At 8pm on Wednesday 7 August 2024, the skies above North Finchley began to swell. Seemingly impervious to the impending rainfall, a throbbing crowd swayed with the beat of a snare drum, chanting and stamping their feet as police waved the limping traffic through. 

Aside from the 1,000 people who had come out that night to defend their borough against the far-right, Finchley High Road was deserted. Usually-bright restaurants were condemned to shadow behind bolted doors, and thick sheets of plywood obscured the fruit and vegetable stalls which would have otherwise remained open into the early hours. 

“Wednesday night lads. Mask up”, read a Telegram message shared thousands of times in the days leading up to the 40 other planned far-right riots across the UK that same night. “They won’t stop coming until you tell them: no more immigration.”

Yet, the dense sea of placards which rippled in the breeze wrought of the oncoming storm told a very different story to the plans that had been hatched on far-right social media channels. One banner declared the area a “Fascist free zone”, while others pleaded, “Don’t let the far right divide us with their hatred and violence.” 

And a fascist free zone it was—aside from one vocal outlier cloaked in an England flag who tried to attack counter protesters, the far-right failed to materialise, presumably deterred by the news that 378 of their collaborators had already been arrested for crimes committed both in the streets and online. 

Outside the intended target of the failed riot—an immigration advice centre which provides support to those forced to flee their home countries in exile—the only crowd to be found was one which welcomed refugees with open arms. 

A few days later, the anti-racist counter protesters regrouped, this time for a protest of their own organising. At 2:30pm on Saturday 10 August, some 5,000 people assembled outside of MP Nigel Farage’s office at Reform UK HQ, marching through Westminster until they reached Trafalgar Square. 

A passionate closing speech delivered by Stand Up to Racism’s national coordinator, Samira Ali, declared the far-right tide definitively turned: “It’s a testament to our mobilisation that they failed to come out. They would not have been stopped if it was not for our mobilisation.” 

Earlier in the day, Ali condemned Nigel Farage for “fanning the flames of racism and bigotry” and “whipping up Islamophobia” among Reform UK voters, while other members of Stand Up to Racism recalled Elon Musk’s incendiary remarks on X (formerly Twitter) regarding a forthcoming “civil war” in the UK. 

These anti-racism protests came after almost a week of far-right riots following the tragic killing of three children in Southport on 29 July. Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, were stabbed to death in the Merseyside town by 17-year-old Axel Muganwa Rudakubana during a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at the start of the school holidays. 

Whilst UK law ordinarily prohibits the publication of a suspect’s identity if they are under the age of 18, an exception was made for the Southport case in an effort to quell the mass spread of Islamophobic misinformation on social media platforms, where far-right groups had falsely claimed that Rudakubana was an illegal immigrant. 

Shortly after the stabbings, in which a further eight children and two adults were injured, violence again erupted in the Merseyside town. During a vigil for the victims on 30 July, far-right rioters assembled in the streets of Southport to protest in front of a local mosque, injuring more than 50 police officers and burning a riot van in the process. 

In subsequent days, the protests spread to other towns and cities in the North of England and Northern Ireland, with hotels housing asylum seekers in Rotheram and Birmingham set alight by protesters. 

The riots began less than a month after the UK general election, in which Reform UK gained more than 4 million votes and five seats in Parliament. Nigel Farage, whose incendiary social media activity before and during the riots is pending a possible police investigation, has played a particularly active role in stoking the wrath of the far-right. 

Another key figure of the movement, far-right and brazen anti-Islam campaigner Tommy Robinson, gathered thousands of supporters in Trafalgar Square two days prior to the incident in Southport in what he claimed to be the “biggest patriotic rally” in British history. 

While the far-right seem to have retreated from our streets since the initial rioting, it is evident that the UK’s factious political landscape is far from reconciled. Heartening though the anti-racist protests are, only time will tell if the threat of 10-year jail terms is enough to prevent further tragedy.