Every Saturday for the past seven weeks, a crowd of far-right protestors has gathered in a square in the city centre of Newcastle, outside a hotel housing asylum seekers. They arrive around noon, sometimes earlier, and usually stay till late in the afternoon. The protests, like anywhere, are a mixture of the threatening and the bathetic. Last Saturday, many of the hardcore were on the big march in London, and the atmosphere was almost routine. A man in a grey tracksuit, wearing an England flag as a cape, contemplatively paraded a split US/UK flag on which he’d written ‘RIP Charlie Kirk / 1993-2025 / Rest easy my Freind [sic]’. A young lad in a stab-proof vest waved a Knights Templar flag; some men, wearing identical waterproofs with a message about only ever using cash, hung around at the back chatting. A couple in late middle age stood holding each end of a giant flag that said STOP THE BOATS in one corner and SEND THEM BACK in the other, shyly furious; a drunk man danced and gesticulated at the counterprotest, and, roaring, goaded his children into doing the same. A crowd of counterprotestors, not much bigger, played Bob Marley at them from a respectable distance. The police looked bored.

There’s been trouble. The first weekend, four people were arrested, and the far right made serious attempts to sneak around the back of the counterprotest. One of the local organisers turned up on the second week, waving an Israeli flag and wearing a totenkopf t-shirt, and was arrested after a scuffle that was largely with his own side: local antifascists had spread the word that he’d served time for violently stalking a teenager. Another regular attendee has been convicted of forcing young children to fight for entertainment. Exposing these people’s criminal convictions has proved somewhat successful as an isolating tactic, but only to a point, and the numbers are not encouraging. The far right is suddenly mobilising more people than ever before in the region; many of the faces are new, and they arrive earlier and stick around for longer. 

Raj, an experienced anti-racist organiser in Newcastle, realised at the first Saturday demonstration that something had changed. ‘On the first week, they had probably double the numbers we had — it’s the first time I’ve seen the antiracist crowd outnumbered. And it’s the first time I’ve seen their numbers go up while ours went down. Normally, they all start to disappear quite quickly, but this time, more kept arriving.’ That first week, there were physical confrontations, and many of the counterprotestors left under the threat of violence. Raj said, ‘The police had nobody between the two groups. There were Nazi salutes, people calling us ‘black cunts’, ‘terrorists’, stuff like that. We had to face them off down back alleys.’

Keir Starmer’s intervention following the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London, however stilted, seems to indicate that the government may finally be beginning to feel the consequences of having ceded so much of the public sphere and political discourse to violent nativism. For the North East, as for much of the country, it comes impossibly late. The riots that erupted in Teesside and Wearside following the Southport killings last summer were terrifying in ways that would probably have been global news had they occurred in London, and in retrospect, they seem to have cracked wide open a seam of politics that was already making its presence felt in communities, in workplaces and in families. 

This is the ambient background to what’s happening outside hotels and at demonstrations: a slow, attritional confrontation that you can feel penetrating deeper into every part of the place where you live. The recent irruptions of flags have been useful for plotting out geographies of where stuff is happening: you’d be hard pressed to find more than a smattering in much of Newcastle, but head out into the exurbs and the former coalfields of Durham and South Northumberland, and they get thicker. They appear tied to railings or bridges, often with sad-looking messages scrawled on them — SEND THEM BACK, STOP THE BOATS; some streets have scores of them, all uniform size, ziptied to lampposts. In housing estates and down terraces, in allotments and back yards, flagpoles have been going up steadily for the past few years anyway, and now most of them are flying the St George’s Cross. Where I live, up the West Road of Newcastle, there are plenty of flags, but they’re almost all Palestinian, Eastern European, African, Caribbean or South Asian. Down the hill in Benwell, there’s a whole street of them. The two neighbourhoods are next to each other, and both are amongst the most impoverished in the UK; Benwell is whiter. 

Then there’s the more declarative stuff. Last month, in Hunwick, County Durham, someone made a public diorama of migrants in an inflatable canoe, their faces painted black, a sign pointing to Dover, a Labour Party placard and a shoal of grey sharks’ fins. Spray-painted red crosses have moved from road signs, traffic bollards, and bus stops to houses where people from migrant backgrounds live. Graffiti’d slurs or STOP THE BOATS appear overnight on walls. There have been small demonstrations in towns that don’t normally have them: this summer, Ashington, Alnwick, Bishop Auckland. Home-made flyers say Government Out! / Patriotism Day / Peaceful March / Monument Walk into Bishop Auckland Town Centre / Migrants Out!

Raj has been watching the far right in the North East carefully for a few years. ‘Things have changed,’ he says: ‘This stuff used to be fringe but now it’s embedded into society, that energy’s everywhere, and they’re trying to capture it and organise it on the street. Last summer was really the beginning of that phase shift. It’s not just city centre stuff any more, it’s small towns.’ The question that really worries Raj is what happens when Tommy Robinson comes to Newcastle on September 27. He’ll be here, along with Nick Tenconi — the UKIP chair recently seen giving a Nazi salute in London — and the former Reform MEP Ben Habib, for the launch of Habib’s new party ‘Advance UK’. Significant numbers of far-right activists are expected to arrive in town. ‘They’ve chosen Newcastle because they think it’s the heart of Brexit’, Raj said. ‘What we need on a national level is we need every region to mobilise on behalf of the NE. This is a national-level threat, and it needs to be treated that way by the rest of the country.’

Half of the problem is geographical isolation. The North East is further away from everywhere than anywhere else in England. While people from the North East are used to going elsewhere to demonstrate or do solidarity work, it’s relatively unusual for outsiders to come to us, and there’s a danger that an organised mass mobilisation of the far right in Newcastle will overwhelm the numbers we have available to stop it. Tommy Robinson may be counting on that.