LAST SUNDAY Faversham Against Racism campaigners — gathered outside a small facility housing refugee children — outnumbered anti-migrant marchers who had threaded through the deserted streets of the Kentish market town.

Gathering several hundred yards away in a local playground — because the main organiser of the march has a community protection notice (a new-style Asbo) imposed on him sanctioning his earlier behaviour around the site the anti-refugee marchers, organised by the self-styled National Emergency Faversham Division, demanded the refugee children’s hostel be shut down and “returned to the use of local people.”

Hundreds of counterdemonstrators filled the street in front of the children’s centre until the anti-refugee marchers dispersed.

Readers will recollect that a month ago, this column discussed an earlier march on the same theme.

Between the two events, the town has been convulsed with controversy over the issue, and a broad-based Faversham Against Racism has changed the ways in which the issues are seen.

The first, and most interesting feature, is the way in which the breadth of the “anti-racist” mobilisation has, to a certain extent, demoralised the people campaigning to shut the centre. Simply outnumbering the protesters was important in challenging the way townspeople see the issue.

Disputing the morality of an attack on the wellbeing of children has been important despite a desperate attempt, in the complete absence of any evidence, that somehow these minors were “men of fighting age.”

Dig beneath the social media posting, and it is clear that some of this fits into a poisonous narrative that a conspiracy exists to infiltrate Muslim fighters into Britain as part of an imaginary jihadist plot to replace the British people with alien Muslim hordes.

Bizarrely, where this idea exists in the minds of some of these people who I talked to, it is related to the perception that the Libyan jihadists who carried out the Manchester bombing and the jihadis now running the Syrian government are assets of British intelligence.

In a startling convergence of otherwise contradictory ideas, this is taken as confirmation of a massive conspiracy encompassing government, “lefties” etc, etc.

It is clear now that the capacity of this odd collection of evangelical enthusiasts and flag fetishists to mobilise the local population is limited. The local anti-racism campaign has thus far been successful in its primary goal.

The bigger problem emerges in that while it is almost routine for a local “anti-racist” movement to challenge such street manifestations, the capacity of the overt fascists running the “flag” campaigns at the national level to mobilise is unprecedented.

And despite their limited local mobilisation, some of the marchers in Faversham remain exultant about the size of Yaxley-Lennon-organised national march and confident of continued US funding.

The big problem is that the bizarre ideas which motivate flag fantasists at the local level intersect with views about migration, and a pervasive Islamophobia that animates far wider sections of the population.

The competitive rivalry between Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage over exactly how many hundreds of thousands of migrants they aim to deport has been enabled by the Labour government’s own framing of the issue and by Keir Starmer’s descent into Powellite language.

The effect of this race to the gutter is to destroy any lingering strains of progressivism in Labour’s appeal while validating the Faragiste narrative. Badenoch playing catch-up puts the Conservatives in the unhappy position of challenging for political ground that is already highly contested.

The most important priority is to orientate the anti-racist movement to tackle, in alliance with the organised Labour movement, the electoral threat posed by Reform UK at each of the forthcoming elections and at a general election which may be coming sooner than anticipated.

Certain features of the anti-racist movement are a given. One is that people will see the straightforward necessity of challenging racist and fascist-inspired activity on the streets as the main priority. It is certainly the easiest to organise and allows quite disparate tendencies to find a basis for common action.

In our local case, some interesting trends have emerged, which, in that they represent a very wide spectrum of political and ideological tendencies, is a sign of strength and vitality.

Some people are anxious about the assertive language and political style of the anti-racist campaign and worry it alienates local residents and townspeople and could become a barrier to changing minds.

While the danger of this is probably limited in relation to the most active flag-carriers, it is certainly a problem as far as some local residents who are not directly involved in the marches but who have some sense that migration is not a simple question that is settled exclusively around the issue of the migrant hostel.

It is also true that many people caught up in this activity or sympathetic to it do not see themselves as racist and certainly not as fascists, and not all see themselves as prototypically “white English.”

Incidentally, this local authority care facility was closed some years ago despite a vigorous local campaign involving the Labour Party. It is not that the refugee children have displaced a facility for the local elderly, as the flag carriers’ banners allege. That was the result of the austerity cuts, which governments of all complexions have carried through on local government funding.

As an ironical consequence of this, Kent council’s Reform UK majority is now to set council tax at the highest level permitted.

While it is certainly true that a different language and political style are necessary to engage with working people open to Reform UK-type arguments, and liable to vote for it, it is not sufficient simply to find some contact at the human level.

It is necessary to engage at the political level, and this, of necessity, entails challenging reactionary ideas while finding points of agreement on the substantive political and economic questions that animate voters.

Reform UK voters, on most economic and class questions, are closer to the average British voter than they are to the narrow, finance sector-based ideologies of privatisation and profit-taking of the Faragiste leadership.

Isolating both the Faragiste leadership and the fascist elements entails working to change the dominant narrative about migration and detaching the question of small boat arrivals and refugees from the broader question of migration.

Getting people to understand that migration flows within Europe and between west Asia and Europe and Africa and Europe are connected above all to the effect of imperialism’s wars, climate change and in the case of the former socialist states, the extreme dislocation and rampant unemployment which followed the capitalist counter-revolution.

Latvia’s population is down by nearly a third since Soviet times; Bulgaria has lost almost a quarter; Moldova and Romania, 15 per cent; Lithuania, 22 per cent; and Latvia, 21 per cent; Croatia is down 18 per cent; and Albania nearly 16 per cent.

Winning an understanding that the population movements of this moment are a function of capitalism’s contemporary crises is a basic building block in a rational anti-racist strategy that, in itself, is just part of a political project to deal with the pressing economic problems which underlie the shifts in public opinion currently reflected in Reform UK’s positioning.

This is a job most especially for the labour movement and the entire left, with particular responsibility focused on the forces assembled around the new left party, the Marxist left, and the Labour left.

Qatargate update

READERS will recollect our earlier report of convulsions in the world trade union movement and the Brussels bureaucracy following the exposure of corruption around labour conditions at the Qatar construction sites for the World Cup. 

“Socialist” EU politicians, global trade union leaders (including a former TUC official) and EU functionaries fell, and legal processes are ongoing.

The latest twist has former vice-president of the European Parliament Eva Kaili, now out of jail, filing a complaint in the Milan courts of “calumny” against former “socialist” EU deputy Pier Antonio Panzeri, who has cut a plea bargain with Belgian prosecutors.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.