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”.
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