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 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”.
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.
He said the rhetoric, the optics and the movement’s recruitment strategy all represented a shift. 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.
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