Alastair Campbell's diary: Fascism has no place in Britain

Same theme as last week in many ways… but when suddenly it feels like hope is beating fear, you have to ride the wave while it lasts.

Last week, it was all about the joy that Kamala Harris seems to emanate putting booster rockets under the hope that Donald Trump can be stopped, and firing up morale to get hundreds of thousands wanting to campaign and donate hard for the good guys. Her appointment of Tim Walz as her running mate kept the wave rolling in the right direction, the contest suddenly turning into one between everyone’s favourite aunt and everyone’s favourite uncle against the misanthropic grandad and the weird cousin.

There is a long way to go, and complacency kills, but America feels a lot, lot better than it did a short time ago.

And so does Britain. Don’t ever tell me that taking to the streets in peaceful protest cannot have a powerful effect. Because it had such an effect last Wednesday.

For 48 hours, the police, political and media narrative presaged another night of far right carnage, and instead we got a huge show of unity, decency, compassion, and the very clear message that this is not and never will be a country that tolerates fascism.

Again, no complacency, because the forces that drove the riots from their keyboards, sunbeds and bot-farms are real, often powerful, often wealthy, and they won’t go away as quietly as we would wish; also, there are genuine policy issues that have to be addressed to prevent further exploitation of grievance by the populists and the fascists.

But when even the Daily Mail and the Daily Express feel they have to lead with headlines about decent people facing down the thugs, it means the message that came from the counter protests was very, very clear. These are papers which have done as much as Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon to fire up the mob, with their decades of anti-immigrant coverage, which they presumably think it has served their political and commercial interests well.

But maybe they could recognise their own readers out among the anti-racism campaigners and trade unionists marching against fascism, and just for once they decided to get on the right side of an argument.

However, the test of whether that change of attitude is real or merely cynical – and forgive me if for now I remain sceptical – will come not in one day’s headlines, but in whether they continue to over-promote the likes of Farage (as the Express had done with a patsy front page interview a day earlier), whether they continue to cover the Tory leadership debate through the current prism, with issues like leaving the European Convention of Human Rights ludicrously some kind of Conservative virility symbol, and whether they continue to pump out the message to their readers that migrants are the cause of all the problems they face in their lives, as previously they did with the European Union. Let’s see.