‘Would I sit down with Tommy Robinson? It’s not a definite no’: lessons from people who fought the far right in the 70s, 80s and beyond

Imam Adam Kelwick outside the Abdullah Quilliam mosque in Liverpool. The mosque was targeted by a mob in the wake of the murder of three girls at a dance class in Southport. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian

‘If you’re not organised, you get picked on. When you’re organised, often they flee’

Tariq Mehmood encountered the far right early – at primary school. “When white children surround you in the playground and sing, ‘God made little black people, he made them in the night, he made them in a hurry, and forgot to paint them white’, and the school doesn’t clamp down on that, then you’re living within the far right. It’s not one organisation, it’s a mass movement.”