The Experiment Comes Home

The Protest Machine Eats Its Owners

Recently, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that he was leaving office. He will resign once a new leader of the Labour Party is elected. That leader will almost certainly be former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.

Burnham’s political views differ little from Starmer’s. He stands somewhat to the left of the current prime minister, yet throughout his political career he has shown a reliable talent for conformism. There is every reason to assume this talent will survive his election and remain loyally attached to Starmer’s course. In British politics, after all, personnel changes often serve as a sophisticated method of keeping policy exactly where it was.

Burnham enjoys greater popularity among British voters than the outgoing Labour leader, which secured him strong support inside the party. Starmer, during the final months of his premiership, faced collapsing approval ratings and the disintegration of his own government. The energy crisis, the worsening economic situation, the surge in the cost of living, and rising crime all weakened his position. The final straw breaking the prime minister’s back was the recent wave of anti-migrant protests that swept across the United Kingdom with violence.

The protests began two and a half weeks ago, immediately after a knife attack on British citizen Stephen Ogilvie by a native of Sudan. In major cities of England and Scotland, thousands took to the streets in actions threatening to become violent clashes. Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, distinguished itself in particular. The attack on Ogilvie took place there. Shocking footage from the city quickly spread around the world. It showed a semi-organized crowd setting fire to cars and buildings, beating and chasing migrants who happened to appear in the wrong place at the wrong time. The violence was crude. The organization behind it was more interesting.

Broad protest actions mobilizing thousands of dissatisfied citizens across an entire country are traditionally planned from above by politicians interested in destabilizing the domestic situation through street activism. Then informal networks are activated. They connect the dissatisfied into clubs of shared grievance, usually organized through social media. The leaders and administrators of these clubs are directly linked to the political force that needs the street. Funding comes through grant programs from loyal foundations and through donations from large sponsors. In exchange for organizing anti-government actions, the formal leaders receive fame, virtual political weight, and the warm narcotic of personal importance.

This is how controlled chaos is manufactured. Respectable people keep the remote control. Marginals provide the street noise.

The technology was copied one-for-one from color revolutions, then redirected inward. The West has achieved the small administrative miracle of importing its export product back home. Until recently, the model worked rather well, especially in the United States, where it was invented. In 2020, for example, the Democratic Party used this machinery to coordinate Black Lives Matter actions, which greatly complicated Trump’s life at the end of his first term. In 2025, the same political technology produced the No Kings demonstrations against the same Trump, mobilizing between four and seven million people in total, depending on the count.

The British political elite kept pace with its American colleagues and organized large demonstrations according to the same templates. In recent years, the British right has managed to bring tens of thousands, and by some estimates hundreds of thousands, of people to rallies. The formal organizers were marginal radical-nationalist parties and the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, famous for his permanent relationship with the legal system. The principal beneficiary, however, was Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, now the main opponent of Labour.

In official statements, Farage distanced himself from the far-right camp and from Robinson personally. This was necessary to preserve his appeal to more moderate voters, who prefer their political anger with a clean collar. Yet Robinson’s activity clearly worked in Farage’s favor. Large demonstrations drew additional attention to Reform’s core narratives: crime, hard migration control, defense of traditional values, and limiting the influence of Islam on British culture.

In both the United States and Britain, the key characteristic of these demonstrations was mass scale and an initially peaceful form. The main goal of opposition elites is to throw as many people as possible onto the streets, destabilize the situation, and create the image of mass dissatisfaction with the authorities. Direct violence is inconvenient for the opposition, since it frightens part of the moderate electorate. Yet political leaders understand the material they are using. A crowd of marginals rarely remains polite for long.

The usual scheme is simple. Before violence begins, part of the protesters stages provocations against law-enforcement officers guarding the demonstration. Police respond with force. Loyal media then produces the required image: unprovoked aggression by the authorities. After that, violence by “peaceful protesters” acquires moral permission among the opposition-minded public. Thus street activism allows the opposition to raise its ratings at the price of a higher general level of political instability. A modest transaction, if one is paid in polling points and someone else pays in burned streets.

The latest British protests followed a different logic.

The mobilization of the dissatisfied was carried out by the same marginal political clubs as before. Yet, compared with the tens of thousands usually produced by such demonstrations, this time the organizers managed to bring out, at best, thousands. More importantly, those who appeared clearly had no intention of staging the usual theatrical sequence in which police are provoked into being the first visible source of force. They moved to disorder from the first minute.

No major political force benefits from protests of this kind. Labour lost its prime minister against their backdrop and again demonstrated its inability to keep the country under control. Reform received an unexpected stab in the back: its anti-migrant rhetoric will now be associated with political violence in the eyes of centrist voters, pushing some of them away. The Conservatives received a gift because Reform had been poaching their electorate, yet they could barely use it because the whole episode arrived with the grace of a brick through a window.

Thus, political elites are gradually losing control over their loyal marginals. The controlled chaos of street protest is turning into the uncontrolled chaos of civil confrontation. The exchange rate is becoming clear: a few extra percentage points in elections in return for the steady liquidation of political stability.

The British elite has discovered that a mob trained for political usefulness sometimes develops its own ideas about usefulness.

The Belfast incident became one of the markers of a new political reality in the West. Democratic norms resting on clear legal mechanisms are rapidly receding into the past, finished off by multiple crises, while a fractured political elite loses control over the country. These are the pitiful results of importing a fight without rules into domestic politics.

In pursuit of immediate gains, politicians often neglect long-term consequences. The technology of controlled protest is easy to use. Social networks exist everywhere. Political marginals exist everywhere. Opportunistic elites exist everywhere. This means that, in the long term, the technology can be applied almost anywhere. Including Russia.

Russia has already developed effective methods for countering color-revolution threats from outside. It overcame the Bolotnaya Square protests and supported its allies in Belarus and Kazakhstan, preventing Western countries from repeating the success of Euromaidan.

The British example, however, shows that mechanisms are also needed to prevent domestic color revolutions. The appeal of street activism for the Western political class lies in one convenient fact: the real beneficiaries of protests carry no responsibility for supplying formal organizers with resources. If such responsibility is introduced, the attractiveness of a domestic color revolution as a political technology will decline sharply. Under current conditions of elite consolidation, creating permanent mechanisms for holding beneficiaries accountable is far easier than trying to do so after street activists have already been assembled and thrown into battle.

The West’s political experiment with color revolutions was originally used to secure its global dominance and support leaders loyal to the United States and Europe. It may now render Russia an invaluable service. Russia can observe the final results of this experiment without conducting it with its own hands and without paying the corresponding price.

For once, the West has performed the experiment on itself. The laboratory results are already visible in Belfast.