Encountering the fascists outside Waterloo

It's clear now that we are in a battle of terrible proportions.

I arrived at Waterloo at the wrong time yesterday. Outside the station were the fascists. A small army of them, nearly every one holding a flag they do not understand and a symbol they do not deserve to stand under. A great swell of entitlement, and hatred, and cultivated victimhood.

There was no indication, as the train rumbled into London, that anything unusual was happening. Usually, the arrival back is joyous. I savour that initial rush of the city, the first encounter with it when you've been away. The mass of people, the impossible variation, as if you're slipping back into the bloodstream of humanity itself. On a sunny Saturday, the streets of the South Bank will be full of kids playing, couples strolling, families laughing, people from all over the world who have made London their home, or are visiting it. The South Bank is one of London's triumphs, effortlessly convivial and broad-church, a kind of permanent funfair where culture and sociability take precedence over retail.

My partner and I were heading in different directions after we reached the station. She had to go home, I had to go to a meeting. She took the Tube from the station before we even knew the fascists were there. I am very grateful for that. She is a brown woman. The next hour would have been difficult if she had been there. It could have been dangerous.

And so even then, within moments, they had done something which can never be forgiven. They had introduced a notion of racial awareness. They had made brown people feel unsafe. They had made the people who love them think in terms of personal security. How would you protect them from a crowd? Is there an easy escape route? Which streets are least likely to have assailants on them? These are ideas that would have seemed absurd on any other Saturday on the South Bank, but they became pertinent immediately once the fascists arrived.

Once you left the station, they were everywhere, surrounding Waterloo like an army. There was no way to avoid them. I had to walk among them - in the graffiti tunnel, through the terraced side streets near the station, along South Bank, across Waterloo Bridge and up to the Strand, where they finally started to thin out.

Most of the time I was walking in the same direction as them. I started doing the silliest things. Whenever I saw a non-white person walking in the other direction I would smile at them, as if to say - what? - don't worry, here's a friendly face? We're not all like this? Look into my eyes to see my silent solidarity? Absurd. Patronising.

There were people you would not expect. A respectable-looking father walked hand in hand with his wife and son, all of them wearing Union Jacks like capes. A couple of sweet looking older women, perhaps in their 70s, wore T-shirts that emblazoned with ‘Britain First’, a fascist hate group. A gang of three young women who looked like they should be going out to get pissed in Newcastle were instead roaming a far-right march arguing with each other about Israel.

Perhaps a quarter of the crowd was composed of people like this. Everyone else was a young lairy white guy. You know this guy. You have seen him a million times. You grew up with him. He is in every English town and city: young, pissed-up, loud, bristling with bitter energy. Most of the time he'll grow up to make a perfectly average father and husband, the aggression in him fossilising into suburban defeat. But he's currently in his 20s, at the peak of his nonsense. He's quiet on his own but he's loud in a crowd. He's at the football, he's in the pub, he's marching down the street at 2am shouting 'fuck off' to someone under a streetlight. He is a transparent man. When you peer at him, you can see underneath the skin to the insecurities within. You can watch him struggle and fail to process his feelings, then revert to anger instead. You know him. You've seen him a million times.

The beauty of South Bank was gone. Something rich had become monotonous. Skin colour had simply disappeared. Suddenly, everyone was white. But every other kind of diversity had gone too - the skaters in the underpass, the film nerds at the BFI, the people strolling through the book market under Waterloo Bridge, the groups of young people taking photos of themselves at the food trucks. All that joy and mixture gone, replaced by something angry and white and entitled. Something uniform and plain.

Thank God she's not here, I thought. Thank God she's not with me.

I made it to the meeting. When it was done, a few of the people attending it went to the pub. We chatted about how people were getting home. Most of the people there were from out of town. They expected some of the people attending the march to be on their train. We talked about how we would deal with it. But we did not mention the fact that we were not all in the same boat.

Anyone who was not white had more to fear than those who were. They could not merge with the crowd, as I had done. They could not spend their time castigating themselves for smiling at strangers. They would be in danger, wondering if the eye of this crowd would turn on them. Wondering if social norms had collapsed so completely that they might be a risk of assault even on a train in daylight.

This is how white supremacy works. This is what racism entails. It finds the things in us we thought irrelevant and brings them uppermost to mind. It creates a climate of fear that is not equally distributed, because it is not meant to be. It spreads a beacon which serves to divide simply by virtue of being heard. It is grounded in division and hate at its most elemental level.

It's clear now that we are in a battle of terrible proportions. They have numbers. They have the support of the richest man in the world and the information network he owns, which is relied on by politicians and journalists. They have the tacit support of the right-wing press and can easily spread their message through broadcast media coverage. Next week, the US president, who they know to share their values, will be treated with honour by the British state. They are in their pomp.

Over the months and years to come, we will have to fight for our values like never before. That means proudly making the case for diversity and openness. It means that we must make that case without embarrassment or apology, without equivocating or whimpering about how we’re metropolitan elitists for doing so. The government is unwilling to do it, so it will be up to us to do it instead - whether we are on the right or left or centre, whether we are naturally activist or rather resigned, regardless of our temperament or inclination. But it will also mean that we stand with those who would be targeted. Thinking practically, speaking openly, ensuring they are safe and protected. It will be an exercise in solidarity. And it is through that solidarity that we will show our values and the failure of racism.

In the years to come, we will all be judged by how we behaved in this period, when the beast woke from its slumbers. Whether we stood up and were counted or hid in the shadows so that its gaze would pass over us.

Britain is not a racist country. The people on that march do not understand the flag they wave or what it represents. Eventually, it will defeat them.