As most Britons spent their bank holidays bathing in the summer sunshine, it was easy to miss the fact that thousands of protesters marched on Whitehall to “protect freedom of speech”. Far from being an innocent defence of Enlightenment values, the protest seemed more a Trojan horse for the ideas of the far right to insert themselves into the political mainstream. The demonstration was a response to former EDL leader Tommy Robinson’s permanent ban from Twitter, and featured figures such as Anne Marie Waters, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Gerard Batten of Ukip.

I’m not sure that British mainstream politics has quite taken the growing presence of the far right across Europe and the US seriously enough, or indeed the fact that British far-right and socially conservative groups are overtly and deliberately adopting the tactics of their allies across the pond. Claiming freedom of speech as a value is something the American far right has been doing for years (aided and abetted by liberal dupes, naturally); Britain has also recently had an escalation in protests outside abortion clinics. “They are starting to resemble more and more the tactics that you’d see in the United States: graphic imagery, more aggressive approaches to people,” said John Hansen Brevetti, clinical operations manager at a clinic in Ealing, west London.

It’s important to understand that these protests aren’t simply individual opportunistic acts, but part of a growing narrative embraced by social conservatives and the far right that the nation has been corrupted by elites, who are simultaneously destroying the economy and damaging society with their decadent liberal values. These elites, argue these protesters, are censoring ordinary people from expressing reasonable opinions, and forcing women to abort their children when other options might be available. Or as Tommy Robinson put it when he addressed the rally: “The people of this country have been silenced for 20-30 years with the tag of racists. They have managed to silence people so that they are too scared to speak up when they see things that are wrong.”

Photograph: Penelope Barritt/Rex Features

Robinson is tapping into that hoary old Nixonian trope, “the silent majority”. Central to these culture wars, then, is who “the majority” is and which groups can claim to speak for it. No one can claim to have found the perfect oppositional response to the culture wars, but in light of Robinson’s argument, it’s probably a bad idea for the opposition to set itself up as a group that represents only minorities. Instead, perhaps the aim should be to redefine who the majority are, through collective struggle, solidarity and a movement that makes itself welcoming to, and represented by, all demographics in society.

Whatever the response to the weekend’s rally is, it can’t come soon enough. Nigel Farage’s triumphalist meetings with Marine Le Pen, the far-right AfD in Germany, and Donald Trump should tell us all that this is a concerted international nationalist project that correctly sees itself as insurgent. And preceding every far-right victory is a political mainstream that didn’t take it seriously enough. Let’s not allow that to happen again.

• Ellie Mae O’Hagan is a freelance columnist