IT IS clear that among the people organising what is clearly a well-planned operation are any number of far-right figures, including people with neonazi profiles. Operation Raise the Colours was co-founded by Andrew Currien, aka Andy Saxon.

Formerly a key member of the English Defence League’s leadership bodyguard team, and now running security for the far-right party Britain First, Currien was jailed for his part in a racist death. He was one of six men convicted in 2009 after a 59-year-old man was crushed to death by a car following a violent brawl. But the way in which the campaign has materialised with an English dimension suggests that deeper currents of thought and feeling are being mobilised.

How to first understand and then deal with the politics of this phenomena has created some controversy on the left, and it is worth looking at the diversity of views that have surfaced.

Last week, the Morning Star carried a well-argued and provocative piece by Simon Brignell suggesting that the left should recover the St George’s Cross flag as its own.

His point is that if we abandon it to the right, we allow them to define Englishness entirely on their own, racialised terms.

He argues that the left has long conceded this terrain and has allowed the far right to monopolise the St George’s Cross, and in doing so, has associated it with racism, chauvinism, and bigotry.

Our refusal to fight on this powerful terrain of national identity has handed them victory in the battle of ideas, he argued.

In a class society national identity is always contested territory, but the subsequent debate, online and elsewhere, has refined the discussion to make a distinction between British identity, in as far as it is conflicted around the Union Flag, and the sense of English nationhood seen as embodied in the St George’s Cross flag. This emerged as a signifier of English identity relatively recently as the emblem of the English football team’s fans. Hitherto, it mostly served as the flag carried on the Church of England’s places of worship.

Among the arguments present were; does it make sense to try to rescue the flag, the founding symbology of which is Christian, given that so many people in England are secular or not Christian? Is it that St George’s flags flying everywhere serve no other purpose than as far-right signifiers and thus exude menace?

One powerful argument has it that the Union Flag (or Jack) is so identified with slavery, the exploitation, servitude, violence and repression of the British empire that its appellation “the butcher’s apron” makes it especially redundant as a symbol of progressive nationhood and human values. Yet it was during the London Olympics that it acquired a more complex role as a signifier of British sporting pride, which subverted, for a while, its function as a signifier for some of the far-right project.

It is clear that these arguments, almost theological in their careful parsing of abstract concepts and meaning, cannot be resolved exclusively in theoretical debate but only on the terrain of mass action.

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Where I live, in the small but growing market town of Faversham in Kent, these issues have arisen in a particularly controversial manner over recent weeks.

Some streets in the town have been festooned with flags flying as far up lamp posts as ladders extend, giving a strange appearance of the town in mourning for some tragic event. Roving groups have harassed local residents trying to take down the flags, and when the most rowdy of the flag bedecked group were driven out of the main street in this town renowned for its high concentration of pubs, they gathered in drunken disorder to desecrate the town’s memorial to the fallen of both imperial wars and the anti-fascist struggle.

Enter stage right a portentously named National Emergency Faversham Division headed by a local evangelical figure — a self-proclaimed sinner, allegedly with a conviction for affray in one of the periodic postcode run-ins between Faversham and Sittingbourne youth, but now, by his own account, instructed by a higher spiritual authority to lead a crusade against the infidels (aka refugee children).

He was joined in the online agitation for a demonstration at Faversham’s small hostel for unaccompanied migrant children by the leading figure in a Sittingbourne-based motorcycle group.

This created considerable alarm in the town, and two online anti-racist groups emerged to co-ordinate the community’s response to what was seen as an unwelcome disruption of the town’s tranquillity.

One very interesting aspect of the agitation for the anti-migrant demonstration was our evangelical saviour’s bid to present it as by intent peaceful and distinguished in this respect from other anti-migrant protests. On one hand, this was a subliminal recognition that violence was perhaps a likely feature of his demonstration and on the other, a transparent bid to provoke a violent reaction from what his followers describe as “woke lefties.”

The plan was for the motorcyclists to join the marchers outside the (now privatised) Faversham post office before moving off to the children’s hostel situated in a local housing estate.

In a town with 500 Elizabethan buildings, the post office stands as a perfect exemplar of mid-20th-century modernism, with the space before it enlarged when a plan to drive a new road, demolishing part of the historic town centre, was thwarted.

It was here, last Saturday, that the rather modest motorcycle contingent joined the 100 or so anti-migrant demonstrators to be outnumbered by hundreds of local people carrying homemade banners, St George’s flags with Refugees Welcome slogans, and mini Union Jack facsimiles with multicoloured sections signifying diversity with the slogan “Racists go home.”

To musical chants of “there are many more of us than you,” snatches of the Beatles’ “All you Need is Love” and laughing derision, the bedraggled anti-migrant procession moved off to be confronted at the children’s hostel with a contingent mobilised by Kent Stand Up to Racism.

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What can we take away from this experience?

Firstly, the anti-migrant group was already on the defensive, conscious that last year’s violence and intimidation — and the sustained anti-racist campaign since — limited their appeal to attend the demonstration to all but the most highly motivated among their co-thinkers. This later emerged as a limp plea to explain why they were outnumbered.

Secondly, that the iconography, and symbolic representations of their political project were no longer unchallenged and that the once seamless appropriation of icons of Britain’s now conflicted nationhood, and thus the symbolic representation of an English identity, was now contested territory.

Thirdly, they were now seen in the town as the disruptors, the outsiders, as out of step, discordant and humiliated objects of derision. In the fierce online controversies that followed, this sense that their claim to speak for a silent majority was expressed in repeated assertions that their opponents were a privileged (and educated) minority elite dripping condescension and contemptuous of online grammatical error.

In this, they touched upon a real problem. The priority to differentiate the racist and fascist tendencies from a wider group for whom the migrant issue stands as a proxy for more legitimate concerns was obscured by ad hominem attacks and a gratuitous criticism of the language used rather than the arguments themselves.

The issue, and especially the anti-racist campaign, has energised local politics. The local Communist Party secretary, Nathan Bolton, one of the organisers of the counterdemonstration, says the effect of Operation Raise the Colours has been to show that the polarisation in Britain exists on terrain that is somewhat difficult for the labour and progressive movements. “Unless we tread carefully,” he adds.

“Far-right and racist protests, unfortunately, have become a regular part of the British summer. Mixed with a Labour government that has failed the working class, these protests, while less violent than 2023, have arguably reached further into people’s lives, fusing worries about jobs, housing and the NHS with perceived preferential treatment to what mainstream media almost unanimously call ‘illegal migrants’.”

So far, the main electoral beneficiaries have been the Lib Dems, but the electoral consequences of the next local elections are unpredictable, with Reform UK’s growth not yet expressed and the effect of the new left party difficult to predict. Both the Lib Dems and the Greens played a positive role in the campaign, with the town council leader, a former Momentum Corbynista turned Lib Dem and the Green councillors taking a leading part.

Bolton notes that the protest in Faversham was joined by various known far-right and fascist activists from across Kent, but it was also made up of local residents with their children and noticeably swelled as it made its way through the estate where the children’s hostel is situated.

“While we stopped the march reaching the gates of the centre for unaccompanied asylum-seeker children and adolescents, the grievances of those on the Bysing Wood estate who joined the march remain.

“The wider labour movement must provide a clear narrative and effective solution to the sense of unfairness that working-class people feel. Years of austerity have trashed the public realm and made life more precarious, and Labour’s first year in government has left them indistinguishable from the last 14 years of Conservative rule.

“When the protests recede, our task is to reach into those communities, with a unifying message that can move the whole working-class forward, and isolate the poison of the far-right.”

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.