Half A Million Estimated To Have Taken To The Streets
On Saturday 28 March 2026, central London belonged to the people – or at least, to the half million of them who converged on its streets in one of the largest demonstrations this country has ever seen. From Park Lane to Exhibition Road, two great columns of marchers moved through the capital, converging into a single river of dissent that flowed toward Whitehall.
The Together Alliance march assembled on Park Lane from midday, departing at roughly 1pm along Piccadilly, to Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, where speeches and music ran into the early evening. A separate march organised by the Palestine Coalition formed up at the southern end of Exhibition Road, before joining the Together Alliance route at Piccadilly.
Two marches, many causes, one destination.
The logistics mattered. They spoke to the deliberate architecture of the day’s mobilisation – a coalition that had been built carefully over months to hold together people who did not always march under the same banner.
“Our estimate is now that there are half a million people on this demonstration – the biggest demonstration ever against the far right. And it gives us all confidence to carry on. Thank you very much.” — Rally co-organiser Kevin Courtney, chairman of the coalition, speaking to crowds on Whitehall
The Coalition
Over 300 organisations mobilised on Saturday, with trade unions marching alongside Amnesty International UK, faith communities, disability rights groups, climate justice organisations and Palestine solidarity networks.
Extinction Rebellion took to the streets alongside teachers, care workers, artists and organisers. More than 100 coaches arrived from across the UK. Community groups had spent weeks arranging transport and coordinating delegations – the unglamorous, essential work of movement infrastructure that rarely makes headlines but makes movements possible.
A Labour Government Implementing Aggressively Right-Wing Policies
The Together Alliance’s stated mission was to march against the far right. The uncomfortable paradox at the heart of the day – one that many marchers felt but few speakers on stage directly named – was that some of the most consequential right-wing policies are not purely a future possibility. They are being implemented, day by day, by the current Labour government.
Labour arrived in office in 2024 promising renewal. What it delivered was – and continues to be – an aggressive rightward trajectory on immigration, civil liberties, state power, and the protection of corporate interests.
The signals came early. In May 2024, before the general election that brought Labour to power, Keir Starmer declared himself “delighted” to welcome the hard-right Conservative MP for Dover, Natalie Elphicke, into the Labour Party. Elphicke had built her political reputation on anti-immigration agitation, regularly called for asylum seekers to be forcibly turned back in the Channel, criticised footballer Marcus Rashford for campaigning for free school meals, and was temporarily suspended from the Commons for attempting to influence a judge presiding over the sexual assault trial of her then-husband.
Then, in May 2025, came that speech. Launching a white paper on immigration, Starmer warned that without tighter controls, Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.” The phrase detonated across the political landscape. Critics noted its echo of Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, in which Powell had championed those who found themselves “made strangers in their own country.” Veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott called the speech “fundamentally racist.” Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell compared it to “the divisive language of Enoch Powell.” Care4Calais’s chief executive warned that “shameful language like this will only inflame the fire of the far right and risks further race riots.” Academic analysis found that Starmer’s rhetoric “chimes with classic far-right narratives where migration is framed as the root of all societal ills.” Nigel Farage, with evident satisfaction, told Starmer in Parliament: “Reform very much enjoyed your speech – you seem to be learning a great deal from us.”
In policy, the direction was consistent. The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act became law in December 2025, tightening enforcement powers and accelerating deportations. A new deal with Nigeria, was designed to fast-track the removal of thousands of asylum seekers before they could exercise their legal right of appeal.
On corporate and financial power, the government offered business the predictability it craved – corporation tax capped at 25 per cent for the full parliamentary term, capital allowances maintained, personal investment tax reliefs left untouched. The architecture of financial privilege built over decades of neoliberal governance was preserved with care, while public services continued to be hollowed out.
The Real Victims – Absent from the March
There was something else that needed to be held clearly in mind as the march wound through the streets of London – that those most directly impacted by the right-wing policies already in effect were not on the demonstration. They could not be. They were in detention centres, in the sea, in rubble, or in graves.
In the years before and leading up to the march, hundreds of people had drowned in the English Channel attempting the crossing to Britain. They are not statistics. They were mothers, fathers, children, people who had survived wars and persecution and torture only to die within sight of the English coast – because the legal routes available to them were so narrow, and the political will to create safer pathways so absent, that a small inflatable boat in freezing water appeared to offer more hope than any official channel.
Those who survived the crossing could find themselves in places like Manston, the short-term holding facility in Kent that became a byword for systemic failure. Originally designed to hold fewer than 2,000 people for a matter of days, it was at times dangerously overcrowded with thousands of men, women and children held for weeks, sleeping on mats, denied adequate food, water and medical care. Parliamentary inspectors described conditions as “not fit for purpose.”
Or they could find themselves aboard the Bibby Stockholm, a converted barge moored off Portland in Dorset, deployed by the previous Conservative government and initially retained by Labour as an emergency accommodation measure. Described by human rights organisations as a “floating prison,” the vessel housed hundreds of asylum seekers in cramped, prison-like conditions. Inspectors documented severe mental and physical health harm among residents, outbreaks of disease, and at least one suicide. Freedom from Torture, whose therapists worked with survivors housed there, described it as “a mental and physical health catastrophe.” The barge finally closed in January 2025, but not before it had inflicted what campaigners described as deliberate, unnecessary cruelty on some of the most vulnerable people in Britain.
Or they could be held at Yarl’s Wood, the immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire that had been a site of documented harm for more than two decades. HM Inspectorate of Prisons found in 2023 that Yarl’s Wood was “no longer safe,” with razor wire installed, prison-style cell doors fitted, and detainees held not for days but for months with no court oversight and no fixed time limit. Inside, the Independent Monitoring Board documented rising violence, mass protests and escape attempts fuelled by desperation.
These were the people absent from Saturday’s march. Not because they did not care about the outcome, but because the machinery of the state had placed them beyond the reach of the street.
Genocide in Ghazzah, War on Iran: Britain’s Role in West Asia
To understand the full weight of the march, it is necessary to situate it within the catastrophe unfolding in West Asia – a catastrophe in which the UK government is not a bystander, but a participant.
The genocide in Ghazzah has claimed over 100,000 Palestinian lives across more than two years of sustained military assault. Hospitals have been destroyed. UNRWA, the UN agency providing the primary lifeline for Palestinian civilians, has been systematically undermined. This is not a humanitarian crisis in the ordinary sense. It is the methodical destruction of the conditions necessary for life – and one that the UK government has observed with feigned expressions of concern, while continuing arms sales and the sharing of military intelligence with Israel’s right-wing government. You are the company you keep.
In June 2025, the United States and Israel launched military strikes against Iran – part of an escalating campaign that had included years of sanctions, hybrid warfare, and a military build-up described as the largest in the region since 2003. Britain’s response was silence. No condemnation. No attempt to halt the escalation. No presence or position taken against what legal scholars widely characterised as an illegal act of war.
In February 2026, new strikes were launched against Iran by the right-wing Trump administration and Israeli forces. Once again, the region convulsed. And the UK government response? To make available UK air bases to launch US bombers that have killed thousands of civilians.
The UK government’s refusal to use what diplomatic leverage it possessed to protect civilian lives is the clearest expression of where its values lie. The same logic that drove the dehumanisation of refugees at home – that some lives are expendable, that some peoples are available for sacrifice – are now being applied, with far more lethal consequences, to the peoples of Palestine and Iran. The aggressive right-wing ideology visible in UK domestic policy is not confined to its domestic expression. It has already been exported, in its most brutal form, to the Global South and to West Asia in particular. The marchers gathering on the streets of London were, in that sense, protesting policies that have already been killing people for two years.
The Enclosing State: Anti-Protest Legislation
Those who marched did so against a backdrop in which the right to do so has been systematically narrowed by successive governments.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, passed under the Conservatives, had significantly expanded police power to intervene in protests, introduced new criminal offences including ‘locking on,’ created Serious Disruption Prevention Orders – protest banning orders enabling courts to restrict named individuals from attending demonstrations – and extended stop and search powers to protest situations.
Starmer’s government did not reverse these measures. Instead, it introduced The Crime and Policing Bill 2025 introduced further restrictions – face-covering bans at designated protests, expanded police powers near places of worship, a proposed “cumulative disruption” measure that could allow police to restrict protests based on their frequency rather than their conduct, and a new offence of protesting outside elected officials’ homes. Palestine Action, a direct-action group that had targeted arms manufacturers, was proscribed as a terrorist organisation – the first social justice group in British history to receive that designation, and a move UN human rights experts said endangered civil liberties by conflating protest with terrorism.
Human Rights Watch concluded that the UK was “adopting protest-control tactics imposed in countries where democratic safeguards are collapsing.” This was not the aggressive right-wing politics of the future, waiting to be voted in. It was already being implemented – by a Labour government, in the language of order, security and managed necessity.
The Metropolitan Police’s conditions for Saturday’s march illustrates the degree to which the state now manages and shapes public assembly. Routes were prescribed. Start times were set. Finish times were dictated. The peaceful Palestine Coalition march was prohibited from being within half a mile of any synagogue. The march was, in the fullest sense, state-managed dissent – authorised, routed and bounded by the very institutions the marchers had gathered to challenge.
There was an acute paradox on display – the Metropolitan Police, an organisation independently found to be institutionally racist, lined the route of a march called to oppose racism and right-wing ideology. The thing being protested stood, in high-visibility jackets, beside the people protesting it.
After the March – Resistance Is a Spectrum
The Together Alliance assembled something genuinely remarkable – over 300 community-led organisations and resistance groups set aside their differences, focused on common ground, and mobilised half a million people. That was a feat, and it deserves acknowledgement.
But marching alone has rarely led to change. The largest demonstration in British history – February 2003’s march against the Iraq War, which brought an estimated million people onto London’s streets – did not prevent a murderous invasion and occupation. The more recent anti-genocide marches haven’t stopped the slaughtering of Palestinians.
Grassroots movements that have achieved lasting change have generally done so through a diverse ecology of tactics – the march and the strike, the legal challenge and the direct action, the community organising and the electoral intervention, the boycott and the cultural shift. None of these alone is sufficient. Together, over time, they create the conditions for transformation.
There was also something predictable in the choreography of the day. The government sanctioned it. The Metropolitan Police managed it, including setting the route and the finishing time. Certain figures took to the stage not to lead or to challenge but to echo back the crowd’s own frustrations from the safety of an authorised platform. And those most affected by the policies being protested were nowhere near the march.
What the day could do, at its best, was accelerate the connective tissue between people who cared about the same things – the climate activist who had not yet thought deeply about Palestine, the trade unionist who had not yet engaged with the anti-war movement, the community organiser in one city who had never before stood alongside someone from another. In a political culture increasingly shaped by division, the act of physically gathering across difference was itself a form of resistance.
The question is – what will half a million people do next.
POSTSCRIPT: Sixteen Arrested — The Evening of the March
By the evening of the march, sixteen peaceful sign-holders were arrested outside New Scotland Yard.
They had gathered holding signs reading “I oppose genocide – I support Palestine Action.” Their arrests came despite a High Court ruling that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful – a ruling that had led the Metropolitan Police to publish a policy stating they would cease making arrests under the ban. In the days immediately before 28 March, the Met reversed that policy. Officers were deployed. Arrests were made, on the same day that half a million people marched through London in the name of solidarity and resistance.
The sixteen were not acting alone. Their arrests were a deliberate act of defiance ahead of Everyone Day, planned for 11 April 2026, when hundreds intend to do the same in Central London – an open, peaceful refusal to accept the criminalisation of solidarity with Palestine through a terrorism designation that courts have already ruled is unlawful (pending a government appeal due to be heard at the end of April).
Saturday’s march had been permitted, routed, timed and managed. The sixteen outside New Scotland Yard had not asked for permission. In that difference lay much of what needed to be said about the nature of resistance, the limits of sanctioned dissent, and what it cost, in practice, to refuse.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
Everyone Day takes place on 11 April 2026. For more information: www.EveryoneDay.uk
This article was written on 28 March 2026. All legislative references, policy details and attendance figures are accurate as of the date of publication.
