AS MANY AS 150,000 people joined Tommy Robinson, a far-right campaigner, at a rally in London on September 13th. Far-right it may have been, with some in the crowd chortling at chants like “From the river to the sea, let’s make England Abdul-free!” But the “Unite the Kingdom” march drew on a wide range of grievances, from perceived government crackdowns on free speech to migration and net-zero. Although Mr Robinson’s usual crowd of hooligans out for a scrap showed up (26 police officers were injured), they were outnumbered by the kind of people you might see at a music festival or at the supermarket.
And the vibe was oddly transatlantic. Charlie Kirk, the recently murdered right-wing influencer, featured on many T-shirts. MAGA, MEGA (Make England Great Again) and MBGA (Make Britain Great Again) hats were dotted about. Evangelical preachers implored Britons to love Jesus, leading the crowd in a public recital of the Lord’s Prayer, and demonstrators called for mass deportations and rallied against DEI “indoctrinating our kids”. As the march concluded outside Whitehall, home of the British civil service, Elon Musk appeared on massive screens via video link. To rapturous applause, he told the crowd “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or die.”
As King Charles prepares to welcome President Donald Trump to Windsor for a state visit, how Trumpist has Britain become?The visit is part of a British strategy of seeking to bridge the political gulf between Mr Trump and Sir Keir Starmer’s left-wing administration by appealing to the president’s fascination with the British royals. During a visit to the Oval Office in February, Sir Keir whipped the invitation from King Charles for an “unprecedented” second state visit from his jacket pocket with a flourish. “This is really special. This has never happened before,” he gushed.
Mr Trump will land in Britain on Tuesday and be treated to all the pageantry the British state can muster: carriage rides, gun salutes and a state dinner with King Charles at Windsor Castle. He will on Thursday hold talks with Sir Keir at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence. The British government will emphasise the benefits that trade with America brings “working people”, with new American investments in nuclear power and artificial intelligence to be announced. But since the events will take place far from London, there will be little prospect of encounters with the British public.
Just as well. YouGov, a pollster, reports that only 16% of the British public hold a positive perception of Mr Trump, making him slightly less popular than Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. But look beyond the man, and MAGA-esque ideas are gaining ground. Many of the grievances that carried Mr Trump to the White House are approaching critical mass in Britain.
The Economist identified 34 questions from the British Election Study (BES) which aligned with America’s MAGA movement, covering issues from immigration to overseas aid, transgender women’s participation in sports and racists’ freedom of speech. Individually, some of these thoughts reflect old-fashioned conservatism or classical liberalism; collectively, they are a useful MAGA proxy. The share of Britons holding MAGA views on a majority of the 34 questions fell from 40% in 2014—when Reform UK’s hard-right predecessor, UKIP, was at the height of its popularity—to just over a quarter in 2020. Since then, Trumpist views have rebounded, rising to 36% in 2025.
Although people with such views make up a slightly smaller share of the public than in 2014, they are angrier than ever. In March 2015 they gave David Cameron’s Conservative government a net approval rating of positive 21. A decade later, they gave Mr Starmer’s government a rating of negative 44.
As in America, distrust of government now pervades British politics. When the National Centre for Social Research first started quizzing Brits in 1986, 40% of the public said they trusted the government to act in the nation’s interest above party interests “most of the time”. Only 12% replied “almost never”. Today those numbers have inverted. The proportion of Brits who trust the government “most of the time” has shrunk to 12%. Those who “almost never” trust it has hit 46%, an all-time high.
Concerns about social-media censorship and the policing of “non-crime hate incidents” were front and centre of Saturday’s march (described by the organisers as a “festival of free speech”). Such concerns are widely shared. According to the BES, 70% of Brits think people are too easily offended by others’ language.
Support for mass deportations, a Trumpy addition to Britain’s anti-immigration movement, reached 45% over the summer. Reform UK sees deporting 600,000 migrants in five years as a realistic target. If an election were held tomorrow, it would have a good chance of winning.
Other MAGA-esque trends in Britain include a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment (resulting in the biggest measles outbreak since 2012) and a further doubling, since 2019, in those who think that Britain spends too much on climate change and the environment. Many of Saturday’s protesters found such themes motivating enough to stand squished together in the pouring rain for hours on end. In nearly two decades of campaigning Mr Robinson had never mobilised such support.The success of Saturday’s march can, in part, be put down to its relative vagueness. “Unite the Kingdom” was aptly named, allowing people of different stripes to rally together under a single, broadly anti-establishment banner. This is something that Mr Trump’s movement has always excelled at.
Still, in Britain polarisation and conspiracy thinking still lag behind America, and electoral success requires maintaining a distance from the extremes. Representatives of Reform UK were noticeably absent from Saturday’s festivities, and the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, has long rejected the company of Mr Robinson and his ilk. Mr Farage will hope that such people will vote Reform anyway, while he remains palatable to MAGA-curious middle classes.
That looks politically astute. Underlying Saturday’s combination of Christian nationalists, Brexit campaigners and first-time protesters was a generalised anxiety about Britain’s seemingly terminal decline. Conversations touched on everything from cancelled bus routes to unaffordable house prices, crumbling care homes and migrant-driven crime. And though nobody sang his name, Mr Farage was the only politician anybody said they would dare vote for. They certainly won’t be voting for Labour. “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” was, by far, the most popular song of the day.
In May, after a quick tour of Britain, Charlie Kirk wrote that “Trump’s revolution is coming to the UK.” When Air Force One touches down in Britain, Donald Trump will step out into a country that is becoming increasingly sympathetic to his politics—if not to him.
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