You’ve almost certainly seen the filmed footage of a woman being viciously attacked by a mob of violent hooligans at Nigel Farage’s party conference in Birmingham last weekend. But it is the people in the background who really chill the blood.
The faces filled with glee are somehow more upsetting than the ones contorted with hate. In the UK in 2026, a woman who dared to heckle an elected politician is being brutalised and battered in the middle of a crowd while attendees of the conference of a supposedly respectable and mainstream political party look on with visceral delight.
Last year, the same conference cheered a woman who had been rightly jailed for urging murderous violence against entirely innocent people. This year, senior party figures like Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson competed to see who could treat the victims of genuine political violence at the hands of their own cultish followers with the most contempt. Hashtag save our women. Hashtag protect our girls.
The photographs of the few hundred black-shirted, “fighting age” men who descended on Dover the next day and Portsmouth the day after merit rather less scrutiny. Their faces are completely covered, rendering their identities even harder to clarify than their motives. Some pseudo-patriotic nonsense about protecting communities by descending on them dressed like ersatz paramilitaries, or somehow repelling refugees by showing them that this is a country where mob rule and violence are as common as they are in the countries they have fled.
Like the men who took to hanging flags from lampposts without invitation from the people whose streets they invaded, they co-opted media and mainstream politicians’ shameful rhetoric about so-called “small boats” to create an air of menace and a sense of threat for anyone who subscribes to an honourable concept of patriotism, best expressed for me in the inscription on a statue of Edith Cavell that I walk past every day on Charing Cross Road in London.
A nurse from Norfolk, Cavell was the matron at the Berkendael Medical Institute in Brussels when the First World War broke out. She treated soldiers from both sides with identical care and compassion and was executed by a German firing squad in 1915 after helping 200 allied soldiers to escape German-occupied Belgium.
The inscription on the statue is a comment she made to the chaplain who gave her communion on the eve of her execution: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”
Back in the conference hall, Farage, who has previously described the infamous misogynist Andrew Tate as an “important voice” for young men, was making a new friend.
Ryan Bridge, co-founder of the flag-hanging “grassroots movement for unity and patriotism”, beamed as the Reform UK leader gushed: “What your campaign has done is wake up vast parts of this country.” Hours later, Bridge, previously linked to an alleged food poisoning scam in Mallorca, was charged with 14 offences, including racially aggravated harassment, threatening behaviour and assault. He may, of course, be found innocent. As may Tate, who is facing charges of rape in Britain and charges of trafficking minors in Romania (he denies all wrongdoing).
Last year, Bridge travelled to France with a man called Daniel Thomas so that they could film themselves berating charity workers and refugees around Calais. They were subsequently banned from the country.
Thomas, who organised the congregations of black-shirted, balaclava-clad men in Dover and Portsmouth last weekend, has been in the news before. The convicted criminal, who wants people to call him Danny Tommo, is a close associate of the violent far-right criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who wants people to call him Tommy Robinson, and was jailed in 2016 for the attempted kidnapping of a man he believed had stolen drugs from him. The judge in the case described the conduct of Thomas and his accomplices, who had somehow targeted an entirely innocent man, as “stupid“.
It may not be immediately obvious but all of these men have something in common. They are all coarsening our culture in self-serving, deliberate and dangerous ways. Whether wearing suits, like Farage or Jenrick, or balaclavas and black shirts, like Thomas and co, they are seeking to sow division and distrust in our communities under a false flag of patriotism.
The events in Birmingham on Friday constitute a profoundly significant moment in British political history and I don’t believe we would have reached it without the broader cultural decline evinced by Thomas, Bridge, Yaxley-Lennon and even Tate.
A woman was viciously attacked and senior party figures found it funny. The message sent by Farage and Jenrick is clear: violence is an acceptable response to criticism; you can attack people whose politics you don’t like and if they get hurt then it’s their own fault.
And this message doesn’t just reach his fans, or the latter-day Blackshirts all over the news this week. It reaches his critics too. It reaches people who might wish him harm and so it imperils not just everyone who rejects political violence but also those who endorse or appear to enjoy it.
We are falling fast as a country but slowly enough for the full significance of the most crucial moments to be missed. The incremental dismantling of the guardrails that protected us from being beaten for our views or having our streets invaded by flag-hangers and mask-wearers is gathering pace. Halting it involves politicians from Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch down finding the courage to call out these horrors properly and condemn the conduct of their parliamentary colleagues from Reform.
Most of all, though, it involves them reclaiming the proper meaning of patriotism from the clowns, criminals and cretins currently co-opting it to line their pockets, indulge their bigotries and massage their egos. And if they need help remembering exactly what proper patriotism looks like, there’s a statue on Charing Cross Road they would do well to visit.
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