Take back control. It was a good slogan, which is an annoying thing to admit, and it worked because it offered people something to do at a moment when most of them felt they could do nothing.
Three words, a verb at the front and the promise that the doing would be simple. Ten years on, the people who used it have delivered less control to fewer people than at any point in my lifetime, and the slogan is sitting there unused, like a bike in a shed.
So let us take the slogan. It is not doing anything where it is.
This is a list of nine things that are genuinely available to an ordinary person with a job, a limited amount of free time and no interest whatsoever in becoming an activist.
I have done most of them, badly, from abroad, which is harder, and they still worked. None of them involve shouting at anybody. None of them involve a placard. Most of them involve a Tuesday evening and a biscuit.
The reason they work is the same reason the far right keeps collapsing, which I wrote about last week. Those movements run on rallies and die in committee rooms. So the place to beat them is the committee room, and the committee room is almost always empty.
1. Check you can actually vote
Photo ID is now required to vote in person in England, and the list of accepted documents is narrower than people assume. An expired passport is fine.
A young person's railcard is not, though an older person's is, which tells you something about who wrote the list. If you have neither, there is a free Voter Authority Certificate, which takes ten minutes online and which almost nobody has heard of.
Check yours. Then check your mum's. Then check your kids', who moved flat twice since they last registered and are, in the eyes of the state, still living above a chip shop in 2021.
Then check the person at work who moans about politics and has never once been on a register. This takes four minutes each and is the single highest value thing on this list, because the whole strategy of the people we are talking about is that you will not bother.
2. Go to one boring meeting
Council meetings, planning committees, licensing hearings, the parish council. They are open to the public, they are dull beyond description and the reason they matter is that almost nobody attends, which means the handful who do get an enormous amount of say.
If you have ever wondered how a decision that nobody wanted got made, it was made in a room with nine people in it and four of them were staff.
You do not have to speak. Sit at the back. Learn who the councillors are and which ones turn up. Notice who else is in the public seats, because the far right has worked this out already and sends people, and they are counting on being the only ones there.
Fact box
Local election turnout in England routinely sits around a third of the electorate.
Which means a council seat can be won on a few hundred votes in a ward where most people did not participate. That is the level at which fringe parties get their first foothold, and it is also the level at which they are cheapest to stop.
3. Join a union
Whatever you do for a living. Unions are the largest organised anti-fascist infrastructure in this country and have been for a century, which is why it is Unite putting on the Cable Street commemoration this month and not a think tank. They have branches, halls, printing, legal cover and a great many retired members with time on their hands and a low tolerance for nonsense.
They also, incidentally, get you more money. Union members in Britain earn more than non members doing the same job, and have done for as long as anybody has measured it. So this one pays for itself, which is more than can be said for most political gestures.
4. Stop quoting them
Every time you screenshot a bad post to explain why it is bad, you hand it an audience it could not have bought. Outrage is the currency.
Sharing it in disgust spends the same as sharing it in agreement, and the algorithm cannot tell the difference and does not care. The man who posted it is delighted. He has reach now. You gave it to him, with a caption.
This is the hardest one on the list because it feels like doing nothing, and doing nothing is unbearable when you have just seen something vile. But the maths is the maths.
The most effective response to a post designed to be shared is to not share it, and to say something interesting instead, about anything, in the same space, so that the space is not left to them.
Sharing it in disgust spends the same as sharing it in agreement, and the algorithm cannot tell the difference and does not care.
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5. Give locally and boringly
The food bank, the refugee drop-in, the community centre with the leaking roof, the youth club that is open two nights a week and could be open four.
Fascism does its recruiting where the state has stopped turning up, in the towns where the last thing that opened was a bookmaker and the last thing that closed was everything else. Anything that keeps a place staffed, warm and open is doing counter-extremism work whether it thinks of itself that way or not.
Money is fine. Time is better. Two hours a month at the food bank puts you in a room with the people the feed is telling your grandad to be afraid of, and it turns out they are a woman called Sandra and her lad and the fear does not survive the contact. It never has.
6. Ring your own relative
The one you are worried about. You know the one. Not to argue, because arguing does not work and never has, and I have a whole other piece about that. Just to talk about something else, regularly, for as long as it takes. The dog, the score, the garden, the thing he is good at that nobody asks him about any more.
Every hour he spends with you is an hour the feed does not get. That is the entire strategy. You do not have to win. You have to be more interesting than a screen, which is a low bar and a real one, and it is the only form of deradicalisation that has ever been shown to work on anybody.
7. Be the person who checks
Reverse image search takes ten seconds and is built into every phone. Most viral outrage in this country is a real event from somewhere else, several years ago, relabelled and reposted with a British caption by someone who knows exactly what they are doing.
You do not need to lecture anybody about it. You need to know how to check, and to check, quietly, before the thing has finished loading.
Then, if it is wrong, reply with where the photo is actually from. One line. No commentary. Then say nothing further, because the correction does the work and the argument undoes it. The person who posted it will not thank you. The forty people who saw it and were not sure will.
8. Turn up on the day
Not just the marches, though go to the marches, they are lovely and well catered. Be a teller outside a polling station. Help someone get there who cannot drive. Offer a lift. Sit on a stall. Democracy in Britain is largely held together by retired people with clipboards and there are not enough of them, which is a genuine structural weakness and also an open door.
The people on the other side have understood this. They have tellers. They have lifts. They have a man with a clipboard outside every polling station in the wards they care about, and he is polite and organised and knows your name.
Be the other man with the clipboard. It is one Thursday a year.
9. Stand for something
Parish council. School governor. The residents' association. Any of it. The nomination process is easier than you think, most parish seats are uncontested and every uncontested seat is one that somebody else could have walked into unopposed, and increasingly does. You do not need to be a politician. You need to be available on a Tuesday, and to be able to sit through a discussion about a bench.
The bench matters, incidentally. The bench is the point. The far right cannot do the bench.
It can do the rally and the video and the shared post at six in the morning, but it cannot sit on a parish council for three years and argue about a bench, because there is no glory in it and nobody films it. That is the gap. That is the whole gap. Walk into it.
The unglamorous truth
None of this is a rally. Nobody will film it and it will not trend and you will not get a badge. But every far-right movement this country has produced has died of internal collapse rather than defeat in argument, and what fills the space afterwards is decided entirely by who was still turning up to the boring meetings when it happened.
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They are betting you will not. The whole model, from the feed to the rally to the man with the clipboard, is a bet that ordinary people cannot be bothered with a Tuesday. It is a good bet. It has usually paid.
Take your country back. Start with the parish council, because they are desperate, the seat is probably uncontested and the biscuits are surprisingly good.
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