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/EPAView image in fullscreenFrom 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/EPAA militaristic operation with features of influencer culture, the new anti-migrant movement seems to show a shift in tactics and rhetoric 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.View image in fullscreenDaniel 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.View image in fullscreenOswald Mosley speaking at a rally in Leeds in 1936. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty ImagesTo 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 childre
