Few of the 150 000 people who took part in last weekend’s far right march will have recognised Johnny Adair in the crowd. The Royal Ulster Constabulary estimated that he was involved in about forty sectarian murders of Catholics. He says, and there is no reason to disbelieve him, that he was often acting on information provided by British soldiers. Tommy Robinson knows him well, having interviewed Adair for his podcast.

Fewer still will have heard of Mark Sinclair, a convicted loyalist terrorist bank robber who spent much of his ferry journey to the gathering racially abusing Chinese passengers. Nevertheless, Adair and Sinclair knew that they would be with people who largely shared their world view.

Unsurprisingly genocide indulgent right wingers like Melanie Philips writes of the crowd “The vast majority of people at that rally were decent types who simply want an end to the mass immigration which threatens to transform Britain for the worse.” For Peter Mandelson’s mate Trevor Philips “These are the people you meet in a country pub with their dogs, or in a queue for drinks at half-time.” It does not cross their minds that people who are kind to their mothers, help their neighbours, drink beer and watch football can also be part of a mass movement which is led by the closest thing British politics has to a criminal, fascist demagogue. I offer my neighbour as an example.

Melanie Philips correctly identifies hostility to immigration as the principal motivator for most of the people Robinson got onto the streets. This is ironic. Her view is that the Palestinians are not a people, and Israel has the right to displace them by mass murder in order that anyone of Jewish heritage can take their land. Such are the logical fallacies of colonial racism.

Those beer drinking football fans have been won over to a programme of anti-migrant racism, xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia and hyper-masculinity. Its most common expressions at the moment are territory marking flag displays and protests against migrants which display an intent to commit serious violence if the opportunity allows.

The original sin of the British labour movement is that it never once offered an internationalist alternative to patriotism, monarchy, nationalism or even imperialism. Individuals and small groups within it did, but the mainstream of the unions and the Labour Party have always embraced these anti-working class ideologies. So, while until about ten or fifteen years ago the consensus was that virtually the entirety of British society and tacitly or explicitly adopted multiculturalism and that overt racism was a relatively marginal thing, it is now common for militantly xenophobic demonstrations to happen in Britain. This shift was enabled by Brexit. As the saying at the time went, “not everyone who supports Brexit is a racist, but every racist supports Brexit.”

The right has been conducting this culture war vigorously. Films like Top Gun are at one end of a spectrum that ranges from GB News, podcasters, the Daily Telegraph and Tik Tok. Its clear aim is to eradicate feminist, socialist and progressive ideas in society. The Trump regime doesn’t even bother to hide that fact anymore.

Anti-migrant views are the hallmark of racism all across Europe. They are now always expressed in terms of shortages of housing, hospital places, “undocumented men” etc. Yielding to this way of thinking is one result of not understanding what political parties are for. Yes, they exist to win elections, but they also exist to change the way people think about things.

One of the positive aspects of the people around Your Party and the Greens’ new leadership is that they look like they are not willing to wrap themselves in the union jack. Anyone who does that will always be running behind Tommy Robinson, Farage, Labour and the Tories when it comes to jingoistic nationalism. It’s a game socialists mustn’t play, not just because it can’t be won, but because it’s fundamentally anti-working class.