“Bellingham” is a familiar name I couldn’t put a face to, but the plain white of the shirt that bore it sent a shock of prejudice through me that I am partly ashamed of: shame at tending towards self-preservation and fear, which clashed with that part of me that believes we need good people supporting England.
Fright won last Saturday when I saw this England-shirted man in my assigned seat. I continued to an empty four-seater down the carriage.
From that vantage point, I overheard a conversation among caricatures. “Good day that today, a lot of people were scared to come out because of Charlie Kirk, but you can’t live the rest of your life fearing, can you?” Without having read the day’s news, I quickly gathered from their excitable “Tommy this, Tommy that,” what the day had held.
An aside – as I was writing, a man attempted to take his seat. The woman opposite me shouted – “Nope! My husband’s sitting there.” Having offered his ticket as proof, she permitted him to sit and made a brief exchange about him being Middle Eastern. After a classic awkward laugh, he asked if her husband was in the toilet, she responded “Oh no, he decided not to get on.” All that to say, there is something disquieting in the air.
A quick search confirmed that the Tommy Robinson brigade had been out in force. My impulse here–which labels the protestors right-wing thugs and assumes their complete separateness from my life–is to make it an easier pill to swallow. Listening on confirmed my prejudices, yet unsettled the ease with which I had sheltered in them. Thuggery became an insufficient explanation.
“When flying a flag in your own country is probably the most offensive thing you can do” was the decider–team “Unite the Kingdom” were sitting smug. As an older man disembarked, he congratulated the ringleader, “Never change that shirt, eh lad?” “The amount of people that have come up to me and said that today!” was his self-assuring reply. He felt like the voice of the country. We have failed to stand up and tell him that he does not speak for you or me. So, all he knows is this: his friends agree with him, his social media feed agrees with him, and strangers on the train only voice their support.
What my train compatriot reads consistently frames “the woke” as the dominant oppressor, and its opposite as the silenced majority. In his view, those like me who smiled politely when they got on, and kept silent in his wake, are probably in the second camp. As were the two ladies who appeared to have missed all the content of his chatter, they smiled when, over FaceTime, he promised his young daughter a goodnight kiss. All this affirms for him that the British public is more scared of woke backlash than they are of him.
At the protest itself, Robinson played into his curated image as a masculine protector of young British girls. Showcasing a clip of a documentary about immigrant grooming gangs, he racialised women’s fears for their safety. Apparently clueless that his 80 per cent white male audience, like those on my train, take singular pride in a dark machoism.
It is the same machismo that prevents them from seeing migrant men as victims in need of our help. Dinah Bentley, an anti-asylum hotels protestor, summed it up: “We are advised not to go to Somalia because it’s a dangerous country and yet we are accepting Somalians–Somalian men–here.” Where migrant women are victims of the danger they flee, the men are complicit–and worse, are attempting to bring the danger here.
This façade of protectionism attempts to make his violent speech against immigrant men undisputable. The pre-speech performance, which tore the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, and Palestinian flags in half–in a cruel confabulation of the three–epitomised this.
Last week, I mourned the arrests of eight hundred and ninety Palestine Action protestors. When I saw that just 25 people had been arrested, at the “Unite the Kingdom” protest I was furious. It’s a sad day when justice, for a second, appears as a call for more arrests. Unfortunately, now, when protesting peacefully makes you an easier target than protesting violently, the state is playing survival of the fittest. Yet, to label them as ‘thugs’ makes our job too easy.
Starmer’s condemnation of our flag being used as a symbol of violence was a spineless retort. “Well, no, Marie, I don’t think it’s right to be violent about it all.” This lets them assume the suffix, “But, I agree with the cause.” When that “Bellingham” shirt was embraced by his wife and kids, he believed he’d defended them that day. I merely sat stewing on what a braver person would have said. So, we must speak our own suffix–that we are ashamed of the bigotry they claim in our honour. Otherwise, we let them speak for us.
“Badge on England Shirt” by Steve A Johnson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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Conversations on a Train: An Encounter with the Far-Right
“Bellingham” is a familiar name I couldn’t put a face to, but the plain white of the shirt that bore it sent a shock of prejudice through me that I am partly ashamed of: shame at tending towards self-preservation and fear, which clashed with that part of me that believes we need good people supporting England.
Fright won last Saturday when I saw this England-shirted man in my assigned seat. I continued to an empty four-seater down the carriage.
From that vantage point, I overheard a conversation among caricatures. “Good day that today, a lot of people were scared to come out because of Charlie Kirk, but you can’t live the rest of your life fearing, can you?” Without having read the day’s news, I quickly gathered from their excitable “Tommy this, Tommy that,” what the day had held.
An aside – as I was writing, a man attempted to take his seat. The woman opposite me shouted – “Nope! My husband’s sitting there.” Having offered his ticket as proof, she permitted him to sit and made a brief exchange about him being Middle Eastern. After a classic awkward laugh, he asked if her husband was in the toilet, she responded “Oh no, he decided not to get on.” All that to say, there is something disquieting in the air.
A quick search confirmed that the Tommy Robinson brigade had been out in force. My impulse here–which labels the protestors right-wing thugs and assumes their complete separateness from my life–is to make it an easier pill to swallow. Listening on confirmed my prejudices, yet unsettled the ease with which I had sheltered in them. Thuggery became an insufficient explanation.
“When flying a flag in your own country is probably the most offensive thing you can do” was the decider–team “Unite the Kingdom” were sitting smug. As an older man disembarked, he congratulated the ringleader, “Never change that shirt, eh lad?” “The amount of people that have come up to me and said that today!” was his self-assuring reply. He felt like the voice of the country. We have failed to stand up and tell him that he does not speak for you or me. So, all he knows is this: his friends agree with him, his social media feed agrees with him, and strangers on the train only voice their support.
What my train compatriot reads consistently frames “the woke” as the dominant oppressor, and its opposite as the silenced majority. In his view, those like me who smiled politely when they got on, and kept silent in his wake, are probably in the second camp. As were the two ladies who appeared to have missed all the content of his chatter, they smiled when, over FaceTime, he promised his young daughter a goodnight kiss. All this affirms for him that the British public is more scared of woke backlash than they are of him.
At the protest itself, Robinson played into his curated image as a masculine protector of young British girls. Showcasing a clip of a documentary about immigrant grooming gangs, he racialised women’s fears for their safety. Apparently clueless that his 80 per cent white male audience, like those on my train, take singular pride in a dark machoism.
It is the same machismo that prevents them from seeing migrant men as victims in need of our help. Dinah Bentley, an anti-asylum hotels protestor, summed it up: “We are advised not to go to Somalia because it’s a dangerous country and yet we are accepting Somalians–Somalian men–here.” Where migrant women are victims of the danger they flee, the men are complicit–and worse, are attempting to bring the danger here.
This façade of protectionism attempts to make his violent speech against immigrant men undisputable. The pre-speech performance, which tore the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, and Palestinian flags in half–in a cruel confabulation of the three–epitomised this.
Last week, I mourned the arrests of eight hundred and ninety Palestine Action protestors. When I saw that just 25 people had been arrested, at the “Unite the Kingdom” protest I was furious. It’s a sad day when justice, for a second, appears as a call for more arrests. Unfortunately, now, when protesting peacefully makes you an easier target than protesting violently, the state is playing survival of the fittest. Yet, to label them as ‘thugs’ makes our job too easy.
Starmer’s condemnation of our flag being used as a symbol of violence was a spineless retort. “Well, no, Marie, I don’t think it’s right to be violent about it all.” This lets them assume the suffix, “But, I agree with the cause.” When that “Bellingham” shirt was embraced by his wife and kids, he believed he’d defended them that day. I merely sat stewing on what a braver person would have said. So, we must speak our own suffix–that we are ashamed of the bigotry they claim in our honour. Otherwise, we let them speak for us.
“Badge on England Shirt” by Steve A Johnson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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