At first, I think they’re simply overcome with World Cup fever. Several of the melee gathered outside the Turtle Bay in Birmingham city centre, donning their England football shirts and novelty hats, are also holding St George’s flags. It’s the flag bearing a “Black Country patriots” crest that gives them away. That and the periodic chants of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker.” And that’s before we get to the two women dressed in long, white Knight’s Templar capes adorned with blood red crosses.
This is a different kind of pre-match build-up, where Paul Golding stands in for Alan Shearer.
There’s still an hour to go before our host arrives yet, but the crowd seems primed, clutching to their tins and Rothmans as the excitement builds. The man leading the sing-song against the prime minister, wiry and energetic in a black and blue tracksuit, bobs an excited jig on the pavement. Every so often thrusts his fist into the air and lets out a wail.
The small crowd is here for a ‘remigration march’, one of several that has been held around the country by the far-right political party Britain First since early 2025. Two of the largest of these marches have been held since then in Manchester, with attendee numbers over 1,000 (our colleagues at The Mill in Manchester went along to one last summer, and were treated to an extended video segment that seemed to protest the non-inclusion of Wiltshire’s Silbury Hill among the seven official wonders of the world, and a man begging Donald Trump to “buy England).
This is the second time Birmingham has played host to one of these Remigration Marches; the first one took place in March last year when roughly 100 people turned out for the protest. This weekend’s demo, which followed rioting that spread from Northern Ireland to England in recent weeks, saw a marginally bigger crowd.
In some ways Birmingham, with its racially diverse population, is a far from obvious place for a group like Britain First to target. But equally, our city is so often used as a reference point — especially by the very online right (including the world’s first trillionaire) — for all the ways in which the country has gone wrong, it does make a kind of sense.
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