The far right marched through my small market town this weekend. Like many places, flags have appeared on lamp posts. Sat at the traffic lights, men, and I only saw men, beeped their horns – at each other?  Or at the flags? 

They gathered, wrapped in their England flags, their Draig Goch, their Union Jacks full of swagger and bile, while half as many turned out to protest against fascism, for love not hate.

I didn’t really want to go to the demo. Always politically active as a young woman, I’m older now.  Unmasked, I don’t really like crowds or noise, and using a wheelchair, I felt more vulnerable. But I went by myself anyway, because I knew I should.

Walking into our small market town, dissected by police barriers and political lines, felt surreal, almost unrecognisable. The far right gathered in front of the Remembrance gates, the red poppies marking the wars that their grandfathers fought to defeat the fascists.

Tightly packed in, shouting to ‘Get rid of Starmer’ (of which I could agree, but more of that later), I found it almost physically painful to see faces I recognised amongst the jeering crowd. The woman who, like me, picks up litter in her close, another who remembers my kids. The guy who trains his dog in the park, the man who always stops to give my dog a treat, the woman who works in the local shop. I wondered how these seemingly ordinary people could be standing shoulder to shoulder with the far right.

Bought almost to tears, seeing those I call neighbours, my community, standing with others full of hate, my heart broke. There seemed to me a clear class divide in the protestors on either side of the barrier, a divide I am not sure how to breach.

The thing is, we want many of the same things. A properly funded NHS, a GP appointment when we are sick, access to decent, affordable local housing, an end to the cost-of-living crisis, and imagine having access to a dentist.  But while they blame migrants for their woes, I, like others, argue that it’s not migrants that are the problem, but all the tax-avoiding millionaires.

It wasn’t migrants that caused the banking crisis in 2008.  It wasn’t migrants’ legal or ‘illegal’ that caused the NHS to be on its knees. It wasn’t migrants that caused energy prices to spike, or zero-hour contracts, or cuts to local services, or insecure tenancies.  That was the ideology of the Right.

We’ve been in austerity for 17 years. We’ve seen our standard of living eroded, our public services, our schools, our social care, and our local housing decimated. Not by migrants but by the ideology of those elected to power, the Tories. And the Labour government are not doing enough to challenge this.

Our culture, our way of life, is being undermined, but not by migrants and refugees, who have always only added to our communities, but by those who want to ferment hate and dissent for their own political and economic gains.

I understand why people are angry, but they are being misled to be angry at the wrong people.

It was hard to see this small Welsh market town so divided, especially following the food festival the weekend before.  Crowds gathered to eat Mexican street food, local curries, Japanese dumplings, or Caribbean goat curry, watching cooking demonstrations of Syrian food or crepes from the French town twinned with our own.  All while listening to local bands and world choirs.

At the protest, it was hard to see some of the same faces twisted in hate,  fear in others.  It was hard to see the absence of so many local community groups, seemingly silent on the rise of anti-immigration rhetoric. Where were the local churches that have worked so hard to welcome refugees to our town? Where were the civic groups?

In the coming months, we need to all stand up and be counted if we want to ‘take our country back,’ not from migrants, who are not the problem, but from the far-right and the ultra-rich who would see most of us left in the dirt.