LIKE hundreds of others, I found myself standing in Glasgow’s George Square last weekend for a rally against racism.

Loitering at the back, we struggled to hear or even see the speakers for much of the time, but soon heard a voice from behind on a loudhailer.

“I’m Alastair McConnachie …” he said, walking towards the rally with his grinning chum, holding aloft a placard reading “asylum frauds out.”

In seconds hundreds had decided to descend upon the lonely pair from the proto-fascist party Independent Green Voice, returning proudly to the now depleted rally when the lonely pair scurried away. That showed ’em.

It did show them we were easily distracted, and willing to provide them with the pictures of a baying mob they so crave to feed their ludicrous claims of victimhood.

Channelling his inner Rodney Dangerfield, a friend said: “That’s the problem with these things … No discipline!”

A day earlier, we had stood outside the Millhouse Hotel in Paisley. In some ways, the gathering was more impressive. Pulling together 250-odd people at short notice to stand between racists and refugees in the hotel on a Friday evening was no mean feat.

Around half a dozen racists turned up to scowl through their sunglasses and hoods across the road, mumbling into the traffic-filled void. One of their number did venture undercover into the rally though, wearing a camera on his chest he was spotted immediately.

The crowd didn’t round on him, instead folk took his picture, and noticing his extreme discomfort as they did so, forced him to pose for selfies — an agonising comical subversion which was a joy to behold.

Soon, the rally was over and I jumped in a fast car to go to hear Roger McKenzie launch his latest book, African Uhuru. Fresh from the rally, a comment he made on the National Front marching through his neighbourhood particularly struck home.

He said: “It wasn’t the marches we had to worry about, it was what came after. That’s when people were attacked, shop windows broken, and they went on the rampage.”

It was a lesson many of us learned just down the road more than a year earlier in Erskine. The Patriotic Alternative had leafleted the area and filled local Facebook pages with tales of “200 fighting-age men” on their way to launch the UN-backed takeover of Britain from a new town 20 miles from Glasgow.

It was brought to my attention by an elderly friend who saw one of the pages and was genuinely scared. It hadn’t occurred to them that anything appearing on there might be a lie.

It’s easy to mock this, but we really shouldn’t. There are many out there whose prejudices are just confirmed by such posts, but many more who grew up believing what they saw on the TV news, and treat these things with the same faith.

The following Sunday, I joined dozens of folk outside the Muthu Glasgow River Hotel in Erskine after hearing that Patriotic Alternative would be at the hotel with the intention of spreading their lies further and intimidating the refugees housed there.

Being a new town, the hotel stood on its own, an isolated, crumbling, block of concrete which was being kept upright through the Home Office’s custom.

At that first rally, we heard speeches, I even gave one myself, and there was boisterous, robust chanting from our side at the group standing opposite. We were angry, and they needed to know that.

Within a few weeks, it became clear that most standing across from us were locals who had had their concerns about crumbling local services ignored for years by parties holding power, offered an explanation by the handful of fascists among them.

This is a familiar tale, but we keep coming around this block, don’t we? It looked like we’d be lobbing insults at each other for the foreseeable.

When, in exasperation, a young local Unite activist met and spoke with the locals in no-man’s land, it was obvious very quickly that it was a game-changer as the actual fascists like Kenny Smith and Simon Crane became infuriated and nervous.

Those discussions became the norm for a few weeks, and all the time the Young Communist League were out leafleting the area, talking to people and doing their bit to offer rational explanations for the community’s wants in place of fascist fear.

A similar battle would be waged to stop far-right infiltration at the local community council, as trades council members put themselves on the line and politicians paid to represent the area ran for the hills.

We went from spending our time staring-out the fascists to turning our backs on their dwindling number, instead focusing on the refugees who now felt safe in joining us to share food, and music, while a football kick-around soon escalated into a competition for the Morning Star Solidarity Cup.

As summer came, their numbers melted like snow off a dyke, flags outnumbering the few hardcore fascists remaining, as they pathetically pleaded for attention while blowing on their “spiritual weapon.” When they got it, it was generally to mock, with renditions of the laughing policeman launched in their general direction.

The broadest conceivable gathering of the Scottish left managed to hold it together for a year and while differences will remain, bonds were made, and week-to-week a level of trust was built on one issue at least.

While Sir Keir Starmer’s response to the riots is to throw the book at 12-year-olds and make threats about clamping down on social media, he laughably forgets his idol’s three-decade-old mantra: “Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime.”

Whether Starmer will countenance it or not, those causes lie at the root of fascism today.

They may talk a good game on anti-racism, but his centrist creed refuses to see the connection between their anti-immigrant rhetoric and fetishisation of “tough decisions” to cut spending with a growing far-right threat. After all, it’s so much easier instead to tell yourself it falls from a clear blue sky, or punching down at the working class.

But the left risks making the same mistake if we rely entirely on the necessary rallies, marches and confrontations to demonstrate the strength of our cause.

Without getting to the root, these risk becoming little more than self-soothing performances telling ourselves it will be all right.

It is not going to be all right unless we make it so.

The instant gratification of hounding a fascist is irresistible, but that sugar rush cannot be followed by a crash, nor can we risk making the mistake that those with empty bellies seduced by the far-right cannot be won over.

As Roger Mckenzie pointed out, the scary part comes when the rallies and marches are over. What then? Solidarity cannot be a weekend pursuit.

Reflecting on the past year, Robert Parker, secretary of the Paisley and District Trades Council, the body which led the defence of Erskine, told me: “Rallying and shouting will only work in the short term, you’ve got to develop and grow, you’ve got to be open to the people you are supposed to be taking a stand for, and ready to engage the people infected with the ideas you stand against.

“The Communist Party, YCL and trade unions like Unite, Unison, CWU and PCS were the backbone of the battle for 59 weeks, but we know the war is never over.

“It takes patience, perseverance and vigilance in our communities to turn things around and keep them there.

“When the shouting stops, you can’t just say ‘that’s it folks, my ma’s got the tea on,’ there are no shortcuts.”

A challenge to us all.