It may not have involved running battles with fascists, but what happened in the Southside of Glasgow on Thursday will go down as one of the most important flash points in the recent history of defending refugees and asylum seekers from a Home Office that is very rarely rattled this effectively.

From the Glasgow Girls of Drumchapel — a formidable group of school children who forced the Home Office to release their friend Agnesa Murselaj and her family dawn raided in 2005 — to the recent demonstrations against the mistreatment of asylum seekers in the city’s hotels, Glasgow has a long and proud history of defending what the city calls “Refuweegees.”

So, when the Home Office turned up to forcibly remove two of their neighbors on Eid al-Fitr, Priti Patel’s enforcers should have known that they would face resistance. They could not have known, however, that by 5 PM the people of Glasgow would have forced them to release their human cargo and provide them with a two-hundred-strong police envoy to their local gurdwara.