To be honest I feel a bit dirty this morning, and I don’t just mean that I need a shower. Yesterday was one of those days which will probably stay in my memory for quite some time, but not in a good way: it’s fair to say it was a big eye opener. A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me to go with him to some kind of nationalist march in central London, involving Tommy Robinson. Of course, I wasn’t at all sure about it – I vehemently oppose nationalism in all it’s acrid forms. Yet my mate seemed to really want me to come, using the arguments that it would open my eyes to other ways of thinking, and that if I didn’t come I would be being narrow-minded.

So I went with him, catching the train yesterday morning from Kidbrooke to Victoria. I almost instantly regretted it. As soon as we left the train station, we walked into a crowd of nationalists, waving flags and shouting all sorts of vile crap of the kind I usually detest. I wouldn’t say there was that many of them – two hundred or so – but it was enough to wind me up. At first I tried to stay calm, but after about twenty minutes I felt ready to argue. My mate realised this and took me back into the station, giving me time to calm down. Truth be told, part of me really wanted to come home; yet another part of me – the anthropologist in me – was curious to see what would happen and what made the marchers tick.

A few minutes later we went back out. The crowd had grown quite significantly, but I still wouldn’t call it huge. Frankly, I’ve been to bigger disability rights protests. Not that I want to play into stereotypes, but it was clear that this march would be made up of a certain type of people: mostly elderly, very working class; the type of people who read the Sun, Mail or Express and accept their baseless spewings without question. I could tell from the way they spoke and the words they used that these were the type of people whom the education system and welfare state had left behind. Nonetheless, although a few were a bit loud, the people around me seemed peaceful and kindly, if extremely misguided.

The march soon got going. I followed, staying close to my mate. Frankly my biggest concern was that my presence there would be seen as some kind of support: I still felt extremely uncomfortable with some of what I was hearing the people around me say, and part of me begged to be let loose and tell these idiots to shut the fuck up. Yet mostly out of respect for my friend I told myself to keep quiet and stay calm, looking at it as kind of an exercise in tolerance. After all, the last thing I wanted to do was cause some sort of incident or get beaten up. Thus I kept telling myself that I didn’t agree with what those around me were saying, but I would defend their right to say it.

The march didn’t seem to last very long, finishing on college green outside the Houses of Parliament. By my reckoning there weren’t very many people there: my mate boasted there were about a quarter of a million, but I would say it was five thousand at most. Upon the green, surrounded by statues of great people like Mandela, Lincoln and Churchill, a screen and stage had been set up, from which various right wing figures soon began to speak. I did my best to listen, but from where we were sat it wasn’t easy. From what I could make out, though, tract of bile after tract of bile was being spouted, each as unsubstantiated and baseless as the last.

However, what was soon obvious about what the crowd was being shown was how much it boiled down to paranoia and feelings of victimisation: the world, the mainstream, the elites or whatever were out to get them, and they were being silenced for telling the truth. For instance, one video screened alleged that the UK had some sort of two tier police system, in which right-wing activists were being arrested and silenced while islamic protesters were allowed to go free. The film itself was barely more than a set of loosely linked news clips accompanied by some ominous, melodramatic music, and not one iota of real evidence was offered to back up the preposterous claim; yet the crowd around me seemed to lap it up, yelling and clapping like seals in a zoo.

The most ridiculous, laughable part was yet to come, though. When Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, began to speak, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Donald Trump. I have never heard a more pitiful, wretched, self-pitying stream of nonsense. It was frankly laughable that anyone was listening to the wanker! The world was out to get him, and he was being silenced; but he was the one fighting to protect British rights and culture. Alongside that there was all kinds of Islamophobic idiocy about muslims engaging in child abuse and rape, although to be fair I couldn’t really make that part out. Either way, it staggered me that anyone was listening to the barely literate moron, not least because he was claiming to be silenced while speaking from a stage outside parliament. He was playing upon the fears and naivite of the people in front of him to draw attention to himself, trying to become some kind of cult hero just like Trump does. It would have struck any thinking person as either laughable or sickening.

Mercifully we didn’t stay until the end. I think we had both had enough and I needed a beer more than at any other time in my life. A quick pint in a nearby LGBTQ-friendly pub was enough to steady my nerves, and then we were on the train home. The afternoon had been an eye-opener: it had, it must be said, simply confirmed and entrenched many of the ideas I had already about the political far right. It is reactionary, crude and unthinking, reliant on baseless notions of oppression, as well as people’s fears of things they may not understand, to perpetuate itself. People are being used and manipulated by charlatans like Robinson, and they don’t even realise it. Notions like patriotism are being used and usurped in order to set one community against another in a way which will only make the current cultural crisis even more dangerous.

On the whole I’m glad I went yesterday; I learned a great deal, and, as I say, it was a real eye-opener. Yet it was also a real effort to stay calm among so many fools and thugs, so I don’t think I’ll ever go to anything like it again.