On the train to meet Sunder Katwala in Dartford, Kent, you pass streets with bright new Saint George’s flags on every lamp-post. There are more of them, plus union jacks, visible everywhere: in gardens, on bridges, on rooftops. It’s the week after hundreds of thousands of people attended a flag-waving rally in central London led by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, rounding off a summer of protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, and portentous warnings that Britain is a “tinderbox” or even a “powder keg” about to ignite. This is England in 2025.

In Dartford’s pedestrianised town centre, though, it’s a different picture. People of all skin colours peacefully go about their business on a sunny afternoon. A busker is strumming next to the sculpture of local heroes Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And crisscrossing the streets overhead are miles of Saint George’s flag bunting. This is also England in 2025.

“We’ve got lovely bunting in Dartford,” says Katwala proudly, as we look out on the scene through a cafe window. “This is the right kind of bunting, whereas the flags at the lamp-posts look sadder.” The bunting has been up since Saint George’s Day, he explains. There was a big parade here in April, with local schoolchildren and brass bands. Then it stayed up for VE Day, then the England women’s victorious Euros football tournament this summer, which Katwala cheered on with his daughters, in an England shirt.

If there are two versions of British identity pulling in different directions at the moment, then Katwala is one of the people trying to bring them together. Where much of the national rhetoric lately has been about conflict and division, Katwala prefers to talk about “balancing” and “bridging”. He laid out his philosophy on British identity in last year’s book, How to Be a Patriot, and his organisation British Future is geared toward finding common ground and constructive solutions when it comes to race and immigration. It does the polling to find out what people really think, but also proposes imaginative solutions such as the “poppy hijab”, which enabled British Muslims to feel more part of Remembrance Day.

The child of an Indian doctor and an Irish nurse, born and raised in Britain, Katwala literally has skin in the game – as a product of and advocate for multiculturalism, but also as someone who’s been no stranger to the worst of British racism, not only back in the 1970s and 80s but also, regrettably, in the present day. “I experienced much, much more racism on a daily basis this year, and in the last three years, than I did 30 years ago,” he says.

Katwala is concerned but not necessarily surprised by the recent far-right rally in central London, which platformed a variety of extreme voices and views, conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric. Perhaps most chillingly of all, Elon Musk told the 150,000-strong crowd: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.” Not since the days of Enoch Powell have such inflammatory sentiments been so openly aired.

It would be easy to read this as “far-right politics gone mainstream”, but the picture is more complex than that. “Three-quarters of those people wouldn’t think they were on a far-right rally,” he says. “On the whole, in the long run, [the far right] is becoming more vocal, more angry and more dangerous because it is shrinking, but it definitely doesn’t think it is shrinking.” That makes it all the more concerning that such a large crowd can be drawn to such an event by other factors, such as general discontent over their economic circumstances. “It’s a very effective strategy for the far right, to blur and try to dissolve all of the boundaries.”

He’s all in favour of discussing “legitimate concerns”, clunky though the expression has become; it’s more question of drawing the line – “It’s not racist to talk about immigration, except for the people being racist when they do.”

But these issues become complex once you start to drill down. “British attitudes to immigration, in particular, have been chopping and changing in both directions in the last 10 years more than the attitudes of any country, anywhere,” he says. “When people think and talk about immigration, we’re not talking about one thing, we’re talking about four or five different things.”

In surveys, more than half of Britons now see immigration as a concern – the highest level in a decade – but when you break it down into specific types of migrant, the numbers start to change, Katwala explains. Ask about foreign-born nurses and doctors in the NHS, for example, and almost nobody says they are not glad they are here. Then there’s a category of “good people who work hard” – Polish plumbers, say, of whom most Britons also broadly approve. And “there’s almost always a refugee you’re in favour of,” he says, such as Ukrainians fleeing the war, or Hongkongers leaving China.

That leaves asylum-seekers arriving by boat across the Channel, who dominate the immigration conversation but make up only a small number of the total. That proportion has increased as net migration has fallen (by 400,000 since Labour came to power) and the number of people arriving by boat has increased (by about 14,000). It is now about an eighth of the total. The situation is compounded by the backlog in processing asylum claims and the housing of asylum-seekers in hotels, he points out. “The hotels are taking a visible lack of control of boats in the Channel – which tells you a lot about islands, sovereignty, the sea and Britain – and sticking it in a hotel that’s familiar to you, in your town. So that is a disaster.”

Labour’s lack of a coherent response – or sometimes, any response at all – has become its biggest liability in recent months, but a new report by British Future, How We Can Actually Stop the Boats, argues that practical solutions to the problem could make a substantial difference. Unsurprisingly, it proposes a balanced approach – between “compassion and control”: tackling the problem of small boats but also creating a safe, legal migration route.

Labour’s “one in, one out” arrangement with France is on the right track, the report says. At present, the scheme aims to return about 50 people a week; were it to be expanded tenfold, it would make returns “more likely than not”, and at 20 times, “it could operationalise a returns guarantee”. This would effectively destroy the business model of small-boats traffickers, says Katwala. “If you got to the point where there was a guarantee that the irregular route, where you paid a trafficker, wasn’t going to work, and there was a legal scheme to apply to as well, then you would see a three-quarters drop [in numbers arriving by boat].” And eventually, “you could actually eliminate it entirely”.

Of course, there are legal, political, diplomatic and practical hurdles to overcome, but they are by no means insurmountable. In fact, there is an unlikely precedent: the US. The report is co-authored by Katwala and Frank Sharry, a leading American immigration strategist, and it points out that the US did actually get on top of immigration at the Mexican border in the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, with a similar “routes and returns” approach: closing off illegal routes to immigration and creating legal ones. The numbers crossing the US border were far greater than those crossing the Channel – 2 million a year – and Biden’s approach reduced them by 77% between December 2023 and August 2024, an achievement that was barely reported at the time.

British Future’s polling suggests an intake of 50,000 refugees a year would be supported by 48% of Britons, and opposed by just 18%. “It gets most Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative voters all agreeing,” says Katwala, “because they can hear about the ‘routes’ if they’re liberal, and they can hear about the ‘control’ and ‘returns’ if they’re Conservative.” It would even persuade 38% of Reform voters, he says, which is all you need on a national level.

Whether such practical solutions would help win the argument on political or emotional levels is another question. There’s a feeling that the global rise of the far right is now inexorable, especially in Europe: Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Finland, possibly Le Pen in France next, all boosted by Trump and his allies in the US. It almost feels inevitable that Reform will sweep to victory here and Nigel Farage will be the next prime minister.

Katwala is less convinced, and the multicultural scene outside the window is part of the reason. “Britain is quite different from the rest of western Europe, on a good day, about how well we do this,” he says. “We’re a generation ahead in terms of visible diversity, and the normalness of diversity in public life.” Most Britons don’t perceive this, he says, but “if you’re in business, media, politics, thinktanks, and you do pan-European things, all of the diversity in the room is British, always”.

He points to public figures such as Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch, Sadiq Khan, even Reform’s Zia Yusuf; “Shabana Mahmood is the fifth ethnic minority home secretary; the first [Sajid Javid] was in 2018.” Most Britons have found this unremarkable, but “it’s really triggering for a particular group”, he says. “What I think has happened is, the group that want to recontest the very presence of ethnic minorities in Britain are seeing this as their moment to hit back. Because it’s too in-their-face, and they’ve also been given the amplification.”

Much of that amplification is happening online, supported by powerful figures such as Musk, and is often brazenly racist in ways that would be unacceptable elsewhere in society. Katwala has been fighting a different kind of battle on this toxic terrain, personally calling out the most bigoted voices on X and demanding its moderators take action. “Musk is infinitely more likely to retweet than to remove the most racist people,” he says.

Last month, as an experiment, Katwala began reporting examples of the worst kinds of racial abuse and harassment ethnic minority public figures received on X, including himself. Most outside observers would be shocked: racial slurs are liberally thrown about, and replies often include comments such as: “You’re not English. You never will be. You should be deported.” Out of 30 incidents of P-word abuse Katwala reported to X, just one user was suspended. The rest, X judged, had not “broken our policies”. As the summer protests show, this is no longer just a social media problem, he says. “What I could feel very clearly this August was that the online had clearly spilled offline, that heightened sense of permission.”

This isn’t simply a “free speech” issue; this is hate speech, proscribed by law – a result of Britain’s long, largely fruitful history of fighting racism. We haven’t come all this way, Katwala says, “just for Elon Musk, a man born into an apartheid state, who’s polarised America, to come and start a civil war here by breaking the law. We just want the law applied to Elon Musk.”

In his lifetime, Katwala and many others have seen the battle against racism play out on the football terraces. He was born in Doncaster, then moved to Ellesmere Port, Wirral, aged five, so became a lifelong Everton supporter. He would get some racist abuse as a school kid, he says – “When people called me the P-word, ‘I’d be like: ‘It’s like calling you French, dickhead. Get a map’” – but not necessarily at football matches. In 1987, though, Everton’s arch-rivals Liverpool signed John Barnes, the Black English striker. Now 14-year-old Katwala found himself in his Everton kit surrounded by supporters chanting: “Everton are white.” One threw a banana on to the pitch at Barnes. “That was my introduction to very overt racism,” he says, and it was the first time he realised how, like most other English football teams, Everton was all-white. But football was also the first place he saw how racism could be effectively challenged; by the early 90s, initiatives such as Kick It Out had made open racism unacceptable.

By that time, Katwala was studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. He didn’t have a plan, and wasn’t all that into politics, he says, “but I had views that came out of this sort of working through my own identity”. It was only after he graduated, in 1995, that he became closer to the socialist thinktank the Fabian Society – he became general secretary in 2003, after spells in publishing and as a leader writer for the Observer. Then, in 2012, he founded British Future, partly seeking a more up-to-date conversation about race, migration and multiculturalism – much of which was still centred on ideas of faith or ethnicity at the time. “That doesn’t work so well into a second or third generation if you’re getting integration right, because you will have lots of people of mixed ethnicity,” he says. “​​I don’t want to be in a community of communities. I want to be in a community of citizens that has freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of political views.”

We speak again a few weeks later, after the Reform, Liberal Democrat and Labour party conferences. Farage has unveiled extreme proposals to deport people with indefinite leave to remain – “an unforced error”, Katwala thinks. Conversely, Keir Starmer appears to have taken on board British Future’s “compassion and control” message. “Asylum for people genuinely fleeing persecution is the mark of a decent, compassionate country,” Starmer said in his speech. “But … secure borders are also vital for a decent, compassionate country.” This ​is the best version of Starmer, making the ethical and moral arguments as well as the practical ones, Katwala says. “If you’re going to argue with populists about the future of the country, you’ve got to appeal to the heart as well as the head.” Labour also brandished the national flags liberally, which some observers found cringeworthy, but crucially they defined their idea of patriotism – more Dartford bunting than Tommy Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), you could say. “When you have ‘we’re the patriots of a modern, multi-ethnic Britain’, then the Labour party can fly its flags for that because it feels it hasn’t been said. Whereas if you just say ‘we’ve got to fly flags, because people expect us to fly flags’ … that would feel a bit performative.”

This is the first time in 30 years that he feels the country is moving backwards in terms of race relations, Katwala says, but he’s not entirely pessimistic. “I’m very much for vigilance without alarms,” he says. “And then when things happen, actually getting the balance right. So not being alarmist can be pretty complacent – do we wait until it’s not 150,000 but 2 million on the fascist march? But there’s also, I think, including among liberal left people who would want it not to happen, a sort of a panicky pessimism that is quite demobilising.”

Fundamentally, he says, Britain has a lot of foundations to deal with these challenges. Unlike the US, we have a “balancing middle” of things that enjoy overwhelming national support: the NHS; our sports teams, whether nationally or as team GB; the monarchy; the BBC; and our wartime history of fighting fascism.

“I’ve always been very optimistic,” he says. “Not because I’m an optimistic person, but because my life experience verifies it. I felt, saw, experienced and benefited from times when my country changed for the better.”

• How To Be a Patriot is available at the Guardian bookshop