The far-right Gen Z agitators vying to be Britain’s Charlie Kirk

Two Gen Z far-right provocateurs are touring British university campuses whipping up controversy in a bid to emulate the late American political activist Charlie Kirk . Since the start of the autumn term, Thomas Moffitt, 18, and Montgomery Toms, 21, have between them held 12 filmed street debates on university campuses across the country. They post the most controversial and combative clips on social media. The format, known as “tabling”, mimics the Prove Me Wrong debates popularised by Charlie Kirk, the rightwing activist killed last year by a rooftop sniper while speaking at a university debate in Utah.

Toms travels with two security guards and a gazebo emblazoned with the words “Prove Me Wrong”. In clips of his “Freedom Watch GB” tour, Toms is frequently shown goading students. In one post, entitled “A British Passport Doesn’t Make You British”, he tells a young Asian woman she is “not part of the collective ancestry of this country”. When she points out that she and both her parents were born in the UK, he says that while “legally speaking” she has a British passport, “I don’t believe you are British”.

He adds: “I believe that to be British is about a lineage in this country.” When she becomes upset, he tells her to “chill out”. In October Toms had to be escorted away from a debate by police after clashes with antiracist protesters In October Toms had to be escorted away from a debate by police after clashes with antiracist protesters Moffitt, who goes by the pseudonym Young Bob, is equally controversial. He was arrested on 25 October for allegedly using a racial slur, having apparently argued that the P-word is “just an abbreviation”.

He had been released but was arrested again last Wednesday on suspicion of affray after he got into a physical altercation with a UCL lecturer. He had set up a table at the UCL campus reading: “Abortion is immoral, transgenderism is a mental illness, deport millions, let’s talk.” Moffitt describes himself as a “Christian pro-life remigration activist”. He previously worked for Turning Point UK, the British offshoot of Kirk’s Turning Point USA, yet was suspended after the campaign group Hope Not Hate revealed he had privately made disparaging comments about Turning Point and its chief operating officer, Nick Tenconi.

He now has links to Restore Britain, the political party founded by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe . Toms’s biography on X states that he works at the headquarters of Restore Britain. Last month he posted that his Freedom Watch GB tour would be “a vehicle to win over young voters to Restore Britain”. Montgomery Toms The Gen Z agitators’ incendiary remarks have provoked protests in Bristol, Manchester, Cardiff and Brighton. In October, police had to escort Toms away from a debate in Churchill Square, Brighton, after clashes with antiracist protesters.

He later posted footage on social media apparently showing his gazebo being destroyed, and claimed to have been spat at. Related articles: ‘A new home for old fascists’: Restore Britain steals a march rightwards from Farage’s Reform Fight the power: how Gen Z became a political force to be reckoned with Their events are not confined to university campuses, however. Last weekend, Toms and Moffitt travelled to Paris to cover the continuing protests in the French capital and, in Toms’s words, “document what happens when you import the third world into our European nations”.

Their group included Will Coleshill, a former Conservative councillor who was suspended by the party in 2018 after asking, during a debate on school funding, whether a Labour colleague’s Turkish family had “brought a classroom with them”. He was later removed from the council for non-attendance. Coleshill has his own alternative media channel, Resistance GB. Toms has received more than £11,000 in donations on his Go Fund Me page, including £1,000 from John and Irina Mappin.

Earlier this year he visited Mappin’s Camelot Castle, a Victorian-era clifftop hotel in Tintagel, Cornwall. Mappin is a descendant of the founding family of the Mappin & Webb jewellery dynasty and a proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory – the Brexit donor Arron Banks described him in his book Bad Boys of Brexit as a “total fruit loop”. In February, Mappin said he and his wife had joined Restore Britain. Mappin has also publicly supported Moffitt.

Toms is also supported by the crypto millionaire Peter McCormack, who described him on his podcast as the “British Charlie Kirk”. Last month Toms thanked McCormack for offering to buy him a new gazebo and pay for a lawsuit against the people who had destroyed the original one. He has also expressed gratitude to the property investor Samuel Leeds for offering to fund his security. Moffitt has received help from the Canadian rightwing political activist Ezra Levant, owner of Rebel News , a Canadian far-right political website.

After Moffitt’s 2025 arrest, Levant flew to London to meet him and used his platform to crowdfund Moffitt’s legal defence. Alex MacKinnon, a researcher at the anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate, suggests that the “tabling” open debate format is “fundamentally a way for the far-right to farm content while maintaining a facade of genuine debate”. MacKinnon added that “the best course of action is to simply ignore them – by doing so you starve them of content”.

What are your thoughts on this? Email us at letters@observer.co.uk Photographs from youngbobrb/instagram, montgomery.toms/instagram The far right Social media Gen Z Universities Charlie Kirk