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The Saturday read: From black-clad agitators to an appeal for ‘Tommo’s Mum’: an unsettling week with the Patriot Platform
The Saturday
readImmigration and
asylum
From
black-clad agitators to an appeal for ‘Tommo’s Mum’: an unsettling week with
the Patriot Platform
From top
left, a National Front demonstration, Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts, EDL
supporters, Unite the Kingdom protesters, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy
Robinson); in the foreground, Daniel Thomas and Patriot Platform protesters.
Composite: Guardian Design/SSPL/Getty Images/PA/Alamy/AP/AFP/EPA
A
militaristic operation with features of influencer culture, the new
anti-migrant movement seems to show a shift in tactics and rhetoric
Sat 12
Sep 2026 06.00 BST
Shortly
after 7am last Saturday in the English coastal town of Dover, livestreamed
footage distributed by Britain’s newest anti-migrant movement showed dozens of
men in paramilitary outfits jumping out from the backs of vehicles, their faces
covered beneath balaclavas, their hands in black gloves.
Within an
hour, hundreds more masked agitators, dressed head to toe in black, some
wearing silver crosses around their necks, were marching through the town’s
streets, clapping and chanting “Stop the boats” and “Christ is king”,
blockading the busy port for hours.
Anti-immigration
protests have become a familiar sight in Britain over the past five years, with
demonstrators expressing anger at successive governments’ inability to stop
people arriving in small dinghies from France, across the Channel. But last
weekend’s launch of the new Patriot Platform movement appeared to mark a
significant shift both in rhetoric and tactics, disrupting once again the
shifting ecosystem of the British far right.
A
disciplined, well-organised and militaristic operation was unleashed. The new
movement also displayed features of online influencer culture, with manosphere
undertones, led by people who seem skilled at swiftly pulling together
flashmobs of protesters and highly adept at exploiting social media’s
algorithms to attract attention to their cause and fundraise. Most unnerving
was the masked appearance of protesters, and the intertwining of Christian
chanting with anti-migrant sentiment.
Footage
of the weekend’s disruption posted on the YouTube page of the movement’s
leader, Daniel Thomas, who calls himself Danny Tommo, has had, in total, more
than a million views, with visitors to the site invited to pay a £4.99 monthly
fee to subscribe to his channel and join the community of so-called patriots.
“We’re
doing this under Christianity. We’re doing this with Christian British and
English men. We’re not doing this with thugs,” Thomas, 37, tells his viewers.
But most
politicians, even on the hard right, expressed instant scepticism. Reform UK’s
leader, Nigel Farage, said the display was “disgusting”. “Nobody, at any
political protest, whether they’re on the left or right, should be wearing
balaclavas. It is wrong, it’s horrible,” he said.
Concerned
that police forces had revealed themselves to be unprepared, the home
secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said on Thursday that the government expected
police officers in future to make “full use” of new powers allowing them to ban
face coverings at protests.
Academics
and analysts of the far right have spent the week trying to assess whether the
new grouping has staying power and whether Thomas is himself sufficiently
disciplined to unite a splintered anti-immigrant right.
Daniel
Thomas arriving outside Associated Newspapers on Wednesday. Photograph: Carl
Court/Getty Images
“Is Danny
Tommo a threat or a clown?” the anti-racist organisation Searchlight asked this
week, before concluding: “A bit of both.”
Joe
Mulhall, the director of research at Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascist
organisation, who has been charting the movement’s growth over the summer,
described last weekend’s protests as “an alarming development”, which could
prove dangerous if protesters continued to target boats carrying asylum
seekers. He said the rhetoric, the optics and the movement’s recruitment
strategy all represented a shift. “It’s much more vigilante in style, and
organised in a more clandestine way,” he said.
In the
decades since Oswald Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, with its
blackshirted followers, Britain has seen an evolution of different far-right
movements, their fortunes rising and falling. The National Front in the 1970s
was followed by the British National party in the 1980s and 90s. The English
Defence League, Britain First and Patriotic Alternative have had time in the
headlines before receding in prominence. The secretive, militant neo-Nazi
movement National Action, whose followers also appeared in masks and
balaclavas, emerged in 2013, before it was banned as a terrorist organisation
in 2016.
Oswald
Mosley speaking at a rally in Leeds in 1936. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty
Images
To many,
Thomas is just the latest iteration of that tendency, but an effective one at a
febrile moment. Thomas, who previously ran a roofing firm and enjoys cage
fighting and boxing in his spare time, has worked as a bodyguard to the UK’s
leading far-right activist, Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon).
The father of five has spent two years in prison for attempted kidnapping.
After being released, Thomas said: “I repented; I gave my life to Jesus.” On
social media he describes himself as “dedicated to defending my family and
homeland, trusting in Jesus Christ, Our Saviour”.
The week
began triumphantly for his agitators, with blanket media coverage both of
Saturday’s visually startling protest and a second demonstration on Sunday in
Portsmouth, another major port on the south coast. Late that evening and in the
early hours of Monday morning, Thomas was knee-deep in the chilly seawater,
attempting to prevent the landing of a boat thought to be carrying about 120
asylum seekers. He quickly rallied more masked protesters to try to stop
coaches from taking the arrivals to an immigration processing centre.
As a
supporter brought phone chargers and other supplies by canoe to protesters in
the water, he shouted at police and volunteers with the Royal National Lifeboat
Institution: “I need these migrants to go home.” Uneasily watchable as it was,
the four-hour livestreamed recording of events that night has had more than
700,000 views.
The
police initially described the Dover demonstration as “spontaneous”. But in
fact, throughout the heatwaves of the summer, Thomas had been travelling across
Britain, pulling together volunteers from small localised anti-migrant protest
groups into his new umbrella movement. In clips posted to Instagram, Facebook,
YouTube and X, he charted his progress towards building a network of men, who
would, he claimed, become a “mass resistance group”, and would spark a
“shockwave around the country” and send “shivers down the spines of those that
have put this upon us”. He filmed new recruits, wearing black, lined up outside
a village church and on village greens, describing them as “working-class men,
bricklayers, roofers and carpenters”.
The
protesters’ media coup will have made awkward viewing for Reform politicians,
coinciding with their party’s annual conference, which proved fractious amid
lingering questions around overseas funding.
The
movement has no manifesto; its website offers vague outlines of intent,
claiming that its followers are patriots who refuse “to stand by while Britain
is dismantled”. Thomas has set out some of his views in short clips recorded on
his phone, sitting in the driving seat of a stationary car. “For too long we’ve
been walking down roads and waving flags and thinking this is somehow going to
save us,” he says in one. “Migrants are having a detrimental effect on the
safety of our women and children.”
By
Wednesday, Thomas’s self-declared claims to be making the country safer for all
Britain’s daughters, sisters and mothers had veered unexpectedly into a more
idiosyncratic campaign: one to protect his own mother, and secure new housing
for her, amid a row over whether an article in the Daily Mail had made it
possible to identify where she lived. That afternoon, Thomas brought dozens of
masked men in black shorts and hoodies to the newspaper’s central London
headquarters, livestreaming himself threatening that unless the newspaper
organised his mother a new home within 48 hours, he would be back again with a
larger contingent of men.
Later he
made an online appeal for donations to help his mother move house, because she
was living in “a state of absolute fear”. “It would be right for the country to
rally together and help her in this time of need,” he wrote on an online
fundraiser, headed: “Help Danny Tommo’s Mum Relocate: a fresh start after
unfair media harassment.” By Friday afternoon more than £62,000 had been
raised.
Some
online commentators said they were sympathetic to his broader aims, but were
irritated by this personal fundraising drive, condemning it as grifting. Even
among supporters, Thomas’s leadership style is not to everyone’s taste.
Over the
past two years, Tommy Robinson has attempted to make his anti-immigration
movement mainstream, explicitly calling on supporters not to attend rallies
wearing face coverings, in an attempt to secure wider support. Details of his
events are circulated on open Facebook groups, and often publicised weeks in
advance, with police notified. Women are free to protest alongside men.
Thomas
appears to be trying something new. Mulhall said: “This is less about
attracting mass numbers, and more about them saying: ‘We’re going to take
things into our own hands.’ They want small committed numbers of people willing
to take direct action.” Success was not guaranteed, he added, noting that an
attempt to launch similar action on the beaches of northern France earlier this
year, branded Operation Overlord (a reference to the second world war allied
D-day landings), had failed, resulting in Thomas being banned from returning to
France by the French authorities, who said: “Violent and hate-inciting tactics
have no place in our territory.”
Thomas
has said that he wants to bring discipline to the protest movement, aims to
avoid arrests and talks of having lawyers at the end of the phone. “We have
clear rules, no shouting, no alcohol, no flag waving, no drugs,” he says
(although the Hampshire and Isle of Wight constabulary reported damage to their
vehicles and some injuries on Sunday night).
Several
researchers have noted the movement’s success at spreading its message through
social media. Thomas’s claims that the British way of life is under threat as a
result of immigration offered “a strong sense of purpose, belonging and
orientation to those anxious about their future”, said Beatriz Lopes Buarque, a
fellow in AI trust and security at the University of Manchester. “Racist
conspiracy theories are profitable to tech companies and, consequently, there
is little incentive on their part to reduce their amplification,” she added,
noting that politicians needed to “raise awareness of the nexus between harmful
conspiracy theories and algorithmic amplification”.
Protesters
in Dover. Photograph: Ay_audits/Youtube
Darja
Wischerath, a research assistant at the University of Bath, who specialises in
studying online and offline mobilisation of the far right, said Thomas
displayed a celebrity influencer’s skill at uploading bits of content on to
numerous social media sites throughout the day to keep followers engaged,
building a community of like-minded people. There were manosphere undertones to
some of the content, with the “misogynistic suggestion that women are helpless
people need[ing] to be protected”, she said.
Footage
distributed by Thomas suggests activists have been drilled over the summer to
respond in unison to his questions, like troops responding to a sergeant major.
“Are we here to hurt the police?” Thomas asks lines of black-clad men in a clip
of the Daily Mail protest. “No,” the lines of men shout back. “Are we here to
stand up for our country?” The men respond: “Yes!” “Are we here to stand up for
our women?” he asks. The men reply: “Yes!” Thomas concludes by bellowing
“Amen!” at his volunteers, who shout back: “Amen!”
Thomas
was a tank driver with the King’s Royal Hussars, but was discharged on medical
grounds before seeing active service.
The
movement’s regular references to Christ have triggered dismay within the Church
of England. Thomas has posted videos of himself attending church, holding a
prayer book. It is not clear where he attends church, but he tells followers:
“When we go to church every Sunday, we go to church as a unit.” People donating
to his fundraising pages can opt instead to press a button notifying organisers
that they will pray for the cause rather than giving money.
Over the
past few years, Christian anti-migrant protesters have begun to position
themselves against the inclusive, pro-refugee position of the established
Church of England. Madeleine Pennington, the head of research with the
thinktank Theos, where analysts are currently finalising a project on the rise
of Christian nationalism in the UK, said research in 2013 had found little
trace of the phenomenon in Britain, but said there had been a “step-change” in
the past few years.
“There
are many Christians who are very concerned about a framing of Christianity that
they don’t recognise as their own,” she said, adding that the bulk of the
marchers’ rhetoric appeared focused on anti-immigration issues rather than
religion.
The
bishop of Kirkstall, Arun Arora, who is the co-lead for racial justice in the
Church of England, said the display of the cross on protest marches was not the
cross of Christ “but rather a fashion accessory utilised by opportunists”.
This
week, Thomas was branded “an idiot” by the man he and two co-conspirators tried
to kidnap at knifepoint in 2016. The trio had wrongly accused their victim of
stealing £10,000 of drugs from them. Thomas pleaded guilty to attempted
kidnapping and was jailed for two years; a judge condemned all three men for
their “stupidity”. Thomas is due in court again in October, accused of going
into a restricted zone in Dover earlier this year, and of threatening
behaviour.
There is
some uncertainty about whether he can maintain momentum and continue to rally
units of protesters. But Thomas has described the Dover protest as a “dummy
run” and local politicians remain uneasy.
Tony
Vaughan, Labour MP in the neighbouring Folkestone and Hythe constituency, said
he was concerned by the group’s “significant online coordination” that had
allowed it to bring people into Kent “at very short notice
and under the radar”. Police needed to “be alert to this tactic and have the
intelligence and resources to respond effectively”, he said, to prevent further
“intimidation and disruption”.
As Oil Prices Rise, BRICS Leaders Have What U.S. Doesn’t: Iran at the Table
As Oil
Prices Rise, BRICS Leaders Have What U.S. Doesn’t: Iran at the Table
Even so,
finding unity among the loose grouping of emerging economies will be difficult
as the war in the Middle East strains their own interests.
BRICS
signage in New Delhi on Friday. The Indian capital has largely been shut down
for the meeting.Credit...Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters
By David Pierson and Alex Travelli
Reporting
from New Delhi
Sept. 12,
2026Updated 2:30 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/world/asia/brics-summit-china-india-russia-iran.html
The
summit of the BRICS group of emerging economies is designed to show what world
leadership looks like when the West is not in the room.
And as widening
clashes in the Middle East send global
energy prices soaring, the gathering in New Delhi this weekend gives the
leaders of China, India and Russia something Washington does not have: a seat
at the table with Iran.
Prime
Minister Narendra Modi of India is hosting the BRICS club — named after its
earliest members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — that has been
conceived as a counterweight to the West.
The
Indian capital has largely been shut down for the meeting. Soldiers in khaki
uniforms carrying rifles patrolled the streets, and steel road blocks cluttered
the city center. Highways leading from the airport were also blanketed with
BRICS signs depicting Mr. Modi alongside slogans such as: “Together we build,
together we rise.”
That
slogan points to the hope that the BRICS group has of projecting solidarity
among its membership, which has expanded in recent years to include countries
such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia. The
message of unity stands in contrast to the global friction emanating from the
Trump administration’s tariffs and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which has
disrupted global energy corridors.
In
reality, expectations are low that BRICS, a loose bloc, will be able to step up
to fill that gap in leadership, let alone broker a diplomatic off-ramp to the
crisis in the Middle East.
The group
has been split by tensions between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, a U.S.
security partner that has been targeted by thousands of Iranian ballistic
missiles, cruise missiles and drones since the war started in February.
Divisions prevented the group from producing a joint statement in May after a
meeting of BRICS foreign ministers. (The U.A.E. sent Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed
bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, who arrived on Friday.)
“The
world is really rapidly fracturing, and in theory that’s really kind of what
the BRICS have been saying all along,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the
Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “But they’re really wildly
underperforming.”
“It’s
very difficult to have such a big and expanded club of countries that are
united by their animosity to Western hegemony but have very different
interests, sometimes opposing each other, sometimes at war with each other,” he
added.
A Stage
for Iran
Both
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran,
whose countries are mired in wars and under fierce pressure from the West in
the form of sanctions, moved quickly on Friday to press their agendas even
before the summit started.
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Mr.
Pezeshkian criticized U.S. power and urged fellow members to build alternative
financial tools to protect themselves from Western pressure. “Who said it
should decide for the entire world, that others have no rights, and that
whatever they want everyone else has to obey?” he said in a speech. “This is
something we will not accept.”
Image
President
Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran, left, with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia,
center, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, during a group photo on
Friday.Credit...Pool photo by Dmitry Azarov
Mr. Modi,
however, used a meeting with Mr. Pezeshkian on Friday to deliver a pointed
message, urging him to safeguard “freedom of navigation and commerce” — a tacit
reference to the chokeholds on the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea that
threaten India’s own fuel imports.
That
messaging is the kind of global leadership that Mr. Modi wants to be seen
exercising. He does not share the same opposition to the West as Mr. Putin and
Mr. Pezeshkian, embodying instead India’s historical preference for
nonalignment and strategic friendships with powers from across the ideological
spectrum. India’s chief
rival for influence in the group is China, which has sought to use BRICS to
displace U.S. power.
The
summit is an opportunity for Mr. Modi to burnish his statesman credentials at a
time when his political power at home has weakened and the Indian economy
continues to take a back seat to China’s.
Will the
Chinese and Iranian Leaders Meet?
The
Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, arrived for the summit on Saturday, but officials
have not said if he will meet with Mr. Pezeshkian.
Iran is
Beijing’s closest strategic partner in the Middle East, but China also has
economic ties with Persian Gulf states that have been targeted by Iranian
strikes.
At a
recent regional security summit in Kyrgyzstan, Mr. Xi and Mr. Pezeshkian met
only briefly on the sidelines rather than in a separate bilateral meeting.
That
fueled speculation that Beijing was unhappy over the war and the closure of the
Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Xi could have also been distancing himself from Tehran to
avoid provoking President Trump, whom he is scheduled to meet in Washington
later this month.
“A
substantive bilateral meeting in New Delhi would therefore carry significance
well beyond protocol,” said Hamidreza Azizi, senior Iran analyst at the
International Crisis Group.
“It could
help clarify whether China still sees Iran as a strategic partner worth
investing political capital in at a moment of acute pressure, or whether
Beijing is increasingly keeping Tehran at arm’s length,” Mr. Azizi said.
Perhaps
more important to China is Mr. Xi’s meeting with Mr. Modi later in the day.
Image
BRICS
summit banners in New Delhi depicting Mr. Putin, Mr. Modi and Xi Jinping,
China’s leader, who will be visiting India for the first time in seven years to
attend the summit.Credit...Manish Swarup/Associated Press
Mr. Xi’s
visit is the first he has made to India in seven years, and is a sign of the
continued stabilization of relations between Beijing and New Delhi. Ties hit a
low in 2020 following a clash of Indian and Chinese forces in a disputed border
region.
For South
Africa, It’s Complicated.
Other
leaders arriving in New Delhi brought their own awkward entanglements with the
group’s Western-skeptic tilt.
President
Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa shares Mr. Modi’s preference for using BRICS to
build relationships across the globe. But the coalition has also created
diplomatic headaches for Pretoria.
In
January, South Africa was criticized by the Trump administration for allowing
Iran to participate in BRICS naval drills off the South African coast at a
time when the Iranian government faced accusations of fatally crushing street
protests in Iran.
Mr.
Ramaphosa said that China was running the exercises and that South African
waters were chosen because of the convenient location.
South
African officials have been disappointed that the bloc has not been able to
reach consensus opinions on divisive conflicts like the wars in Iran and Gaza,
said David Africa, an international relations analyst based in Cape Town.
“South
Africa has knocked its head and realizes it won’t extract much diplomatically
on the issues it’s concerned about,” Mr. Africa said. Instead, he said, South
Africa is likely to focus on economic issues like trade, business and
development at the summit.
Demoting
the Dollar?
One of
the BRICS group’s most ambitious economic goals is to reduce global reliance on
the dollar.
“De-dollarization,”
as the effort is known, would throw a lifeline to countries like Russia and
Iran, which have struggled to pay for imported goods since the United States
and other Western countries restricted their access to the dollar.
The
dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is an “exorbitant privilege”
for the United States, economists say — and it’s a privilege that Mr. Trump
intends to keep. At the start of his second term, he wrote that any country
trying to “create a new BRICS Currency” to circumvent the dollar
could “say goodbye to selling into the beautiful U.S. economy.”
An
alternative reserve currency is not realistic at this point. But many countries
that benefit from having the dollar as the world’s standard legal tender —
India, for instance, which fears a financial future dominated by China — still
want to see its dominance decrease. India has proposed that BRICS countries
should link their banking systems more directly, allowing them to pay debts to
one another without converting sums into dollars.
It is
already buying oil from Russia using rupees and rubles.
Reporting
was contributed by Valerie Hopkins in Moscow, Rania Khaled in Cairo, John
Eligon in Johannesburg and Yeganeh Torbati in Istanbul.
David Pierson covers
Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the
world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
Alex Travelli is a
correspondent based in New Delhi, writing about business and economic
developments in India and the rest of South Asia.
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