It was 2013, her first ever march. A few months before, she’d discovered Tommy Robinson on Facebook. A few months before that, Islamists had murdered Lee Rigby outside his barracks in Woolwich — and something happened to mum. An anger exploded, a flashpoint I couldn’t get my head round. Where did it come from? How did she go from a shy Cumbrian farm girl to a 60-year old gran marching with an EDL splinter group too Right-wing even for Robinson? “Sandy,” their leader Paul Pitt once told her at a protest in Rotherham, “You’ve got more balls than most men.” I mean, the man had a point. Sandra Wilding was feisty. She cared. She had always cared.

Mum had been a carer for over four decades. She’s cared for the elderly, for dementia sufferers and adults with complex needs. She’d been attacked; kicked, bitten, punched; had her hair yanked out, a sink thrown at her head. But she loved her clients and her clients loved her, clung to her warm, no-nonsense practicality as their own lives unraveled. They all knew if it came down to it, she’d have their backs. When an elderly client died, mum would gently wash and dress them in their favorite outfits, pick a flower from the garden and press it into their folded hands. “The least a body deserves,” she told me once.

People deserved dignity and respect, she believed. You didn’t abandon them. That word there — abandonment — was the key to understanding mum’s anger. It didn’t explode overnight. It took decades. Mum was one of eight, brought up on a farm in the Eden Valley in Cumbria, a lush agricultural valley that sits between the backbone of the Pennines and the messy jumble of the Lake District fells. Grandad was a farm laborer, on the bottom rung of the rural ladder. It was a hard life and the burden of eight kids and rural poverty eventually took its toll. Nana kept running away, leaving mum and grandad to hold the farm and the family together.

Rural poverty breeds a hard self-reliance, a sort of bootstrap fatalism where the political solidarity fostered in urban industrial England can feel like a world away. What use is collective bargaining against bad weather? The seasons don’t give a shit about solidarity. You survived alone against forces bigger than yourself. Winter was kept out with blankets stuffed under doors and draped across sofas. There was never enough money for food, but there was milk from the house cow, eggs from the chickens and always potatoes. When the flour ran out, mum would use animal feed from the mealhouse to make pastry. All that beef in the byre but none for the table. But you made do.

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The far-Right is coming for Farage

By Rob Lownie

Mum wasn’t political. Not at first. She spent much of the Seventies on the dole, bringing me up in and out of stormy marriages while working-class power crumbled under Thatcher. In 1985, she bought our council house through Right to Buy, but when we fell behind on payments, loan sharks circled and mum escaped by marrying a soldier who promised stability and security.

That’s when things started getting political. In 1993, mum and my siblings were posted to Lisanelly barracks in Omagh, while I stayed in England for university. One day outside the barracks, a group of men spotted mum’s British number plate as she was returning to camp. They started shouting abuse. She jumped out of her car to confront them as soldiers roared at her to get back inside. That was the moment she quickly realized she couldn’t come here and mind her own business. Her very existence was political.

Inside camp, she ran the barracks pub, watching young working-class lads coming back from close ops patrols with haunted, hunted looks. 1993 was one of the bloodiest years in the Troubles. Mum felt a maternal protectiveness and a defensive, brittle pride. It pulled everything into focus at once: her class, her Protestantism, her Britishness.

Twenty years later, when mum learned of Lee Rigby’s murder outside the gates of his barracks, it felt personal. Memories of Northern Ireland. Another young lad abandoned by the state he had served. But this time, to be hated in your own country. When Tommy Robinson said they’ll come for your daughters with grooming gangs and your sons with meat cleavers, it sent her marching over Tower Bridge singing “I am England till I die”.

London was just the start. Mum traveled to demos across the country: Rochdale, Luton, Bradford. Her fellow marchers wore “FCK ISIS” t-shirts and called each other patriots. She went to Rotherham twice, protesting the state’s handling of the grooming gangs and its abandonment of vulnerable white girls. But on her third visit to Rotherham, in 2015, she never made it into the town center. Police shut down the road until mum’s minibus was the only vehicle on it, boxed in by police cars. Every time her bus neared a slip road, another police car shot ahead to block them. “It was all a bit Benny Hill,” mum laughed. The whole operation had cost the police £750,000. “Don’t you think,” mum asked me later, that “money wasted on escorting a minibus of pensioners could have been better spent?”

At the time, I watched her drift into far-Right protest groups with a kind of shocked bemusement. I was a documentary TV producer, telling other people’s stories, while mum was out there on the streets. I watched her rage harden, her worldview reinforced with every news headline, every anti-fascist screaming in her face. Things got sticky when she started with the “Defund the BBC” posts. “Mum,” I asked her, “do you want me to be jobless?”

I also asked if sharing Facebook posts about Muslims was racist. “Islam isn’t a race!” she snapped back. When white supremacists chanted the notorious “14 words” under the white cliffs, at a protest she attended in Dover, I asked if she really believed it all. “Not everything,” she replied, losing the courage of her convictions. “But I do believe we will be a minority one day.”

A protest in 2016 helped me finally understand her sense of loss. Howe Barracks, on the edge of Canterbury, had been my family’s home in the Nineties, the first place mum and my siblings finally put down roots. It was a safe, close-knit community, filled with quiet cul-de-sacs and pretty gold-brick houses and cherry trees. Then came the cuts. The barracks was abandoned and left to rot. Now it would house London’s most vulnerable — migrant families — while locals missed out because social housing operated in a weird market economy where the richest councils could outbid for homes anywhere. So mum pinned her Union Jack on the chain-link fence outside her abandoned home, and raised her fingers in a “V for victory” salute at the local-news photographer. At the time, I was making a film about the housing crisis, and it felt like our universes had aligned. A few months later Brexit happened, much to half the country’s surprise. Not mine though. I knew mum.

Then, three years after that, Covid. I begged mum to quit her care job, to shield. She had a bad heart. But she refused.“I’ll die in harness, standing up,” she laughed. But care workers were twice as likely to die from Covid as the rest of the population. Social care, once run by local councils, was now almost fully privatized: a system built on a shaky structure of debt and faceless offshore companies exploiting minimum-wage workers like mum. I didn’t trust those companies to protect her or the people in her care.

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One Thursday, a few weeks into lockdown, mum left the house to start her night shift. She lived on an ex-council estate. Others were coming out of their houses too, and gathering on the overgrown green, abandoned after the council stopped maintaining it. People smiled at each other over the tatty wasteland and started clapping. They were clapping for carers and they were clapping for themselves because they were the ones keeping it all going.

They were the low-paid and unskilled, the gig-economy grafters, the left-behinds, the precariat: an atomized working class who had built the country, only to watch their inheritance —  power, security, a stake in the national story — sold off. Mum felt the tears welling. It wasn’t so long ago that people were calling her fascist scum on the street. Now, for a few minutes, the country stood and clapped for people like her. And for those few minutes, she stood still and felt it and just let the stupid tears come; hot tears not of anger, now, but of pride. But it didn’t last. Britain clapped on Thursday and forgot on Friday. And, 10 years on from Brexit, that sense of abandonment hasn’t gone away.

Whatever happens in Clacton, the rise of Farage and Reform shouldn’t surprise us, not really. People like mum are still looking for someone to speak to them in the language of loyalty and belonging, to pull them back into our fraying national story. Someone to tell them they are not far-Right for feeling discarded. And if Reform finally wins? Chances are commentators will probably treat it as something sudden, like an earthquake. But for families like mine, the ground has been shaking for decades: in abandoned farms and barracks, privatized care homes, hollowed out communities, the slow erosion of the dignity and security that work once promised.

I wish I could tell you mum voted Reform in the recent elections. Not because of my own political leanings — but because it would mean she would still be here. But we lost her to cancer and a broken NHS a year and a half ago. She was a proud, passionate, loyal woman trying to muddle her way through the mess of modern Britain. She died at home with all us around her. My sisters dressed her in her favorite summery dress and denim jacket. I placed a flower in her folded hands.

***

These Wild English: A family, a class, a country on fire is published by Profile Books.

When Batten appointed Robinson, Farage quit the party after 25 years of memberhip. “There is a huge space for a Brexit party in British politics, but it won’t be filled by Ukip,” he said. Then he accused Batten of “turning a blind eye to extremism” and attempting to turn the party from an “electoral” force into a “party of street activism”. And here they are now.

I think Farage is right. I have covered Ukip events for 15 years and they never looked like this. They were tweedy and weird but not alarming. Today they look more like an EDL march and their favourite call is: Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!

It begins jovially under the strange tree by the Dorchester Hotel. There was laughter and plenty of hangovers too. It’s Sunday morning. Even if the country is crashing apart and splintering into raging tribes, it’s still Sunday morning. Life goes on.

Further reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

They are down from Yorkshire, Essex, Kent and Devon, the white working class in their Sunday bling. Some people are in fancy dress. There is a man in a bespoke Union Jack suit. “It’s not the first march it’s been on,” he says happily. There are a few dogs and children too, with loving grandparents. They look at the children with pride, because they are doing this for them.

But five times their number is massing two miles away at Portland Place, calling them far-Right fascists and a disgrace to the streets. Almost no one beeps in support from the cars on Park Lane; in fact, a hostile crowd watch from the park, raising their mobile telephones to film them. A man plays the bagpipes: It’s God Save the Queen. I hear it often, and also Jerusalem, a solo from a bearded tenor wearing a backpack. He sings terribly seriously and gets a small round of applause. They hold Union Flags on sticks. Some are 10 feet high.

The placards are various and heartfelt. “TREASON MAY – your “deal” is BREX-SHIT”. This is near a portable set of gallows, with noose, that someone built and brought up for the day, and this is chilling.

“GREAT BATTEN FOR GREAT BRITAIN”. “PARK FARAGE IN THE GARAGE”. There are silhouettes of soldiers: “LEST WE FORGET”. A “CHUCK CHEQUERS” sign, under a picture of Rees-Mogg at his most twinkling, yet serious; he wouldn’t dare show his face here, for fear of losing his standing with Conservatives. “BLACK HOODIES AGAINST BREXIT.” This is carried by a masked man in a skeleton suit. But I watch him and when he takes it off he is definitely white, which is definitely an act of cultural appropriation.

Further reading

Why we mustn't leave debate to the extremists

By Douglas Murray

They have a liberty bell. It is mounted on what looks like an ancient baby carriage. In a wonderful, and possibly deliberate metaphor, the bell appears to be rotting. They queue and take turns to ring it. The liberty bell creator won’t take questions. They don’t trust the press. Inside the carriage, for some reason, is a bunch of bananas. “Whose idea was it to stand by the fucking bell?” a man asks his friend, “I feel like fucking Quasimodo”.

The most sinister thing I see is a man in a full-face Donald Trump mask. He is wearing a suit and carrying a small dog. There is also an effigy of Theresa May made from a sex doll.

There are many Trump supporters here, which is new. “I absolutely idolise the man,” one tells me. He wears a Trump mask on the back of his head like a beret. “But we live in a country where if you like Trump you get called racist. I will support Trump unapologetically. He’s got strength which is what’s lacking in a lot of politicians. He’s 72-years-old and he’s put himself through all this crap just because he loves his country and he loves his people. Donald Trump didn’t need to do what he did. He could be on a yacht surrounded by loads of mint birds for the rest of his life. Because he’s a billionaire. What a role model he is, absolutely fantastic.”

Further reading

How rival extremisms are firing up Britain

By Jenny McCartney

There are two Israeli flags too. White nationalists admire Israel, because they think it has things to teach them about hating Muslims. “Our roots as a country have always been Judeo-Christian roots,” says its owner. “Our Queen takes her oath with her hands on a Jewish book.”

One man carries a vast Tricolor because, he says, “I want to let the French people know they are not alone in their battle against globalism. We are engaged in a common struggle against people who really don’t like us.” He is Australian. But “I love Britain and I want Britain to stay fabulous”. Another man tells me, very seriously, that we will be prevented from leaving the EU because of demons, but we should ignore the demons and leave anyway. Although that may be hangover.

There are two celebrities: Neil Hamilton, the disgraced former Tory, who cannot help but skulk, and an Australian Jewish blogger called Avi Yemini who is a fan of Tommy Robinson. He is wearing a St George’s kippah, and doing a selfie with a man in a painted cardboard Crusader helmet. “Good man,” says the next fan, “such a pleasure. You’re a great man for supporting our Tommy and supporting our country. Yemini shakes hands with the prosthetic Trump as people shout, “Avi, Avi, Avi. Oi, Oi, Oi.”

It’s a spectrum, of course; everything is until it pulls together and forms something solid, and dangerous. There are men here who would be delighted to attack almost anything. “There’s no stopping us without a brick, fucking wall,” says one. “This country will kick off big time if it’s ignored,” says another, and I believe him. I also hear a lone shout of “Bloody Africans”. But there are also fishermen who march not for the right to push Muslims into the sea, but to get their 12-mile limit back, which they won’t.

Further reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

As they march down Victoria Street, the mood becomes sullen. Why Victoria Street, they ask, why not Birdcage Walk, which is a quicker route to Parliament? Is it something else beyond their control, something else to thwart them? They pass the construction site for the new Peninsula Hotel, which could be a metaphor for their woes – a home for a global elite, and in their own capital city.

“Oh, Tommy,” they wail, “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy ROBINSON.” He is in the crowd, but they can’t all see him. “He’s quite a little chap,” says a woman in mitigation. Outside the Green King pub they chant: “We want our country back, we want our country back.” They walk up Whitehall to the sound of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and to that, I do not know what he would say.

Robinson headlines the rally. “I am one of the 30-40% who have never voted,” he says. “I’ve never voted. None of my friends have voted. Because there’s no one to vote for. They have betrayed us. They have abandoned us. 90% of Labour MPs are middle-class. We need a party, a political voice, to electrify the working-class communities of this country. For too long we have looked across Europe.”

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By Ayesha Hazarika

We have, he says, cared too much. “It’s our turn and it’s our time and this country is ready”. He urges everyone to join Ukip for £4 a month “the price of a beer in London. Gerard [Batten] put his neck on the line. There have been resignations all week in Ukip. To all the people in Ukip who were worried. Don’t worry because the cavalry has arrived!”

There are cheers. “Their membership has gone up 25% since Gerard took over,” he says. “Gerard and Ukip can be a voice for the working-class communities when no other politician will talk about Islam. No other politician will take about the issues that you fear and are a threat to our country.” So Ukip steers hard-Right.

Is this the last throbbing gasp of the nation state? They think so. They rage at the ending of an England of their ideals and hate the one that does not look like them. But this is where, I think, inequality brings us – to anger and despair. For others it is something else: entertainment. I watched a group of Chinese tourists on the top of a bus, smiling and oblivious, waving at us all as the remnants of the post-war consensus fall apart.