WASHINGTON D.C. — U.S. Vice President JD Vance urged anti-immigration activists at a rally in London on Saturday to keep going, addressing demonstrators who gathered in Parliament Square for the "unite the kingdom" event. Police estimated that about 60,000 people attended, while organizers claimed millions were present.

"All over the West there is this idea that the way to generate prosperity is to bring in millions and millions of unvetted people and drop them into your neighborhoods," Vance said. "To everybody in the UK who rejects that idea, I'd encourage them to just keep on going. It's OK to want to defend your culture. It's OK to want to live in a safe neighborhood."

Vance also argued that mass immigration drives down wages and harms working people on both sides of the Atlantic, including lower-income Black and Hispanic Americans in the U.S. Saturday's march was the latest in a series of demonstrations organized by far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who told supporters to prepare for the "battle of Britain."

Robinson co-founded the English Defence League in 2009 and has criminal convictions including mortgage fraud, assault, and repeated contempt of court charges for filming defendants in active criminal trials. His most recent conviction in 2024 led to a prison sentence.

Islamophobic and ethnonationalist hate speech and flyers were distributed to crowds at the rally. Nine people were arrested on suspicion of hate crimes.

Before the march, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he supported the right to peaceful protest and that the organizers were peddling hatred and division. The government said it had blocked entry visas for foreign far-right figures who had sought to attend.

"JD Vance's 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," said Weyman Bennett, co-convenor of UK grassroots organisation Stand Up To Racism. He added: "There 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."

The campaign group Hope Not Hate said the scale of Robinson's movement remained "deeply worrying." UK police said they were confident the latest event was less than half the size of a September rally that drew up to 150,000 people into the streets of London, where Elon Musk addressed the crowd by video link.