If ‘Tommy Robinson’s’ great demo in central London on Saturday was designed to alert people to the popularity of his cause, it worked with me. No matter that the ‘million’ protestors that he had asked for beforehand turned out to be ‘only’ 110,000 (by most estimates), it still was an impressive display. 110,000 looks a lot of people, especially in the narrow Whitehall streets. They marched under the banner ‘Unite the Kingdom’; a clever slogan, which must have had a resonant appeal for conservatives and reactionaries on the march – especially the ‘King’ reference.  (Also a highly misleading one, for so divisive and revolutionary a movement.) From my hidey-hole in rational and Left-ish Scandinavia, watching the news on television (yes, SvT covered it), it looked alien and foreboding.

As does the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah, with Trump immediately attributing it to ‘radical agitators’, his favourite targets; effectively making Kirk a ‘martyr’, in much the same way that the Nazis made Horst Wessel one in 1930. Whether Kirk deserves this posthumous promotion, any more than Wessel did, is for his supporters to say. But it’s useful, for a cause that relies on a sense of victimhood for so much of its appeal.

And the marchers in London last weekend certainly regard themselves in this light. ‘No-one is listening to us’. ‘Governments’ – all governments – ‘are out of touch’. ‘They’re all the same’. ‘Just out for themselves’. (‘Look at that Mandelson’.) – There’s masses of this kind of thing on social media, from a movement that claims that it represents ‘ordinary people’, but which, as we know – we superior ‘élitists’, that is – is being manipulated by very un-ordinary (and disorderly) quasi-fascists.

And yet the ‘people’s’ grievances are real, albeit not strictly attributable to the agencies they claim are responsible for them: ‘boat people’, foreigners, judges, Lefty lawyers, Europe, liberals, trans people, wokeists, welfare scroungers, my sort of élitist; and the rest of that huge but very motley ‘conspiracy’ that the ‘victims’ see standing in their way.

The size of Saturday’s march convinced me, not of course of the correctness of these people’s analysis, but of the strength and wide spread of their feeling; and of our (that is, we élitists’) need to combat it before it turns to ‘Fascism’, or a British variant of it. That seems to be happening currently in America, towards which our proto-Fascists are looking for support. Starmer’s government has done a lot of good during its first year; but it is acknowledged to have also made mistakes – Mandelson is the latest – and has failed to fire up the people represented in Saturday’s march, as Farage clearly manages to. Personally I find it difficult to understand Farage’s attraction, but he obviously has more of it than the learned and solid Sir Keir. Does the moderate Left need a more charismatic leader itself to be able to challenge the extreme Right? Remember that the greatest of all Labour leaders, Clement Attlee, had virtually no charisma, which did the Left no harm then. But times are different now. Politics is all show business. (Look at Trump.)

What Labour may need, in order to counter the allure of ‘Reform UK’, is someone like the blessed Jeremy Corbyn – who did fire up people – but with more of what in the eighteenth century they called ‘bottom’, and with fewer left-wing hostages to fortune. People are saying that Andy Burnham – currently mayor of Manchester – might fill the bill. But then we saw the mess that the last metropolitan mayor to become prime minister made of the job. And of course he (or she) would need some firing-up policies too.

On the latter front my preference, as a bit of a reactionary myself, would be to return to the social democratic policies that Labour represented after the last war, but were then ditched in the ‘Great Reaction’ of 1979, when Thatcher came to power. Those policies broadly ‘united the Kingdom’ then, and could do so again. But today? Probably not.

Otherwise I fear that recent events may mark a turning point in the UK and the US, with democracy’s being supplanted by authoritarianism, and even a form of ‘Fascism’, in either or both those countries. Or am I over-reacting, from my safe refuge over the seas?