The Metropolitan Police, for the first time in a public-order operation, formally deploys live facial recognition. Cost of the operation: 4.5 million pounds. The British government – “still” Labour, remember – has barred from entry eleven figures of the international far right who were due to speak at the rally: among them Polish PiS politician Dominik Tarczynski, Flemish Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, the Dutch Eva Vlaardingerbroek (a polemicist close to the MAGA scene), and Senate MAGA candidate for Missouri Valentina Gomez, known for declaring publicly that Britain is “under the control of Muslim rapists protected by Premier Starmer”.

Robinson is not a 2026 improvisation. He founded the English Defence League in 2009 – seventeen years ago. He has been convicted of fraud, violence, and contempt of court. And in recent months he has toured the United States, where he was received at the Department of State, spoke about an “Islamic invasion” at the University of Florida, and appeared on all the major MAGA-right podcasts. Saturday's London march is not an isolated British event. It is a local node of a transatlantic and transcontinental network that has turned the European, American and Iranian-monarchist far right into a single political machine. In short: fascists meeting other fascists.

Geography, then

But on Saturday I was not in London. I was in Gourock, on Scotland's west coast, twenty-five miles from Glasgow, having a coffee in a café and watching the Clyde estuary and the ferries crossing to Dunoon. The geographical distance between central London and Gourock is roughly 770 kilometres. The political distance is considerably greater.

Seen from outside, England and the United Kingdom tend to be used as synonyms. They are not. The UK is not one country but at least two – plausibly four – and the two main pieces are diverging at a speed that will be hard to reabsorb. Scotland did not vote for Brexit (62% Remain, 38% Leave), is not voting for Reform UK, and has just elected, on 7 May, a parliament in which an explicit cordon sanitaire against the far right exists – something that no longer exists at Westminster. To convey what that feels like in daily life, I have to tell you two small episodes, separated by almost a decade, that happened less than an hour by train from each other.

A handbag in Linlithgow

24 June 2016, the morning after the Brexit referendum. I was living then in Linlithgow, a small town in West Lothian best known as the birthplace of Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots) and of Montgomery Scott (“Scotty” of Star Trek), halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

I was queueing at the Tesco checkout with the weekend shopping. The BBC was announcing the final results: 52 to 48 for Leave at the British level, but 62 to 38 for Remain in Scotland. Scotland had voted unequivocally against Brexit and had found itself dragged out of the European Union by the English and Welsh vote. In front of me in the queue, two men in their fifties were sizing me up. One looked at the other, and then, looking me in the eye with a bully's smile, said, out loud:

“Adios amigos.”

I paused a second – the time to register what was happening – and answered him in clean English:

“Adios is Spanish. Before you insult someone, you should know what language they speak.“

Behind me in the queue was an elderly Scottish lady, grey hair, leather handbag under her arm. She had seen everything. She took a step forward, raised the bag with surprising speed, and caught one of the two square in the chest, saying:

“Go away, you fud!” (fud = jerk, stupid, asshole, in Scots)

Then she turned to me and said:

“I'm so sorry. Are you ok? They don't represent us. They don't represent Scotland.“

I have often retold that scene to friends in the years since. It already seemed to me then a compressed icon of a whole country. Ten years later, it seems something more: a historical document. That morning, in the thirty seconds in front of a supermarket till, the two nations that Brexit had just revealed and separated passed in front of me. The Britain of the adios amigos – authorised by seventeen million votes to say out loud what before was said under one's breath. And the Scotland of the handbag – an elderly woman, working-class, who took on herself the responsibility of apologising for them, for us, as if it were her personal business to prevent her nation from being represented by those two.

The detail that still moves me is that they don't represent us. She could have disowned the two as compatriots – said “they are not Scottish”, washed her hands. She did the opposite. She claimed them as ours in order to disavow them. It is the exact opposite of the gesture the two were making toward me, trying to disown me as a non-compatriot. She was trying to recognise them in order to say: this is not our nature. Two opposing gestures of citizenship, in the same minute, in the same supermarket.

A whisper at the Edinburgh border

Jump forward in time. February 2025. Edinburgh Airport, arrivals hall, returning from a short trip to Italy. I queue in front of the automatic passport gates – the ones that scan your photo and let you through. The machine, for some technical reason, does not recognise mine. I am directed to the manual desk where a Border Force officer is waiting – a woman in her forties, black uniform, neutral service expression.

She asks me, in a professional tone:

“Are you here for a short visit?“

I reply:

“No, actually, I'm coming home. I've been living in the UK since 2013.“

Her face changes slightly.

“What do you do?“

And me:

“I'm a Linux platform engineer. I work for a Scottish public body.“

And here the thing happens. Her face opens into a real smile – not the service one. She hands me back my passport and says:

“Welcome back.“

As I am putting the passport back in my wallet, she looks at me, lowers her voice slightly, and says:

“And fuck Farage.“

I laugh. I reply:

“Yeah. Fuck Farage.“

She smiles, gives a small nod, and I walk off toward baggage reclaim.

I sit on a bench, in disbelief. She was a state officer on duty, in uniform, at her workplace. The people trained for that role are explicitly instructed not to express political opinions to the public – it is considered professionally improper. And at the border, of all places, the border, the exact point where national identity expresses itself as institutional gatekeeping, where the hostile environment policy introduced by Theresa May in 2012 manifests in flesh and blood with the stamp that decides who is in and who is out. Of all places…

In that place, she read who she had in front of her – an Italian living here for thirteen years, employed by a Scottish public body, returning from a European trip – and decided that professional protocol could give way to political recognition. She recognised me as one of hers. The difference between 2016 and 2025 is striking. In 2016 I was the object of the defence – the lady was intervening for me. In 2025 I was a participant in the joke – the guard was not defending me, she was sharing with me a joke about a common enemy. It is a complete arc of citizenship, even though legally I have remained Italian with Settled Status, keeping jealously in my pocket my burgundy passport with the eagle on the cover.

What happened to England, 2012–2025

Between those two episodes a decade passed, and during that decade England did particular things. Some of the chronology will be familiar to British readers; others, even British, may not have connected the points the way the sequence connects them.

In 2012 Theresa May – then Home Secretary in the Cameron-Clegg coalition – introduced explicitly what has gone down in history as the hostile environment policy. It is a profound paradigm shift: instead of leaving the control of irregular migrants to the police alone, the British state decides to make it mandatory for employers, landlords, banks, hospitals, schools and universities to verify migration status before delivering any service. The stated idea is to make the lives of irregular migrants so difficult that they “self-deport”. It is distributed administrative racism, in which every British citizen is enlisted as a passive border agent. Landlords risking up to five years in prison if they let to someone without the right paperwork. NHS doctors required to bill foreign patients before treating them. Teachers required to flag children whose status they suspect.

Six years later, in 2018, the Windrush scandal broke. It emerged that the hostile-environment machine had systematically deported, deprived of work, excluded from medical care, and pushed into poverty thousands of black British citizens of the Caribbean generation who had legally arrived in the country between the 1940s and the 1970s. Their crime was that the British state had destroyed their archival documents in 2010 – and then demanded that they prove themselves British. Stories are told of people in their sixties and seventies, lifelong NHS workers, who find themselves without homes or salaries because they cannot retrieve school records from the Sixties. This is the hostile environment applied. It is not a theory; it is an administration.

In 2024 Labour returned to power with Keir Starmer. We all thought – on the continent – that the pendulum would swing. It has swung, but not in the expected direction. Shabana Mahmood, Labour Home Secretary, presented in 2025 an immigration White Paper which she herself describes as “the most sweeping asylum reforms in modern times”. The qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain – the British equivalent of permanent residency – is doubled from five years to ten for new arrivals. Refugee status becomes temporary and revocable. The English requirement for ILR goes up from B1 to B2. It is Labour delivering the toughest asylum reform in recent British history. Hard to credit if you read about it from the continental press, but that is how it stands.

They are doing it because Reform UK – the party of Nigel Farage, an evolution of the Brexit Party, in turn an evolution of UKIP, fascists in short – has reached first place in national polls. YouGov, September 2025: Reform at 27%, against Labour at 21% and Tories in free fall. Reform's programme is explicit and published on their own site: complete abolition of Indefinite Leave to Remain (i.e. transformation of permanent residency into a series of periodic renewals for everybody), mass deportations of all irregulars, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, drastic reduction of naturalisations. Ipsos, August 2025: immigration is the British public's first concern at 48%, ahead of the economy (33%) and the NHS (22%). The Overton window has moved in metres, not in centimetres, and Labour is busy chasing Reform on the terrain of immigration instead of contesting the frame in which Reform has already won the cultural battle.

A last piece needs to be added that is essential to understand the present moment. After the Southport riots of August 2024 – when a young British man of Rwandan origin stabbed three little girls at a dance class, triggering a week of anti-Muslim disturbances across the United Kingdom – a unifying slogan emerged that fused Robinson, the Trump administration, JD Vance and Elon Musk into a single rhetorical line: two-tier policing, two-tier Britain. The thesis is that British justice is more severe toward white Christians than toward Muslims and migrants, creating a “two-tier Britain” in which natives are second-class citizens in their own country. The slogan is patently false – the Office for National Statistics figures show the opposite – but it has worked as a mass rhetorical device, and it is the frame through which Saturday's London march publicly justified itself. It is the key conceptual piece of the moment.

What happened to Scotland

Now the comparison. Scotland, until 7 May 2026, was still a political exception protected more by electoral geography than by culture – the SNP in government for nineteen years, a population voting consistently Remain, a robust civil society that mobilises tens of thousands of people in anti-fascist marches, a small but combative independent press. On 7 May the Holyrood elections crystallised a picture that surprised even the most attentive observers. John Swinney's SNP won with 58 seats, losing six on 2021 but remaining by far the biggest party. The Scottish Greens went from 7 to 15 seats, winning constituency seats (the first-past-the-post kind, as opposed to regional list seats) for the first time in their history – at Edinburgh Central and Glasgow Southside. Labour held at 17, down. Reform UK entered the Scottish parliament for the first time with 17 seats – all from the regional list, none won at constituency level. SNP plus Greens makes 73 seats out of 129: the widest pro-independence majority ever at Holyrood since 1999.

But the most important figure is not this. Swinney declared at his press conference, the day after, a sentence that is no longer said at Westminster: “I will talk to all other parties, with the exception of Reform”. He said it clearly, without euphemism. That sentence defines an explicit cordon sanitaire – the thing that English Labour has not done and probably never will, busy as it is contending with Reform for an electorate it has culturally surrendered to.

There is a legal and cultural framing that supports the cordon. In 2024 the Scottish parliament passed the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act – a law that explicitly criminalises incitement to racial and religious hatred, with an application that has been anything but uncontroversial (J.K. Rowling has been a vocal critic) but which exists as a normative baseline that the rest of the United Kingdom lacks. The Scottish government runs a programme called New Scots for refugee integration, explicitly promoted as public policy. The contemporary Scottish identity has been built, from the 1980s onwards, on an active opposition to Thatcherism, to metropolitan imperialism, to the racism of the Daily Mail. So it is not nature – it is recent historical construction, and as such it is fragile, but real.

It must be said, so as not to slide into romanticism, that Scotland is not 1970s Sweden. Reform took 17 seats here too. Anti-migrant protests outside the hotels housing asylum seekers in smaller centres – Erskine, Falkirk, on the edges of Glasgow – have become routine in the last two years. Police Scotland in 2024-2025 recorded an increase in racist offences, which now account for 60% of all hate crime in the country. Anti-Irish Catholic sectarianism is a historical constant of the western belt of Glasgow, and it flares up regularly during the Old Firm football derbies. But the structural difference is there, it is legible, and it is written not only in votes and laws but also in small daily episodes.

On skin: five years in Sheffield

Between 2018 and 2023 I lived in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, for work. Sheffield is one of the most contradictory cities of the English north: historical capital of the City of Sanctuary movement for refugees (founded right there in 2007), but surrounded by ex-pit towns where Brexit won decisively, where Reform is becoming the first party, where the post-industrial economy never recovered from the closure of the mines in 1984. Cosmopolitan city centre, suburbs and belt another country.

Those five years I felt them on the skin, before I felt them in my head. Somatic knowledge always precedes the analytical kind – the body registers patterns of exposure and caution that the mind has not yet finished organising. It was the difference between speaking Italian on the phone on the 52 bus in Sheffield and on the tram in Glasgow. Between the where are you from said as gatekeeping in a Manchester pub and the where are you from said as curiosity in a pub in Lanark. Between deciding every morning how much caution to put into your accent at the supermarket, and feeling that caution was not necessary. Small details, individually trivial, statistically overwhelming.

Despite this, I was protected and I was among expats: my team leader was a Pole, my colleague a Spaniard, a dear friend an Italian. And a kind lady – South African – from the finance team had a soft spot for me. But it was not “home”. In 2023 I changed job and went back to Scotland, and this April I closed my “emigration” with steps I had not thought possible before. My tree puts down roots.

Two kinds of people

We left the lady in Linlithgow, in June 2016. The woman with the bag, the two fools, the they don't represent us. It has come to me, in the last few hours, to think about that scene while watching the images of Robinson's march scroll on the social feeds. The Linlithgow lady was already, without knowing it, the Scotland that ten years later would win the election against Reform. Her handbag was already constitutional politics, before being a private gesture. Swinney declaring “all parties except Reform” is the same thing, done by a much younger person, in a suit and tie, formalised at a press conference – but it is the same thing.

Societies recognise themselves in the moment they choose how to treat their own abusers. A society that defends them, justifies them, courts them, copies them in order to intercept their vote – is a society in which the two at the Tesco become the majority, then a party of government, then a rally with MEGA caps in the heart of the capital, with wooden crosses and “future for white people” on the leaflets. A society that publicly disowns them, excludes them from institutional dialogue, faces them in the streets with the largest anti-fascist demonstration in recent history (the Together Alliance march of this past March, of which the continental press of course barely wrote a word) – is a society in which the lady of Linlithgow is not a folkloric exception, but a structural political possibility.

Scotland is not better than England. It is different. Very different. Its choices over these years – the SNP, the Greens, independence as horizon, Europe as desire, the Hate Crime Act as baseline – are not nature but political decisions taken repeatedly, until they have become collective identity. A fragile, contested, reversible identity – but real.

My grandmother used to say that there are two kinds of people you don't shake hands with: the stupid and the fascists. My grandmother would have loved the Scots.

Sources and further reading

On Saturday's march and the transatlantic far-right network

• CBS News (2026). Thousands hit London streets for “Unite the Kingdom” march organized by far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Reportage on the day, with police estimates of around 60,000 attendees, framing of the rally as “protest against the erosion of British identity”, and account of Robinson's State Department visit. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/london-unite-the-kingdom-march-tommy-robinson/
• Al Jazeera (2026). Tens of thousands march in London in far-right and pro-Palestine protests. The parallel Nakba Day march, the 11 foreign nationals barred from entry, the Met's biggest public order operation in years. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/16/tens-of-thousands-march-in-london-in-far-right-and-pro-palestine-protests
• Center for the Study of Organized Hate (2026). London's “Unite the Kingdom” Rally and the Transatlantic Far-Right Playbook. The most useful analytical piece on the rally as a node in a wider international network – documents the “Make Europe Great Again” preparatory meeting in Paris, the Patriotic Alternative Facebook posts revealing the openly Nazi tail of the mobilisation, the saturation of the Robinson-Vance-Musk axis. https://www.csohate.org/2026/05/12/unite-the-kingdom-rally/

On the Hostile Environment, Windrush, and the trajectory of UK immigration policy

• Hostile environment policy (Wikipedia). Good entry point for those approaching the concept for the first time, with the 2012-2018-2024 chronology, primary sources from Hansard, and the connection to Windrush. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_environment_policy
• Windrush scandal (Wikipedia). Reconstruction of the scandal, of the parliamentary inquiry, of the (partial) reparations and structural causes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
• Home Office (2025). Earned settlement: a fairer pathway. Official consultation document of the November 2025 White Paper that doubles the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain from 5 to 10 years. Primary source. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/earned-settlement
• House of Commons Library (2026). Changes to UK visa and settlement rules after the 2025 immigration white paper. Parliamentary research briefing – the best independent and condensed analysis of the proposed changes, with estimates of those affected (around 1.6 million people who arrived in the UK since 2021). https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10267/

On Reform UK, polling, and the cultural shift

• YouGov (2025). Voting intention polls for 2025. Reform UK ahead in national polls, with the September 27% peak quoted in the article. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/westminster-voting-intention
• Ipsos UK (2025). Issues Index, August 2025. Immigration as first public concern at 48%, ahead of economy and the NHS. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/ipsos-issues-index

On the Southport riots and the “two-tier” frame

• 2024 United Kingdom riots (Wikipedia). Reconstruction of the August 2024 events – the Southport stabbing, the spread of anti-Muslim disturbances, the police response, the emergence of the two-tier policing slogan and its adoption by US right-wing figures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots

On the 7 May 2026 Scottish elections and Swinney's stance

• 2026 Scottish Parliament election (Wikipedia). Detailed results, breakdown by constituency, full seat tables, post-election narrative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Scottish_Parliament_election
• Scottish Daily Express (2026). “John Swinney opens door to nightmare Scottish Greens coalition as he clings onto power”. Primary source for Swinney's “I won't be inviting Reform in to have those discussions” statement. Curiously, the most direct citation of the cordon sanitaire declaration comes from a right-wing tabloid which obviously dislikes it – which makes the citation politically credible. https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/john-swinney-opens-door-nightmare-37134152

On the Scottish framework: Hate Crime Act, New Scots

• Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 (Wikipedia). Reconstruction of the legislative process, of the controversies during implementation, of the practical applications since April 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_Crime_and_Public_Order_(Scotland)_Act_2021
• Scottish Government (ongoing). New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy. The official Scottish public policy that frames refugee integration as a public good. https://www.gov.scot/policies/migration/new-scots-refugee-integration/

On the anti-fascist response: Together Alliance

• Together Alliance (2026). The civil society coalition of hundreds of organisations – including trade unions (NEU, UCU, Unite, Unison, TUC), faith organisations, Muslim Council of Britain, environmental groups (Friends of the Earth) – which organised the 28 March 2026 London demonstration. Estimated turnout: half a million. https://www.togetheralliance.org.uk/

For background on the political economy of contemporary far-right movements

• Mudde, C. (2019). The Far Right Today. Polity Press. Best academic synthesis on the structure of the contemporary far-right ecosystem – distinction between radical right (anti-immigration, populist, but within constitutional politics) and extreme right (anti-democratic). Useful framework for situating Reform UK and Robinson on the spectrum.
• Goodwin, M., Eatwell, R. (2018). National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Pelican. Devil's advocate reading – sympathetic to the electoral phenomenon described – but useful precisely for that. The four Ds: distrust, destruction, deprivation, dealignment.

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