On September 13, London became the stage for something Britain hadn’t seen before. A far-right rally organized by Tommy Robinson, a British far-right activist and prominent anti-Islam campaigner, dwarfed all such rallies in the recent past. The “Unite the Kingdom” demonstration drew between 110,000 and 150,000 people, making it the largest far-right event in UK history and far beyond the scale of rallies on the continent, where even Germany’s AfD or France’s National Rally rarely draw more than 20,000.
It was dubbed a free speech festival, but the chants, speeches, and atmosphere told a different story. This was a show of strength built on the myth of the so-called “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory popularized by French writer Renaud Camus in 2011.
The theory claims that white Europeans are being systematically replaced by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, aided by complicit elites. Although the theory is baseless, as it collapses under demographic data, under economic data, and under simple social logic. However, it is engulfing as it transforms the anxiety of change into a story of betrayal and invasion.
The danger of this myth isn’t abstract. It produces violence. In London, the rally ended with 26 police officers injured and 25 arrests after clashes with counter-protesters. Across the UK, which is home to about 11.4 million immigrants, this summer, asylum seekers became the targets of rage stoked by the same narrative.
Protests flared outside hotels in Epping, Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Ballymena, where far-right activists whipped up crowds against migrants housed temporarily by the state. Some of these turned violent: in Ballymena, Roma homes were torched during race riots in June. Courts had to step in with injunctions to prevent forced evictions.
The atmosphere was already tense after riots the previous year, and when high-profile crimes were pinned on asylum seekers, it was enough to ignite weeks of unrest. Between July and September, the government was scrambling to contain not just Channel crossings or asylum numbers, but the street politics that were beginning to form around them. Into that climate came the September rally in London, not as an isolated eruption but as the culmination of a summer of migrant-related conflict.
None of this stands up to facts. Net migration to the EU has averaged around 1.8 million annually over the past decade, driven by aging populations, labor shortages, and humanitarian crises. In Britain, the Office for National Statistics reported 764,000 net arrivals in 2024, most of them employed in precisely the sectors crying out for staff: healthcare, technology, and logistics.
Far from being overrun, according to Frontex, Europe has actually reduced irregular arrivals by about 20 percent since 2022. But the numbers don’t carry the emotional weight of the story. The Great Replacement is compelling because it provides an enemy: it is not just “change,” it is “replacement.” It is not just economic stress; it is cultural extinction.
That is why speakers like Éric Zemmour leaned into it on the London stage, why Elon Musk’s video message urging resistance to “the violence coming to you” resonated so widely, and why the event honored international culture warriors like Charlie Kirk. It wasn’t parochial. It was plugged into a global network of identity politics.
And that is the larger danger. This is not just about what happens in Whitehall or Trafalgar Square. The far-right across Europe is no longer fringe. In the 2024 EU elections, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 31 percent in France, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy secured 28 percent, and Germany’s AfD captured 15.9 percent. By 2025, far-right parties were in or supporting governments in seven EU states.
They are consolidating power inside Brussels as well. The Patriots for Europe bloc, launched in 2024, already holds 84 seats across 12 countries and is now the third-largest group in the European Parliament. Their manifesto rails against immigration, against globalism, and against the EU itself. Add to that the European Conservatives and Reformists, often aligned with them, and suddenly you have a voting bloc that can stall migration deals, trade policy, and even Commission votes. A merger between the two could create a 150-plus-seat powerhouse. This is the institutionalization of the same message that echoed across London on September 13.
What is taking shape is a return to the politics of identity on a continental scale. Not politics of economic programs or pragmatic governance, but politics of who belongs and who doesn’t, who is “replacing” and who is “replaced.” It is the oldest, most dangerous form of European politics, and it is coming back dressed in populist slogans about sovereignty and freedom of speech.
The fractures are there—Hungary’s Orbán is cozy with Moscow while Poland’s Law and Justice positions against Russia, AfD is tainted by its Nazi baggage, and Germany and France are still holding the line of cordon sanitaire. But the gravitational pull of shared grievances, migration, Euroscepticism, and hostility to liberal institutions is stronger than the divisions. When you add transatlantic ties, with figures in the US Republican Party and India’s BJP embracing these movements, you start to see not just a European but a global alliance of far-right identity politics.
London’s protest was not an aberration. It was a warning. A conspiracy theory that should have remained on the fringe has turned into a unifying doctrine for movements reshaping Europe’s politics. A summer of violent unrest against asylum seekers has given it fertile ground. And a continent that should know better is drifting back toward the very identity politics that tore it apart in the past. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was right to call the rally a shiver through the country, but a shiver is only the beginning of a fever.
Unless European leaders confront the myth directly—by making migration policy transparent, by addressing real economic pain, and by refusing to let fear dominate the agenda—they risk ceding the political future to those who thrive on division. The Great Replacement is not happening. What is happening is the replacement of evidence with conspiracy, of solidarity with suspicion, of democracy with identity. And if Europe lets that substitution run unchecked, the consequences won’t stop at London’s streets.
