What happened at the weekend with anti-migrant protests in the south of England?
Early on Saturday morning, a crowd of up to 500 black-clad, masked men arrived in the Kent town of Dover and blocked the main roads leading to its port. It is the main arrival point for illegal migrants who make the crossing to Britain from France in small boats.
The protesters chanted the well-worn mantra of the UK’s anti-immigration movement: “Stop the boats.” For several hours until noon they succeeded in their aim, albeit the boats they stopped were mostly passenger ferries going in the other direction.
The non-violent protest was highly organised and caught police off guard. The organisers claimed to have lawyers ready to speak over the phone to police on the ground, while the masked men, who were accompanied by their own contingent of social media streamers, carried paperwork spelling out their legal rights.
On Sunday evening in Portsmouth, 190km west along the coast, another, more spontaneous protest erupted. A dinghy carrying 140 illegal migrants arrived at the Hampshire port, which rarely sees small boat arrivals as it is a much longer crossing than to Dover.
British border officials tried to take the migrants on coaches to an asylum-processing centre in Kent, but were met by an impromptu crowd of protesters, many of whom were masked as those in Dover had been. There were scuffles between police and protesters.
Who was behind the protests?
Both were organised by a well-known British anti-migration agitator, Daniel Thomas (37), who styles himself on social media as “Danny Tommo”.
Thomas has been prominent around Britain’s hard-right activist scene for the past decade, following his release from prison after a two-year sentence for attempted kidnapping in 2016.
Thomas says he became religious after prison. He operates in the growing nexus between Britain’s political hard right and the highly-politicised right-wing Christian evangelical movement with which it has become allied in the past two years.
The Dover protest was carried out under the banner of the Patriot Platform, which he launched this year. He has warned in recent months that his fellow right-wing activists would increasingly engage in the sort of “direct action” that has been more closely associated with some activists on the fringes of the hard left for years.
He said the Dover protest was a “warning” to authorities and a “message … Imagine how powerful the next message will be”.
Barely 36 hours later, Thomas filmed himself confronting police near Portsmouth, not far from his Hayling Island home, as they loaded the newly-landed asylum seekers on to buses to take them to Kent.
“You saw what we did in Dover?” he told officers, panting from running. “I was the organiser … If you don’t stop now, I’m calling 1,000 men to this place.”
Soon afterwards, several hundred protesters showed up.
What is his relationship with Tommy Robinson?
For 10 years Thomas has been viewed as personally close to Robinson, Britain’s best-known hard-right agitator, whose birth name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
Thomas has acted as Robinson’s bodyguard. The Irish Times also saw him in a private area backstage at a right-wing political and religious event organised in London by Robinson last December. He was seen by Robinson’s side again in May for another of his Unite the Kingdom marches down Whitehall.
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Robinson does not appear to have had direct involvement in the protests in Dover or Portsmouth, however. He spent much of Saturday morning suggesting online – apparently incorrectly – that more masked protesters would arrive in shifts to replace any who left.
Robinson still sought to amplify both protests on the social media platform X, commending those involved as “real men” and defending Thomas from criticism.
What are the implications for Britain’s hard-right movement and anti-migrant protests?
Robinson remains its most prominent figurehead, but Dover and Portsmouth show that Britain’s hard-right, anti-migrant movement is becoming more organised.
Its activists are more willing to take direct action on specific issues, albeit official figures from the UK government show the numbers of small boat arrivals are actually in steep decline.
The incidents also confirmed that although much of the media attention on voter attitudes towards immigration focuses on working-class strongholds in England’s north and midlands, the movement’s most burgeoning activism is often found on the south coast.
In addition to the masked protesters in Dover and Portsmouth, there were riots earlier this year in Southampton after the Henry Nowak murder case.
Meanwhile in the seaside town of Bournemouth, urban security patrols by a group with links to activists who have been involved in right-wing movements have been dismissed by critics as “vigilantes”.