Often on a Friday evening, we order a curry from our local “Indian” takeaway. They deliver, but it is easier and quicker for me to walk round and collect, and, anyway, I enjoy chatting to the guy behind the counter. He’s a Man United fan, I’m Liverpool, so we have some banter with a bit of an edge to it. Well, we started on the football, and he noted the lack of summer signings by my team, but we quickly got on to the news: “It’s been a horrible week”. And it certainly has, with race riots and anti-Muslim pogroms in various British cities, egged on by right-wing pundits and politicians “just asking questions” in the context of inflammatory disinformation and with Elon Musk making ignorant predictions of civil war while retweeting Islamophobes.

My interlocutor, born and bred in the UK, told me that it was the first time he had felt uncomfortable and anxious in this country and that many “ethnics” as he referred to people like himself, had chosen to work from home on Wednesday rather than risk being caught on the street. But he told me he’d left work early, just to be safe (thereby telling me that he works two jobs). But he told me, also, that he was encouraged and felt better, thanks to the massive counter-demonstrations in Bristol, Brighton, Newcastle, Walthamstow that night, which told him that the far right are a minority and that most people oppose them and which seem to have stemmed the violence, for now. On the other hand, he said, it was one thing to live in a diverse and left-leaning city like Bristol and quite another to be in Hartlepool or Sunderland where the “ethnics” are isolated and heavily outnumbered by their white compatriots and, consequently, feel more scared and vulnerable. (We then went on to discuss the overthrow of the Bangladesh government, of which he approved.)

The reason I’m bringing this up is because of the failures of imagination on the part of the the new Labour government, who are certainly the secondary target of far-right violence. Making the round of the studios yesterday, the Paymaster General, Nick Thomas-Symonds, urged people not to join counter-demonstrations, because the police were under strain and should be left to do their job. (It was a message that actually differed from that of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who thanked the counter-demonstrators.) The government wants to put the far-right violence down by co-ordinated riot policing and then swift judgements and tough sentences: “the full force of the law” as every official spokesperson robotically repeats. Well, I’ve no objection to to the fascists and their criminal hangers on getting it good and hard. But that state response doesn’t answer to the need my friend has for him and his family to feel good about their fellow citizens and that’s actually the role that mass counter-protests against the fascists can play: we, a mixed, diverse crowd are the people and they, the violent racists, do not speak to to concerns of “ordinary people” as they claim. The police and the courts are no substitute for popular mobilisation in defeating the racists and assuring members of minorities that they too are a part of us. Labour leaders, managerial and authoritarian by temperament, just can’t see that. They’ll talk about “integration strategies”, for which meagre funding may be available, but the best integration comes from people feeling safe and confident in one another.