‘No room for fascist thugs in Britain and there by no means might be’

We were told to expect more than 100 far-right protests on Wednesday night.

The insurgents circulated a list of 30, mainly immigration or asylum-linked venues they had in their sights, ­underneath this defiant call to arms: “Wednesday night lads. They won’t stop coming until you tell them… no more immigration. Mask up. Spread this as far and wide as you can.”

But, like some of their gallant leaders who have fled the country, they were nowhere to be seen. Or rather, in certain cities, a handful of saddos draped in England flags trembled before a sea of counter-protesters who made them realise how small they were. In every sense.

Maybe the prospect of playing Nazi Zombie Army on their PlayStations inside a prison cell for the next few years had made them bottle it.

Maybe the likes of those brave freedom fighters who burned and looted a children’s library in Liverpool saw that 10,000 donors had raised £210,000 in a few days to repair the damage and realised they were a despised minority who would not win.

Maybe the inevitable civil war on British streets that the poor man’s Dr Strangelove, Elon Musk, had predicted, was purely a social media fantasy.

Despite its many historic faults and current problems, Britain have never had any truck with fascists. Unlike most of Europe we have never come close to electing a far-right government.

Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and Nick Griffin’s BNP made plenty of headlines and took a handful of council seats but those parties soon imploded. Not least because they were led by narcissistic buffoons.

Their latest incarnation, Britain First, stood a candidate in May’s London mayoral election and received 0.8% of the vote. Which was fewer than joke candidate Count Binface managed.

In recent years the Tories have planted their flag in hard-right territory only to be handed their worst General Election defeat since 1906, and for all Nigel Farage’s bluster about leading the new electoral Voice of the People, his Reform party holds fewer than 1% of Westminster seats.

The Russian bots and American MAGA influencers can try their worst, but the truth is, unlike many other European countries, fascism has never gained a serious foothold in Britain. And it never will. There’s three reasons for this.

We emerged from two world wars with no sense of lingering national shame that the country had been invaded, or stabbed in the back, which populist demagogues across Europe were able to exploit.

Our first-past-the-post electoral system guarantees fringe parties like Reform can offer absurd pledges to take Britain back to the days of Empire, thus magically fixing all our problems, but they won’t get enough votes to even become the main opposition party. Farage could never get as close to power as Marine Le Pen did in France this year.

Also, it turns most Britons’ stomachs to see tanked-up, snarling thugs brick mosques, burn books or abuse immigrant nurses en route to hospitals to help save lives.

The sight of communities coming together to clean up after this week’s riots and turn out in their thousands to protect asylum centres shows the strength of our anti-fascist solidarity.

That was the real voice calling to get its country back. And the hate-spewing, far-right bootboys will never silence it.