How can so many be racists?

Working on the day of Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally (16 May) is naturally going to bring some politics to the fore among co-workers. It’s not hard to kick up conversation when every trainload brings a few dozen boisterous customers draped in union jacks and St George flags, many of them unpleasant to deal with from a day of drinking. Some coworkers know that I was at a counter-protest in Trafalgar Square earlier in the day, and are curious to hear how it went.

With a few exceptions, it’s a widely held view that the march is racist, and should be opposed. The question of actually opposing it themselves doesn’t occur to most — everyday life provides enough distraction to leave that to someone else.

H asks for my opinion on the UTK attendees a few days later. “So what, are they just all racists then?” He finds the scale of it somewhat hard to wrap his head around. The short answer is “yes”, but, stood together for three hours on the Tube station, you have time for a longer answer too. Racism is the easy answer to people’s lives getting harder. For lack of a better option, they listen to figureheads like Farage, whose racist bilge is wrong, but easy to swallow.

Explaining these origins doesn’t make the racist march any nicer to contemplate. But knowing the root cause is the first step to fighting back, and workplaces across the country will need to see far more conversations like this if we want the workers’ movement to beat the racists.