No, there weren’t ‘over two million’ people at last weekend’s Unite the Kingdom march

In recent days we’ve seen claims on social media that the number of people who attended the Unite the Kingdom march in London on Saturday (16 May) has been estimated at “over two million”, “nearly two million” or simply “millions”.

While crowd size numbers are often disputed, these figures are all much too high. Police estimates put the figure for last weekend’s march at “around 60,000” people, and an independent expert on crowd dynamics told Full Fact it definitely wasn’t millions.

Posts with thousands of shares between them on Facebook and X have claimed the crowd was estimated at “over two million” or “nearly two million”, while the political activist Tommy Robinson—who helped organise the event and whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—claimed on the day on X that “millions are in attendance”.

As we’ve explained before, experts say that accurately counting the size of a crowd at a non-ticketed event is extremely difficult, if not impossible. But in this case the figures circulating on social media appear to be substantial overestimates.

A Metropolitan Police spokesperson told us: “It is always challenging to estimate crowd numbers at protests and it is not unusual for there to be significant differences between police and organiser estimates. We use a combination of drone, helicopter and CCTV footage, alongside crowd density estimates, to calculate likely numbers.

“On this occasion we estimate there to have been around 60,000 people at the Unite the Kingdom protest.”

The police estimated between 15,000 and 20,000 were at the pro-Palestinian Nakba protest going on at the same time.

Professor Milad Haghani, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne and expert in crowd dynamics, also told Full Fact that claims millions had attended the Unite the Kingdom rally were wide of the mark.

He said: “The idea of a crowd of millions in a street rally is completely fanciful and more of a product of imagination and gross exaggeration.

“Both sides of politics are prone to magnifying their protest and rally crowds... This has been a trend.”

He added: “Unfortunately some have no idea what a crowd of a million actually is. As I have said previously, imagine 40 Westminster Bridge[s] end to end and fully jam packed with people. That's a crowd of a single million.”

Many of the social media posts we’ve seen circulating in the wake of last Saturday’s protest also include an image of crowds on a street in London that is almost identical to one shared online last year.