Bret who works in waste management

150,000 supporters of Tommy Robinson gathered in London on Saturday 13th. I took the train back from London to Glasgow that evening. A raucous multi-carriage debate ensued between drunken Tommy Robinson supporters and all sorts of other people who variously agreed and disagreed with what they were saying, and others who didn't know what to think. The journey's been on my mind since. I've had plenty of conversations with people who are attracted to the popular far right and they're always so bloody complicated. So too is their dynamic relationship to the many people around them which reproduces and develops their social and political movement.

These rough notes (poorly organised) try to partially record observations of people, and my attempts to discuss quite plainly my views, in a situation of relative captivity over five hours. The mood was excited and intense, sometimes ambiently boorish but never violent, and surprisingly thoughtful and mutually puzzled around the two tables that furnished the scene.

I got involved in a conversation between a Glaswegian bloke called Bret (mid-twenties) who spent much of the train ride stood up in the aisle talking animatedly with three mid-50s Scottish ladies: Linda (thought Bret was a hypocrite because asylum seeking is legitimate — what about if your kid needed to escape to safety?), Charlotte (anxious, uncertain, scared and puzzled, easily swayed by the migrant blame game and equally swayed by basic anticapitalist arguments) and Frances (quiet, kept to herself, disagreed with Bret, a nurse who's seen it all).

Bret had a lovely day out. He was very excited and seemed to have met a lot of new pals at the rally, who he bumped into on the train. Bret's background is fuzzy at the beginning, but clarifies towards the end of the trip. He's a big lad. Louis-Vitton purse which he brought to London—he's not skint. He visits Dubai every year for a holiday. He gets the idea that debt enables long-term investment. He'd probably call himself working class.

Sat beside me was John, a Carlisle man who kept to himself for most of the trip but later philosophised that Keir Starmer had fucked it by trying to triangulate Labour around people he'd realistically never win over from Reform. He seemed deeply worried when we spoke, but philosophical in his approach to it. You wouldn't tell from his demeanour. He preferred to maintain an aura of distracted gaiety. After all, his football team had won their match and he had beers to drink.

Bret turned out to be pro-Palestine, against the genocide, like his girlfriend. How can you slaughter so many people? It's disproportionate. And besides, October 7th wasn't the start of it—it's been going on for years. But he can't stand Hamas, because they're homophobic and islamist. For his money, we shouldn't be arming Israel, or Ukraine, or anyone else. Why are we funding wars? They can take care of themselves. Bret refers to 'the Jews' a fair bit, but when I distinguish anti-zionism and anti-semitism, he apologises and agrees: it's Israel, not 'the Jews.'

He's an evangelical Christian, went through something called the "Alpha Course" which sounds like it was bible camp. Sunday at church keeps him from drinking, something he used to do way too much of. His faith means he believes in charity, but also in absolute moral good and evil: this is an absolute fact. Satan is a deceiver, so you can't trust your senses. Better to trust scripture and what your leaders tell you. He thinks Charlie Kirk was a preacher of the truth. He thinks Tommy Robinson has given people the confidence to speak up about what's wrong in this country. He thinks Christianity is under attack. Linda, Frances and Charlotte agree that our traditions are under threat, although from what exactly they don't say, and I don't broach. He thinks one of his best friends is gay, but closested. He wishes his friend would come out. He thinks being gay is basically unnatural, a sin. He would hate his daughter to be gay. Frances, Linda and Charlotte agree, but they think he's a coward for not having the conversation.

He feels passionately opposed to prejudice against someone's skin colour. He has friends who aren't white.

But he believes migrants get everything in this country. Linda, Charlotte and Frances nod. Charlotte asks why all her money go to migrants? She pays so much in taxes. Where does it all go if not to them? I suggested maybe we shouldn't assume that all migrants are asylum seekers, pointed out that asylum seekers aren't allowed to work by the British state, and are kept segregated in publicly funded accommodation, which makes it easy to blame them instead of government policy for resource allocation issues. Linda, Frances and Charlotte were open to this point. I suggest that homelessness is a crisis in itself—one that asylum seekers share in. Bret and this other guy can't believe that: only British people, mainly veterans, are homeless. But the others seem open to joining these dots. Separately, they're shocked to discover that migrants pay an NHS surcharge amounting to thousands of pounds over 5-10 years.

We discuss how simple stories of blame allow our economic system to go un-challenged. They reflected that you never hear that in the media or from politicians. None of them knew who the Murdochs were, or that they owned and ran half the newspapers, and Sky, and talkSport. They were shocked. All of them agree that billionaires are ruining this country, and that they use simple headlines and stories to divide and conquer the working class. Everyone agreed that it felt impossible to figure out what is true and false anymore, especially online. Bret kept saying that the British state spends £40bn on the refugee system per year. When I point out that's close to the annual budget of the entire Ministry of Defence, he stops talking about it and other people look at him with befuddlement. (The actual figure is around £3-5bn per year, about 0.4% of the £1.2tn state budget). Not that the game of statistical facts and fictions is really going to win any of this.

When Bret started blaming asylum seekers for terrorising his daughter, everyone ponders quietly... Charlotte tells me she has anxiety issues, and when she hears about all this she gets so panicked she doesn't know what else to think other than kick them out. A viciousness animates her in these moments, but in others she seems relieved to have recourse to some less brutal solution. I suggest it sounds like he's worried about his daughter's safety in general, to which people agree that's not nice, and then I wonder out loud about the prevalence of sexual violence and domestic abuse in the country—the society his daughter lives in. The three women nod: that's not a migrant problem. (Everyone thinks the cops are knob-heads.)

Side-bar: they ask me whether I'd take the vaccine. I explain that I saw what coronavirus did to a friend of mine early on in 2020, and how I have caring responsibilities for elder family who are more prone to respiratory issues, so I decided to take the vaccine as a matter of responsibility to others, even if the vaccine seemed rushed and was produced by a for-profit multinational pharmaceutical complex with no democratic roots in the community. People accepted it's complicated. When I lamented how a good friend contracted long covid and has been out of action for ages, others piped up with similar stories. Bret had never heard of long covid, and seemed shocked.

The problem of population growth keeps coming up. I mention a truth that Melenchon depends on in his recent book: that the global population has rocketed from 1bn to 8bn in the past hundred years—do you think there's just more people in Britain? People seem amenable to the point. Every time they talk about migrants taking all our houses, I mention how the rent has tripled in Glasgow in the past few years, especially after the Scottish rent cap was lifted post-lockdown, when landlords decided they wanted more money because why not? I think out loud about how social housing stopped being built when Thatcher came to power, and how we've lived through 15 years of austerity after the credit crunch and now we're in a cost of living crisis and there was that crazy inflation, remember? Everyone feels the same about the economic situation: it's all gone to shit. Everyone's attracted to the idea of radical change.

But what's the solution then!?!?! Says Charlotte. I suggest a resumption of the rent cap and a wealth tax on property. She's never heard of that latter suggestion before. But the conversation drifts so easily back to the problem of migrants, because kicking them out sounds achievable and they have no idea how else to sort out this sorry mess. (I find this a hard question to answer without starting to feel like a politician selling policies, like a partisan of Your Party. None of them has ever heard of Your Party. They have no opinions on the matter. It frustrates me that there's not a platform with a coherent set of social, political and economic demands. And the idea of a simple manifesto that doesn't deal with the depth of the crisis people are feeling, and their disillusionment with the system, makes me desperately worried about Your Party pursuing a standard, liberal, reformist electoralist strategy.)

I suggest as a basic point, at regular intervals, that blaming and sacrificing some people, and then another group of people, and another, and kicking people out into the street, isn't a principled approach to life: it's juvenile and bullying, not adult problem-solving. I say it like that because people have been talking for hours about how they're scared, disoriented, repeating messages that other people have said to them, and they don't know what to do: they sound like panicking children. So I say it like that to, just maybe, elicit in people the idea or the sense that they have the ability to approach this whole thing with a bit more depth and emotional and practical intelligence: that they could draw on their basic principles to work together to figure out what to do, despite all the panic that everyone evidently feels when they think about the big picture. I continue workshopping a line about how trading off one of your principles for another is not how you get the radical change you need when you're on the edge of a cliff. In this way I feel like I'm preaching a bit—not repetitively or forcefully, but in the sense of speaking to the heart rather than the head, in a way that feels alien to contemporary British leftist discourse, with perhaps the exception of priestly figures like Corbyn—but if I am, what exactly is the message? Trust yourself, don't abandon your principles and work together to meet your needs rather than blame your neighbours doesn't feel to me like a ridiculous message to share. People on the train seem to feel affirmed by the suggestion—in a sense, even palpably relieved. When the three ladies get off, we share big hugs. Anyway, evidently not everyone shares Bret's post-alcoholic evangelical morality-ideology, even if they are swayed by the scaremongering and blame-mongering lines he repeats.

By the end of the train journey it gradually emerged that Bret's had family loans and manages a waste management company on behalf of some family relation, employer of four staff, extended family owns a few houses. You could say Bret is a slightly wealthy petit-bourgeois agitator. His class position puts him in a position to develop an idealist ideology (holy good and evil) that is apologetic for the mode of production and dismissive of materialist critiques of political economy. Maybe I could've done a better job of objectifying him as "one of them." He wasn't going to change his mind, less so his economic position. But I think there was value to discussing with him as part of the wider group, because it was a chance to engage with everyone else.

I wonder if the three ladies have people in their lives who regularly agitate them in another direction: to stick to their guns. Or will they will slowly adopt far right views and incorporate new relationships, beliefs and life decisions around them? This prospect makes me scared, because you can see how quickly people latch on. I wonder if basic messages of working class solidarity, that integrate the experience of the oppressed, are sorely sorely lacking from the public sphere and how we can rapidly redirect the tide through a new, sustained, pervasive, collective voice.