned, echoes “the Nazis’ views about Jews in the mid-1930s” in its systematic “othering” of a minority population.

What our investigation on the ground has consistently found, however, is a reality that shatters this propaganda. Across the country, in community consultations, in interviews with local leaders in Tower Hamlets, Bradford, Birmingham and beyond, Muslims articulate not a desire for parallel legal systems or theocratic rule, but the most basic, universal demands of any citizen: to feel protected from violence, to be safe in their places of worship and on their streets, and to receive the equal rights supposedly guaranteed under the law, so that they may continue to contribute to a society that increasingly vilifies them. They are doctors, teachers, transport workers, small business owners, and students who have sustained this country through crisis after crisis, yet they are being told, by the very state that ought to protect them, that their peaceful political advocacy for Palestine makes them suspect, while the thugs who desecrate their faith with impunity are handed the keys to Whitehall.

The 16 May mobilisation is therefore more than a clash over a commemorative date. It is a referendum on whose humanity the British state is prepared to recognise. The far right, armed with its fabricated “caliphate” panic and its transatlantic political backing, seeks to drive Muslims and their allies from public space, to make the mere presence of a hijab or a Palestinian flag a provocation. The Palestine solidarity movement, in alliance with every anti-racist, trade unionist, Jewish, Christian and secular force of conscience, stands to declare that this public space belongs to all, and that no community should have to beg for the right to exist without being the target of a state-sanctioned hate campaign.

This is why the cry “Whose streets? Our streets!” resonates with such force. It is not a slogan of conquest, but a demand for a public realm cleansed of the poison of Islamophobia and the terror of the fascist boot. The media moguls and Reform politicians who propagate the caliphate myth are not merely liars; they are arsonists, setting fire to the social fabric from their safe perches in news studios and parliamentary offices. The people gathering on 16 May are the firefighters, insisting that the safety, the dignity and the equal rights that Muslim communities, like all communities, are due, will not be surrendered to the lies of the powerful or the violence of their street proxies. Let the record show: they want nothing more, and nothing less, than to live as free and equal human beings. And they are prepared to march, in their hundreds of thousands, to make that truth undeniable.

Source: Multiple News Agencies