Protest

I was at the protest in Canterbury on the 20th September 2025. I've called it 'the protest' as the various labels applied to it so far each have their own flaws and limitations and I may seem either more heroic or psychotic depending on which I choose.

The facts are this: there is a building in Canterbury that currently houses unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC). I had no idea it was there until I read news about the protest being announced, it's a fairly small building that apparently used to be a care home and is in a fairly remote part of the city down an unassuming street. A protest was organised in which people were going to meet in central Canterbury and then march to the building to protest outside it. This protest has been called an anti-immigration protest, or a far-right march, or a patriotic march, and the descriptors levelled at it from opponents and supporters on the day might lead to it being characterised as a fascist march, or a stop-the-boats march.

A counter-protest to this march was also planned. You will easily guess which protest the liberal arts-graduate author of this website joined. This has proved a little more difficult to describe, with the more general 'a counter protest' seeming to be the most successful at capturing the purpose without being misrepresentative. Still, I don't think it would be misrepresenting the views of those present to say that some might have described it as an anti-racism protest, or an anti-fascist protest, or an anti-far-right protest. Publications have described the counter-protestors as 'left-wing counter demonstrators' and, in one inexplicable case in the Kent Online article that since seems to have been amended, as the 'pro-asylum seeker' side (I don't think anybody is necessarily 'pro' asylum seekers, ideally nobody would ever be displaced and need to seek asylum in the first place, so nobody thinks creating more asylum seekers is a good or even a sensical idea, for example).

You get the idea. The difficulty here is that many of these labels do nothing to provide any insights or clarity into the situation that might make it possible to do anything useful about it. 'Anti-immigration' march allows people to feel that the people standing opposite them are therefore the pro-immigration side, and since they're there because they feel immigration is a bad thing, this cements their view that the opposition are enemies trying to make their country a worse place who need to be defeated. 'Anti-far-right march' doesn't stick because a lot of people on that side, as this article helped me understand, believe themselves to be apolitical and were only inspired to attend by a feeling of solidarity with people who share concerns about what they believe to be a genuine and frustratingly neglected issue.

This is not to legitimise the reasons people are drawn to 'that' side, but rather to do the difficult thing of trying to the difficult thing of understanding why in the hope that some people can be drawn back. Appeasement has shown to be a naïve means of trying to defang the titans of the so-called far-right, ('I feel as if I have been cheated at cards!'), but it's not too flat-whitish to expect that dialogue and understanding could have an appropriate place in a toolset that also includes more historically effective methods where necessary. The reality is that some people will experience swift backlash to what to them was an innocent and perfectly proportional expression of their dissatisfaction and become vindicated and pushed further into the tribe that seems to treat them with understanding rather than hostility.

An incomplete list of things I heard or saw in no particular order:

• A 'lefty scum off our streets' chant.

• A 'Nazi scum off our streets' chant.

• A young girl sharing a bag of MAOAMS with the crowd.

• Parents with babies.

• A car driving directly at the crowd.

• A 'let them through' chant for the car.

• The leader of Canterbury City Council.

• A 'deport them all' flag.

• England flags, 'no to racism' flags, Union Jacks, Palestinian flags.

• Someone I went to school with.

• People from my home town.

• People I work with.

• A song sung through a PA.

• Maybe my aunty?

• An Amazon delivery driver.

• Dogs that were bizarrely chill and well-behaved.

• Distaste for Keir Starmer.

(Can you guess which is which?)

Some possible means of improvement for making the pushback against a hypothetical far-right surge more effective:

• The absence of England flags and Union Jacks on the side I was on became conspicuous pretty quickly. That absence, in light of the sea of flags that I saw across the divide, allowed the other side to make a convincing case to themselves and hypothetical undecided watchers that they were the 'pro' England or Britain side, while we were the 'anti' by implication. This seems like handing them a rhetorical victory unopposed. Future counter-protests of this kind might opt more for a spirit of 'reclaiming' the flag and making a case for the forever nebulous and vague 'British values' in fact being what said side is there to represent (which I happen to believe they are—being forward-thinking and willing to do the right thing is what I associate with my version of England). The imprecision of 'British values' is precisely what makes them right there for the taking. (I also gathered that there is some genuine misunderstanding about reasons for brandishing the Palestinian flag with some people apparently confused about why an English person would choose to brandish it over their 'own', so perhaps )

• I personally wouldn't have gone with the 'Nazi scum off our streets' chant that occasionally arose, largely for the fairly uncontroversial reason that many, or most, or maybe all of the people on the other side were not Nazis. I can understand the reasoning—the descent into Nazism happened gradually and could happen anywhere again, so you want people to feel the shame and repulsion that they should feel for anything remotely adjacent to it as a deterrent. We could have a constructive discussion, though, about whether using the word too freely weakens it. When people hear themselves called Nazis too often and don't recognise themselves as such, the word in their mind starts to become a slur that angry politically-correct people level at people they disagree with, and they stop listening. Some people might even not be listening at a point down the line where their views legitimately start to drift into Nazi-adjacent territory. Ideally, you'd carefully and dispassionately highlight the parallels between the insular, paranoid and purity and in-group obsessed iteration of our right-wingers with the developmental-stage versions of various hateful and genocidal regimes throughout history without using the word and try to make them see that it's in their interest to be concerned the end point of such thinking, although you obviously can't do that in a crowd at a protest.

The biggest thought I had while standing in the crowd was that we could really do with is having a chat with each other. Protest is a kind of last resort and I think the counter-protest was overall a force for good given that the march on the asylum centre was going to happen, but I don't, and nor I suppose did anybody else present, believe that anyone's mind was changed or could ever be changed about anything by the events on the day. Very often, the things people complain about are the not the things they're actually angry about, and a bit of dialogue would probably reveal that we're all angry about the same things but choose to blame different people, and that our differences are not as stark as we believe. A lot of the rage directed at us the result of simple misunderstandings and misrepresentations that could quite easily be cleared up. We could all do with reading our Wittgenstein instead to figure out how we can communicate even a little bit more constructively before things reach this point.

---

It was important for me to be there both to contribute to the strong visual and physical demonstration of the fact that this branch of extremism is a minority view in this country (I think that people on these marches should experience feeling themselves to be outnumbered so that they remember this) and to be counted among the counter-protestors as a rejection of the defaultism that suggests that being white and working-class means that Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage and various internet characters speak for you.

The absurdity of the whole thing was not lost on me, though. Anybody from either side could pass each other on the street and not realise they were supposed to be mortal enemies, and we might yet just as easily meet in the pub and find that it's easier for us to get along than it is to hate each other. I wondered to what extent protests are a kind of theatre that some people engage in for the thrill of being part of a tribe or herd, and whether there is a bit of the banal cordiality that used to exist between rivals during downtime in football hooliganism, for example (the poor Amazon driver who interrupted the commotion to get to a house on the other side certainly forced us to break the fourth wall for a second). People on the other side seemed to be having a lot of fun at times, so maybe these marches fulfil some kind of need that's no longer met otherwise in modern English life.

There was an almost physical sensation of passing through some kind of membrane on the way out. I took this photo from about ten metres, where it already took on the feeling of happening 'somewhere else'.

The first thing I saw after turning the corner out of this street was a lady walking her dog, and everything was peaceful and quiet. While we were engaged in a visceral life-or-death battle for the fate of the country while in the crowd, normal life had carried on for everybody else, most of whom were probably not even aware that this was happening. I went home for a quick change and while walking into town to go to Café Nero (okay the lefty scum charge is getting a bit harder to dispute) I passed one of the more prominent protestors from the other side, still draped in his England flag, who either didn't recognise me or extended me the gentlemanly courtesy of understanding the inappropriateness of hating me outside the arena of the protest. Perhaps this is the reminder that our differences are illusory and exist only in a cartoonishly binary hyperreality that some people are profiting from that it would pay not to ignore.

Also, right after I took that photo, a man in a mobility scooter approached me and asked me what was going on. I explained the left-wing version of what was happening, and he said, 'oh fuck all that, I'm right-wing'. I thought it was funny that he assumed I was right-wing too, and I took the liberty of congratulating myself for being able to laugh at it despite the tribalism I had been mainlining all morning a few metres away. I even helped him get through the crowd.

I'm nervous of crowds and groups in general because I don't like having my capacity to dissent taken away. I want to do what I think is right, and groups almost inevitably converge on homogeneity of opinion that can make it difficult to retain your individuality. I closed my half-completed application to become a Labour party member during the early Corbyn mania when I discovered that I was being asked to make a 'lifelong pledge' to the party (absolutely not!!). I hope I'm not seeming to pander to the far-right here in my criticisms, but rather to think about what might be corrected in behaviour and strategy that has patently failed to prevent so many people drifting or being recruited into what for convenience we call the far-right. Group cooperation remains the only way of achieving anything worthwhile.

---

Finally, I have to say that the police were pretty good indeed on the day. They kept everybody safe and pretty much stayed out of the protest itself, nobody was agitated or threatened, and as far as I know everybody went home back to their lives at the end. They were pretty chilled before it started (joking and smiling with people and stuff actually) which probably played a part in letting people know that it was safe to stay. Them seeming to know that it was going to be a straightforward day put me at ease, at least. We'll see how committed I am to my principles in the future when there is a protest with a good chance that I'll get my head kicked in.