THE PUB IS ALREADY FULL before the football starts. Outside, the street glows under a grey Midlands sky, wet from a passing shower. Inside, there is the low hum of habit – the scrape of chairs, the clink of glasses, a quiz machine that has not paid out in months. The television in the corner is split between a rolling news channel and pre-match chat. For a moment, the sound cuts from pundits to a clip of a march, English flags bobbing like buoys on a restless sea.
No one in the bar needs the caption to tell them who is on screen. They know the face, the way he talks, the way he jabs a finger at the camera, the way he says that ordinary people are not being heard. They have seen him on their phones, shared his clips in WhatsApp groups, watched him standing outside courts and council offices that many of them will never enter. He is not just Tommy Robinson the public figure. For some, he is Tom from streets they recognise, that world of terraces, betting shops and half-closed factories.
Around the tables, conversations drift on. Someone jokes about the referee. Someone else complains about their gas bill. But when the clip of the march comes on, there is a slight pause, barely noticeable, as eyes move to the flags, to the faces, to the police line. Not everyone in the room agrees about him. Some think he goes too far, others that he does not go far enough. What they have in common is that they understand the feeling that produced him.
“Strip away the labels and ideologies, and the same story surfaces again and again: people feel they have moved from the centre of their own story to the margins of someone else’s.”
For years, their towns have been changing. The butcher and the greengrocer shut, a chain mini-market replaces them, then that goes too. High streets that once smelled of chip fat and cigarette smoke now carry other scents – spices, grilled meat, things that once felt exotic and far away. New shops appear with new alphabets on the signs, new churches and mosques open in buildings that used to be bingo halls. School gates fill with languages that their grandparents never heard.
Some people like this mix. They enjoy new food, new music, different ways of living. Others are less sure. They do not object to the people, or at least they do not think of themselves as objecting to them. What unsettles them is the speed, the sensation that a familiar script has been quietly rewritten. The jokes that once filled the factory floor no longer feel safe to tell. The words they grew up using are now judged and measured. They are told to be careful, to be aware, to be sensitive.
When they turn on the television or scroll through social media, they encounter another language altogether. Politicians and commentators talk about inclusion, diversity, global Britain. There are panels on structural injustice, debates about pronouns, statements about values. The vocabulary is elegant and precise, but it sounds like something from elsewhere, a professional dialect that belongs in glass-fronted buildings in big cities. It is not the way people sound in the pub on a Tuesday afternoon.
Tommy Robinson and the English Defence League grew out of that gap. For supporters, the marches and videos were not an abstract ideological project. They were a way of saying: we are still here, we still matter, this belongs to us too. The flags, the chants, even the confrontations were an attempt to carve out visibility in a landscape where they felt reduced to stereotypes, either as villains or as problems to be managed.
The stories that circulate in those circles are often local. A protest down the road. A crime on the estate. A video from outside a school, a mosque, a council office. These are not framed like policy debates. They are told as things that happened to people like them, in streets they know, under grey skies they recognise. When those stories do make it on to national news, they are often handled with caution, softened by careful studio language. The distance between the tone on screen and the tone in the bar is where much of the anger lives.
There is also the question of who gets defended. Many who follow Robinson or similar figures carry a memory of scandals where, in their view, the state moved too slowly or too gently. They remember reports about grooming gangs, or radical preachers, or corruption, and they remember how long it seemed to take for officials to say bluntly what was going on. Against that backdrop, the man outside the courthouse speaking into his phone feels, to them, like someone filling a silence.
“When people feel they have been shouted over, they look for someone who will shout for them.”
The English Defence League made that feeling physical. Marches in town centres, banners across familiar shopfronts, a flood of flags down streets where their parents shopped for school uniforms. It was noisy and sometimes heated, but it was also, for many participants, the first time they had been part of anything political at all. For people who did not attend university, who do not belong to unions or NGOs or party branches, this was politics that looked and sounded like them.
Not everyone stayed on the street. Over time, some drifted away, tired or disillusioned or fearful of trouble. Others took the same set of feelings into a different arena, swapping marches for ballot papers. The face that comes to mind there is not Robinson’s but Nigel Farage’s – pint in hand, tie slightly off, laughing in a way that feels closer to the local boozer than to Westminster.
Farage speaks a language that many recognise. He talks about borders and control, about fishing boats and high streets, about bills and bureaucrats. He links the sense of cultural dislocation with economic grievances – the factory that closed, the job that never came back, the mortgage that is harder to pay. For listeners who have spent years hearing that change is inevitable and globalisation unstoppable, his insistence that things could have been done differently sounds less like fantasy and more like long-awaited respect.
Reform UK, his latest vehicle, gathers up these currents. In Reform meetings, you can meet retired couples from bungalows on the edge of town, warehouse workers from out-of-town estates, self-employed tradesmen squeezed by costs, younger voters who feel laughed at for their views in college or at work. They differ in age and income, but they share a sense that the big parties occupy a single shared world that does not include them.
For them, the term “far right” is something other people use. They hear it on programmes they do not trust, spoken by people whose lives bear no resemblance to theirs. In their own minds they are not extremists. They are patriots, parents, neighbours. They worry about crime because they walk home in the dark. They worry about schools because their children go there. They worry about migration because their local GP surgery is crowded and their housing list is long.
“The man on the platform saying the train should never have left without them is often more compelling than the driver promising a better timetable next year.”
The thing they return to, over and over, is that no one listened earlier. They remember writing to MPs, filling in consultations, answering surveys, and hearing nothing back. They remember being told that their town was “vibrant” while they were watching the last of the old trades vanish. They remember voting for parties that promised control of borders, or levelling up, or taking back power, and then watching as those promises were filtered through committees and court cases and acronyms.
Tommy Robinson’s bluntness, for all its controversies, exists in this context. He speaks in a way that does not ask permission. He uses the words that are used in smoking shelters, on construction sites, in minicabs. When his videos are removed or his accounts limited, supporters do not see a technical enforcement of rules. They see someone like them being told, yet again, that the way they speak and think is unacceptable in polite society.
The same is true of the way figures like Farage relish confrontation with broadcasters or panels. When he challenges a host or critic on air, supporters experience that as a proxy confrontation. It feels like someone finally talking back to people who, in their view, have talked down to the country for years. It is not only the policies that matter. It is the performance of standing ground.
In the background, there is the memory of other changes. The closure of coal mines, steelworks, and dockyards left certain regions feeling hollowed out. Promises of new industries and retraining arrived in leaflets and speeches, but not always in reality. Young people moved away, leaving older generations surrounded by boarded-up pubs and empty factories. Into that emptiness, new communities arrived and made lives of their own. For some locals, the timing produced a bitter impression, even if they know it is more complicated: the old world ended, and a new one arrived, and no one asked them what they wanted in between.
Language again plays its part. Walking down the high street, some older residents now hear words they do not understand in shops and on buses. They see signs in other scripts, hear announcements in multiple languages. None of this is hostile in itself, but it quietly reinforces the feeling that they are now guests in a place they once assumed was theirs by default. They can still live there, of course, but they no longer set the tone.
The school playground is another place where the change feels most vivid. Children adapt quickly. They pick up new phrases, share snacks from lunchboxes, make friends with whoever lives nearby. Parents stand in little groups, sometimes mixing, sometimes not. A mother or father who struggles with reading might feel doubly shy when school letters arrive filled with polished phrases about diversity weeks and awareness days. They are not against fairness. They are simply unsure where they fit in the new moral map.
“The Britain that shouts back does so from closed factories, crowded waiting rooms and letters that never received replies.”
Strip away the labels and ideologies, and a similar story surfaces again and again. People feel they have moved from the centre of their own story to the margins of someone else’s. They feel that rules have changed – about what can be said, what can be laughed about, what can be criticised – and that they were never invited into the conversation that produced those rules. When they raise objections, they encounter not calm explanation but sharp judgment.
Movements like the EDL, figures like Tommy Robinson, and parties like Reform provide a way of moving back to the centre, if only for a moment. Carrying a flag down a street is an act of presence. Putting a cross in a box for a party that promises to speak in your voice is a claim of ownership. Sharing a clip of someone challenging officials or journalists is a small gesture of solidarity among people who think their days of being taken seriously are over.
In that light, their rise is not mysterious. It is, in many ways, the most understandable thing in the world. When people feel that they have been shouted over, they look for someone who will shout for them. When they feel that a language has grown around them that is not their own, they gravitate to voices that sound like family or school or work, not like seminar rooms. When they feel left behind at the station, they notice the man on the platform saying the train should never have gone without them.
None of this means that everyone in these circles thinks the same way, or even agrees on a vision of the future. The man in the pub who shares Robinson’s video might vote Reform. His neighbour might never vote at all but still nod along to Farage on the radio. Their children might roll their eyes at both. What binds them is not a manifesto, but a mood: tiredness, frustration, and a desire for someone, anyone, to treat their experience as more than a problem to be managed.
“The distance between the tone on screen and the tone in the bar is where much of the anger lives.”
On another wet evening, the pub television returns to politics. This time it is a party leader in a reflective jacket talking about growth, innovation, investment. The words are smooth, well tested, reassuring. Around the tables, someone laughs, someone swears at the price of a pint, someone glances at the screen and looks away. Out in the car park, a phone buzzes with a new video, a new clip, a new rallying call from someone who insists that those inside the big buildings have got it all wrong.
The Britain that shouts back is not doing so out of nowhere. Its voice comes from closed factories and crowded waiting rooms, from English flags folded in drawers, from letters that never received replies. Tommy Robinson, the EDL, Nigel Farage, Reform – these are names that have attached themselves to that voice at different times, for different reasons. They are not the whole story, but they are part of it.
If there is something beautiful in this story, it lies not in the anger, but in the stubbornness. In the refusal of people in quiet streets and small towns to accept that politics is something that happens only in other places, in other languages. They may not always choose words that pass editorial tests. They may not always reach conclusions others find comfortable. But they are still trying, in their own ways, to say: we are here, and we expect to be heard.
