{"id":593326,"date":"2026-05-19T23:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T23:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/593326\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T23:02:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T23:02:10","slug":"jd-vance-urges-uk-anti-immigration-activists-to-keep-on-going-us-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/593326\/","title":{"rendered":"JD Vance urges UK anti-immigration activists to \u2018keep on going\u2019 | US news"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US vice-president, JD Vance<\/a>, has urged anti-immigration activists in the UK<\/a> to \u201ckeep on going\u201d after tens of thousands gathered for a rally<\/a> in London.<\/p>\n

Vance appeared to align himself with those who attended a march on Saturday where the far-right activist Tommy Robinson<\/a> told supporters to prepare for the \u201cbattle of Britain\u201d.<\/p>\n

Organisers claimed that millions had attended his \u201cunite the kingdom\u201d event, but police estimated the number of demonstrators to be far lower, at about 60,000. The campaign group Hope Not Hate nevertheless said the scale of Robinson\u2019s movement<\/a> remained \u201cdeeply worrying\u201d.<\/p>\n

Addressing reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Vance claimed that \u201call over the west\u201d there is \u201cthis idea that the way to generate prosperity is to bring in millions and millions of unvetted people and drop them into your neighborhoods\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd we simply reject that idea,\u201d he said. \u201cTo everybody in the UK who rejects that idea, I\u2019d encourage them to just keep on going. It\u2019s OK to want to defend your culture. It\u2019s OK to want to live in a safe neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

JD Vance holds a press briefing at the White House on 20 May. Photograph: Samuel Corum\/UPI\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

At Saturday\u2019s rally in London\u2019s Parliament Square, Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, claimed the event was \u201ca turning point for Britain\u201d.<\/p>\n

Islamophobic and ethnonationalist hate speech and flyers were distributed to the crowds at the event, where nine people were arrested<\/a> on suspicion of hate crimes.<\/p>\n

Vance framed his support on Tuesday in economic terms, arguing that mass immigration drives down wages and harms working people on both sides of the Atlantic \u2013 including, he claimed, lower-income Black and Hispanic Americans in the US.<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s march was the latest in a series of Robinson-organized demonstrations. A rally in September drew up to 150,000 people<\/a> into the streets of London, where Elon Musk addressed the crowd by video link. The UK police are confident the latest event was less than half the size<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Keir Starmer<\/a>, the prime minister, said before the march that he supported the right to peaceful protest, but accused the organizers of peddling hatred and division. His government said it had blocked entry visas for foreign far-right figures who had sought to attend.<\/p>\n

Weyman Bennett, co-convenor of UK grassroots organisation Stand up To Racism, who attended the counter demonstration to Robinson\u2019s rally last Saturday, said: \u201cJD Vance\u2019s comments, which come after the San Diego [mosque] attack, tell us he supports division rather than unity. We want unity and solidarity.
His comments incite racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and divide us.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cThere is nothing to gain from going down this road. I think he knows very little about the multi-racial communities that exist in Britain. I hope everybody in Britain rejects this form of hatred and division.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robinson has been a key figure in British far-right politics for more than a decade, and has now seeped into the American rightwing influencer ecosystem.<\/p>\n

He co-founded the English Defence League in 2009 and has since built a string of criminal convictions, including mortgage fraud, assault and repeated contempt of court charges for filming defendants in active criminal trials. The most recent sent him to prison in 2024.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, the UK home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, ripped up the government\u2019s asylum rules<\/a> so that newly recognized refugees will receive just 30 months of temporary protection rather than the previous five years.<\/p>\n

The EU will also fully adopt<\/a> a sweeping new pact on migration and asylum next month, overhauling how the bloc screens, processes and shares responsibility for asylum seekers at its external borders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US vice-president, JD Vance, has urged anti-immigration activists in the UK to \u201ckeep on going\u201d after tens…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-593326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}