Southall Black Sisters (SBS) and The Monitoring Group have condemned last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in central London, warning that the scale of the demonstration and the lack of police protection exposed minority communities to intimidation and abuse.
In a joint statement released on Wednesday (17 September 2025), the groups said their own supporters were surrounded by far-right marchers and racially abused on their way to the counter-protest. They said: “The size of the march was unprecedented and a stark reminder of widespread racist attacks and murders that led to our own formations in the 1970s.”
The organisations accused the far right of exploiting economic hardship and fuelling hostility towards migrants. They added: “The austerity that has been manufactured by successive governments has plunged vast sections of our society into poverty and has been effectively mobilised against migrants.”
They also criticised the use of sexual violence as a rallying cry for anti-immigrant protests, noting that “many of the men protesting and claiming to ‘protect’ women and children against refugees have convictions for domestic and sexual violence themselves”. The statement cited a recent case in the Midlands, where a young Asian woman was raped by two white men who reportedly told her: “You don’t belong in this country, get out.”
Calling government immigration measures “draconian” and designed to appease extremists, SBS and The Monitoring Group urged civil society, trade unions and feminists to unite against far-right intimidation.
They added: “We demand decisive government action to shut down far-right intimidation and foster a bold, anti-racist and anti-sexist vision for our society and pledge support for the twelve demands made by SBS with support from 60+ organisations in the violence against women and girls, anti-racist and migrants’ rights sectors in the wake of last summer’s racist violence.
