I just got home from the counter-protest against UKIP who thought they could march through Liverpool today in the name of Jesus and Lent or whatever. They call themselves the party of mass deportations, not seeming to reckon with the fact that if a man from Palestine rocked up today talking about loving your neighbour, and loving strangers too, UKIP would make for shit disciples because they wouldn’t even let him in the country.

Nah, they didn’t get to march today. We surrounded them. They didn’t even get to stand on the pedestal-steps of the cathedral because the church wouldn’t let them near. A small group, they held a few wooden crosses and one flag with an AI-generated picture of Jesus. Hot day, clear sky, there were four rows of police between us but I could still see sweat forming like blisters on upper-lips. I watched one man sucking his thumb. Another put brown teeth around a holographic vape. But I’ll tell you what, I never heard them once. There were just so few of them, and so many more of us.

It was anti-fascist networks, and Christians holding painted psalms. Megaphones, cow bells, vuvuzelas. It was ‘0151 UKIP-do-one,’ and then it was ‘Nazi scum off our streets.’ People were handing water out, boxes of dates. Some brassy police officer covered in Dream Matte Mousse read me a Section 60AA and confiscated my mask. That was a warning, and if I put another on, I’d be arrested. I didn’t want to get sick, but I also didn’t want UKIP’s auditors to have a go when some of the animals in puffer vests and flat caps had already broken out of the pen.

My friend had told me before we arrived that UKIP like to livestream counter-protesters so that their audiences sat at home can get to work doxxing people. She brought a Bluetooth speaker and played Disney songs on repeat to copyright-strike the streams. They didn’t like that at all. One man lashed the speaker out her hands and then shoved me in the back with two sweating hands. He did it right in front of the police who asked if I wanted to press charges because they had it on body cam. Later, a small lad said he’d found me! Ha! And then showed a profile on his phone of a completely different woman. They’re not very clever, I fear.

And for a while I was inflated with pride that the counter-protest was ten times the size of whatever them lot’d scraped together. Evil globalists had won, and I found that so funny and powerful. The girl behind me was saying this is why she’s single, because that’s the state of the dating pool; the woman next to me was letting someone know their backpack was open, and then we see a carton of eggs peeking out. When UKIP finally gave up, a DJ started blasting the Benny Hill theme. People danced. It was hundreds of strangers looking after each other — it was a model of how we could all live.

But after the police issued a Section 14 order to disperse protesters, and once they were done escorting the UKIP plebs down to the train station, I forgot how much of a celebration it had felt for a moment there, because police proceeded to kettle a group of about fifty of us at the bottom of Lord Nelson Street. With UKIP chased out of the city, it wasn’t clear why we were being held.

At this point, I’d been standing for 5 hours, the longest I’ve stood in as many years. I was feeling faint. The lad next to me let me sit on a speaker he’d been carrying round. Ten minutes passed and then a friend I haven’t seen for years found me in there, and gave me advice about what to do if we get arrested. She explained that might be why we’re being kept, to be made an example of. We got to twenty minutes and I was staring at the ugly shoes the police wear and thinking of their ultimate power; removing face coverings not just for UKIP’s auditors but for the police’s too.

I was also thinking, god, I wouldn’t even be here if I hadn’t been to the cinema this week.

On Monday, my friend asked if I wanted to see ‘Everybody to Kenmure Street,’ and we sat in a Picturehouse cinema reliving the 13th May 2021. I was so ill at the time — the start of my Long Covid — that whilst I knew the people of Glasgow had surrounded an immigration van to stop it driving off, I couldn’t have given you any details. Like, I never knew the Home Office had chosen to take two men on Eid. I never knew that another man wedged himself underneath the van and wound his arm around the axle so it wouldn’t move. It didn’t take long before I felt something sharp hook into my chest and begin to pull me straight out of my seat.

Filmmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra uses crowdsourced phone footage and social media content, as well as interviews with the people there, to reconstruct the protest from beginning to end. There’s something of that era in its reconstruction. I’m thinking of the videos of George Floyd’s murder the year before, and the urgent way people began to film everything, knowing camera rolls could become evidence of state violence; that we shouldn’t rely on reporters, or body cams, when we can do this work ourselves.

I felt moved so quickly, and then moved again because there was also something of Gillian Slovo’s ‘Grenfell: in the words of survivors.’ Between the studio interviews with protesters describing how they bailed on work and exams to show up, we get to hear from Van Man, except he’s not in the studio with the others. We instead get a verbatim performance of his testimony via Emma Thompson who is filmed stuffed under a van like he was, wearing clothes like he wore that day, FCK NZI patch included.

I did worry the acting was laying it on thick, especially when nothing needed exaggerating. But maybe it was useful? Not just because the mask protects his anonymity but I mean, I never see under cars. I think I needed to see how tight the space was, the head by the tire, the way the van pressed down onto his body as more police climbed in and weighed it down. His point of view wasn’t live-streamed for 8 hours like everyone else’s, and so actually, the process of acting it out made it feel live again, especially for someone who never even knew he was there.

‘Everybody to Kenmure Street’ shows what happens when people deny power, even as power tries so hard to separate us down lines of race and class. Alone we are far easier to control but as one woman interviewed says, if you’re all taking a stand together, and if you’re all getting arrested together, then that’s what you’re going to do. She makes the crowd out to be an unstoppable force, and that’s when my friend leant in and whispered, ‘I know this feeling so well. It’s the most free you can ever feel.’ I didn’t know that feeling, but I wanted to. Not just to be someone who does, but to believe that power can still be destabilised.

Yanno, I marched just once for Palestine in recent years before having to accept I was still too sick to be there. I stopped speaking about protests with friends and they stopped bringing them up. But I’m coming up on a year of cardiology rehabilitation that has meant five days a week in the gym, slowly coaxing a bit of strength back into my body. And I watched the people of Glasgow, and I saw the stamina they gave to protect two neighbours. The community it took. I think a lot about how I am the product of a port city — how many migrants there are in my family without whom I wouldn’t exist. What a privilege to grow up in a family with white, brown, Black and Chinese faces, and to think that was normal.

And now I have spare energy for the first time in years, and I want to use it to protect other people so that Liverpool can continue feeling like a place made up of families like mine. I waited until the credits were rolling and told my friend I think I’m well enough to do this now. She said, well, UKIP are coming on Saturday if you really want to?

I can’t say I felt free when the police surrounded the fifty of us. I was spent, I was so angry. I was figuring out how long I had until I needed to take the next dose of heart medication, and honestly I was hoping they wouldn’t choose me.

And maybe I’m writing this for the people who have the health to come next time, because there were loads of us today but if the whole city shows up, well, they can’t kettle a whole city. The police were looking over our heads like they couldn’t risk making eye contact, and I was having a hard time deciding if it was more embarrassing to wear fluorescent yellow or one of those UKIP flat caps. Eventually, they got into riot vans. Friends walked me to the train station. In a fitting end to a protest in Liverpool, they wouldn’t let me walk alone.

Back at my desk, I’m so inspired by the friend who brought me. The same friend who told me about the film. I feel ill, but I’m fine. And, oh, look here, there’s a voicemail on my phone with a crime reference number because ignoring that push in the back would have felt like missing an open goal.

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