The battle for the voice of Faversham

On Saturday 6 September, a group called ‘National Emergency Faversham Division’ organised a ‘peaceful’ and ‘lawful’ protest against immigration in the sleepy market town of Faversham, where I have lived for nearly 20 years. The protest assembled in the town centre and marched to Acacia Court, a former care home at the edge of town which, since 2024, has been used to house Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children, referred to by the oblique acronym UASC.

I went along to talk to people on the protest, and to observe the dynamics at play. This is not the kind of thing that usually happens in Faversham, a town better known for its brewery and annual ‘Hop Festival’ – a larky, drunken, intergenerational celebration of our local brewery, with live music in the pubs, traditional folk dancers in the streets, kids waving balloons and teenagers puking in gutters. It’s like a family wedding to which the whole town is invited, and people come from miles away to join in. This year’s Hop Fest took place the weekend before, and was as jolly as ever.

But tensions have been rising. Inspired by ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, St George’s flags and Union Jacks have been flying from the lampposts for the past fortnight. News of a protest inspired a couple of counter-protests: one in the town centre, the other at Acacia Court. Clearly, this was going to be a bit different to the passive-aggressive meme wars on social media; and it was impressive to see so many local people, on both sides, come out to demonstrate their concern for the town. What was disturbing was how quickly the whole situation got ugly.

The protesters were draped in flags and some sported T-shirts with the slogan, ‘Save our communities, Save our children,’ and ‘Stop importing, start deporting’. A banner read, Enough is enough, Stop the boats’ – and in smaller letters, ‘End knife crime now’. The organisers had mandated ‘No face coverings, No under the influence, No racism or threats’, and they had worked with the police to authorise the march. It remained a peaceful and lawful protest.

This crowd was mainly in their 30s or 40s, and there were a fair few children, ranging from toddlers in buggies to teenagers carrying flags. The main focus of the protesters’ concern was the safety of their children, and their main anger seemed to lie with Kent County Council, for imposing the UASC placement centre on their housing estate, practically next to a primary school; and with the government, for generally regarding the interests of working people as less important than those of asylum seekers.

Then there were the counter-protesters. Initially, they outnumbered the protesters – something they rubbed in by singing ‘There are many many more of us than you’. They were middle class, those at the front were largely middle-aged, and their paraphernalia seemed designed to inflame the situation: Union Jack posters refashioned in Pride colours, bearing the slogan ‘Racists go home’, and some cutesy homemade placards saying things like ‘Paddington is a refugee’. They blocked the road, so the planned march could not start until a sizeable number of police officers arrived to clear the way. ‘They’re bullies,’ complained a number of protesters.

I followed the march down the narrow street, through a tunnel of counter-protesters jeering ‘Shame on you!’ – intimidation dripping with contempt. ‘Lefty scum off our streets!’ chanted the protesters in response. ‘Never trust a lefty with your kids!’ As the march left the town centre, the chants became more confident: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ It stopped at a patch of grass near Acacia Court, where another counter-protest was waiting behind a line of police officers. As some of the marchers drifted towards it, the organiser jumped on a bin and shouted for them to come back. ‘Leave it! They’re irrelevant!’ he said. He gave a short speech, the protesters listened, then some music started and a kid turned up with a box of crisps. I went back into town, where it seemed that normal Saturday had been restored.

What to make of any of this? The most striking thing about the ‘Two Favershams’ was that the divide was entirely about class. You could see it in the clothes, the placards, the slogans – when I arrived, the counter-protesters were singing ‘all you need is love’; the chants of ‘shame on you’ were at least a more authentic reflection of their feelings. The question at the heart of the whole thing was not only, whose streets are they, but whose voice counts?

The protesters saw themselves as the people of Faversham, whose families have lived here for generations; the counter-protesters saw themselves as the people of Faversham, and resented the protestors for bringing discord and disorder to ‘our town’. The rumour-mill already has it that most of the protesters weren’t locals, but had been bussed in from ‘elsewhere’ – as though those ‘people like that’ can’t possibly live here. Yet the people I talked to told me where they had grown up, where their kids went to school, and what they worried about with the town changing. It is as if residents of the town centre have become so estranged from their neighbours that they can only see them as outsiders.  

For a long time, Faversham has been polarised along class lines, but that is generally seen in gossip about schools rather than open power struggles on the street. Despite all the tensions familiar to pretty towns in the South-East around gentrification and the DFLs (Down From Londons), people generally rub along. That’s largely because it’s a nice place. It may also be because working-class communities have been effectively silenced for many years – now they are finding their voice, the professional classes experience it as unsettling, frightening, and rather rude.

Was it about racism? A number of the protesters seemed genuinely bewildered by the shouts of ‘Racists go home’. ‘Why are they calling us racists?’ one woman said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with racism’. I asked her to explain; she introduced me to her teenage son, whose dad was a Muslim, and pointed out that many people on the estates were ethnically mixed – something that was also true of the protest. The protest was about immigration, for sure, but the protesters saw that as quite different to racism. And this is a point that seemed to be lost on the counter-protesters, who seemed to be viscerally responding more to the aesthetic than the arguments.

There are no doubt some die-hard racists involved in all this, as with the protests against ‘migrant hotels’ elsewhere. And liberal middle-class people of my age do tend to regard national flag regalia with unease, because when we were young, racists would march under it while physically threatening non-white people. But those were very different times, with very different politics. There was less ethnic diversity within communities, and there was also less immigration. There was also less confusion about what it meant to be racist – racist people knew they were and said they were, and anti-racists didn’t casually equate Jewish people with Nazis.

The cultural assumptions underpinning elements of the counter-protest are revealed in a commentary penned for the Guardian, by an ‘Anonymous’ Faversham resident. For this nameless witness, ‘the atmosphere for people, especially those of colour, in the town is like the 1970s when the National Front held sway’ – which in turn shows us ‘what England will look like with a Reform government’. As ‘young families, doctors, teachers, priests and university lecturers were abused’, the town was ‘defended’ by a LibDem councillor, who ‘bravely held the line between the far-right thugs and townspeople’. This isn’t just a different interpretation of events – it’s like a different reality. 

The blanket categorisation of a local protest as ‘racist’, with the sanctimonious instruction to local people to ‘go home’, certainly didn’t show much willingness to engage with the problem that was actually being talked about. Acacia Court (previously known as Kiln Court) is a placement centre for around 30 unaccompanied asylum-seekers, predominantly boys aged 16-17. As the local councillor explained last year, ‘the social workers onsite will aim to keep the young people busy with education, games, English classes, counselling, and all the things you would expect’, but it is ‘not a detention centre’ and so ‘the young people will be allowed out’. The people on the estates feel that these youngsters are being given a level of care and services that theirs are not, and worry for the safety of their children with unknown young men roaming, or biking, around the streets.

You might, as I do, think it is right that young migrants are looked after once they are here. Our screwed-up asylum system needs to be fixed, but that’s not going to be done by the asylum seekers themselves. You might, as I do, think that marching on a migrant centre is not a good thing to do – better to take the fight to the council, in the town centre. But the idea that the residents have no grounds for concern shows an extraordinary lack of empathy with the people in our own town. Imagine if Acacia Court were moved next to one of the more sought-after primary schools, or the grammar school – would parents there be so keen to share the love? Self-righteous compassion is much easier when the residents and the migrants are out on the estates, out of sight and out of mind.

Which comes to the big issue underpinning all of this: the protesters’ feeling of being gaslit and ignored by official representatives. The county council’s failure to communicate with residents – let alone to consult them – about its plans has been criticised even by Faversham Town Council, which embraces Acacia Court as part of its mission to become a ‘council of sanctuary’, and acknowledged by Kent County Council itself. Yet there has been no doubt that any objections by residents will be dismissed. ‘We will … actively work to combat the spread of inaccurate and false information, which seeks to stoke fear and division,’ warned Faversham Town Council’s statement of May 2024. ‘There is no place for racist and xenophobic language in our community and wherever we come from, we all have the right to feel safe.’

Right from the start, officials attempted to shut down any concerns about Acacia Court on the grounds that they were illegitimate and racist. This both fuelled the anger of the protesters, and provided the script for the counter-protesters. In addition to this was the effect of continually referring to the migrant teenage boys as ‘refugee children’ – a sleight of hand repeated by a leaflet produced by some Kent trade unions ahead of Saturday’s ‘counter-protest against the far-right’, headlined ‘Setting the record straight’ and showing a picture of some sad-looking little children. In this narrative, anybody worried about the wellbeing of their own kids is simply a fascist who doesn’t care about refugee infants. No wonder the protesters directed most of their anger at the left.

So, what to make of it? The residents of Faversham’s estates are not the only ones to worry about the question of ‘whose streets?’ There have been ‘respectable’ campaigns against the imposition of vast amounts of new housing, and an enormous solar farm built on the marshland – people across the town feel that we are losing control over the boundaries of our community, and worry that infrastructure, employment, and services will not keep pace with these changes. It doesn’t make sense to think that such concerns can’t possibly apply to a migrant centre.

Saturday’s protesters are not the only ones to worry about their children’s safety as tensions rise: yet it seems that in order to keep ‘our’ kids safe, ‘they’ should shut up. The flags have upset a lot of people – but these have been raised, at least in part, in reaction to the Pride flag that flutters above the Town Hall and the Palestinian flags in the windows of some of the posher houses.  

I don’t know anyone who wants our friendly little town to turn into a culture warzone, and I hope it doesn’t. But the polarisation wasn’t started by Saturday’s protests, it has been inflamed by thoughtless virtue-signalling, and it will be made ten times worse by demonising our neighbours as racists and telling them to ‘go home’. There is no ‘voice of Faversham’ – there are different voices, and they need to be heard.