The London rally “Unite The Kingdom,” which took place Saturday, had been planned for a long time — to show this clown-car-crash of a government what people think of their policies, especially those regarding immigration and crime. Yet it also turned into an impromptu tribute to Charlie Kirk, assassinated three days before.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with his tin ear, condemned the march as leaving people “more scared than they were before,” though as far as I can see, the main thing people of all ethnicities are scared of in this country is the fact that we are “led” by a confused addle-pate who seems incapable of putting one political foot in front of the other without falling flat on his face.

As for the rally, a modest 25 arrests were made from a crowd of around 150,000; contrary to the fevered desires of a rabidly left-wing media, these were generally peaceful people. Trevor Phillips, the black political commentator and ex-head of the Commission for Racial Equality, was there.

“I spent an hour or two amongst them and my own impression was that they were mostly the sort of people you’d meet in a country pub, or in halftime queue for the loo at football or at a concert. There was a sprinkling of black and brown faces, and the event was brought to a close by a Gospel group singing Jerusalem.”

It’s likely that the assassination of Charlie Kirk — a little-known commentator over here outside of political and media circles — added a note of sobriety to the proceedings, with marchers carrying last-minute tribute banners. On social media, the gap between left and right — basically, they’ve changed places — was also visible, proudly disclosing everything from the alleged “punk” band Bob Vylan (I was an original punk, and I never came across any punk called anything remotely like “Pascal Robinson-Foster”: He sounds like he’d be more at home in a Noel Coward play) celebrating Kirk’s death to memes of children with their faces covered in blood and mocking captions pretending that this was one of Charlie Kirk’s small daughters, who were present at the debate where their father was murdered.

It’s incredible to think now that until relatively recently the right was more thuggish than the left. But comparing the burning and looting after the death of George Floyd there was no violence on our side against those who created and celebrated Tyler Robinson. Instead we reacted with real-life vigils and online tributes, some of them very wise, a word that one doesn’t necessarily associate with Instagram. “THEY DON’T KILL YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE A FASCIST: THEY CALL YOU A FASCIST SO THEY CAN KILL YOU” was one of the most truthful and stark.

We in the U.K. have always liked to flatter ourselves that the problem we have with  political violence is nowhere near as bad as yours because we don’t have wide ownership of guns. We do, though, have Islamists who enjoy using bombs to blow their fellow citizens to pieces, and a bomb can kill far more people than a gun. So the Brit preening isn’t just distasteful, but inaccurate. 

Like Americans, we have captured institutions that purposely, due to political allegiance, look in the wrong place for domestic terrorism; our laughably named Counter Terrorism Policing organization would rather police free speech than murderous Islamism.

When Vice President JD Vance hosted an episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, he rightly stated that “people on the left are much more likely to defend and celebrate political violence.” He was speaking to the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who vowed to dismantle a “vast domestic terror movement” that he claimed was responsible for Kirk’s killing; the FBI had its DEI department dismantled this year, something we can only dream of here.

Like Mr. Vance, Charlie Kirk took an interest in this country, seeing it as both the tyrant broken free from and the smaller sibling who is vulnerable to being fatally influenced by the bigger. This year he visited the U.K. to debate Oxbridge students, writing for the Spectator:

“As in America, a distressing number of British students seem unable to deliver a question without reading it off their phones. That said, the students of Oxbridge are certainly bright — and better at insults than the average American. But being clever is not the same as being wise. If Oxbridge students were long on wit, they were short on wisdom. In Britain at large, a very different attitude prevails.

“I spoke to everybody I could while there, from drivers and blue-collar workmen to journalists and the shockingly large number of people who recognised me in the streets. Over and over, they told me they were ready to smash the British party system to bits and elect a Reform prime minister. The great turn in Britain is coming. And when it arrives, the students of Oxbridge will be the most surprised of all.”

Many things have caused me to marvel at and be grateful for my political journey over the decades to right from left. Yet the killing of Charlie Kirk and the wildly differing reactions from both sides have caused me — and, I’d bet, a largely proportion of those 150,000 Brits who rallied on Saturday — to be extremely grateful that we identify as human beings, fully capable of the full range of human emotions, rather than as creatures of hatred, as the left apparently identifies in both our nations.