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Just a few days ago, Daniel “Tommo” Thomas let a group of fellow far-right sympathisers in the north-west of England into a secret. “Groups of men all across the United Kingdom are joining up as one, as one group of resistance,” said Thomas, a convicted kidnapper who is a former bodyguard to Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. “Something is about to go down and it is about to send a fucking shock wave. What is the end goal of all of this? It is to start something that will then snowball. Once we pull this off it will then snowball across the country.”
The trigger event prophesied by Thomas in a YouTube video last week came to pass on Saturday morning, when hundreds of masked men dressed in black appeared on the streets of Dover. By occupying key roundabouts at 7am, the group caused a 4-mile-long queue of traffic along the A20, closing it in both directions. Perhaps more significantly, a uniformed gathering that brought to mind the black shirts of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s forcefully grabbed the nation’s attention.
The spillover – the metastasising of the Dover shock to the system – soon followed in Portsmouth on Sunday. Thomas’s new organisation – Patriot Platform – joined a local demonstration being staged in protest at the arrival of a mega-dinghy of asylum seekers in the Solent, and then pushed it to go further.
The mission was not to “wave flags … thinking somehow that it was going to save us”, as Thomas characterised most far-right activity in the UK in recent years, but to block those who had landed from moving on from Eastney marina, near Portsmouth, where the 120 asylum seekers were being held.
The men in black were there again in uniform and sought to display what Thomas said was a new way of doing things: acting with purpose, an understanding of the law and a discipline in how they behaved. Not that everything went quite to plan as they stood at 2am in front of a lineup of riot police standing on the road leading to the marina.
“We’ve taken the collar number of every one of these officers,” announced Thomas, as the faces of the police were lit up by his phone in the 2am gloom. He was livestreaming to about 15,000 viewers of his YouTube channel.
“The ICP … IPCC will be contacted by our lawyers,” Thomas told the officers and for the benefit of those watching online, “and if you do anything apart from what your inspector told you to do … It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. If you commit violence to the person, the IPCC will deal with you. You know that, you know that.”
There was no visible reaction from the weary-looking officers from Hampshire police. The protest had been going on for hours. But someone was niggled by something that had been said.
“IOPC, mate,” chirped an unidentified male at Thomas’s side.
“Eh?” responded Thomas.
“IOPC, mate,” the man repeated.
“What?” asked Thomas, tetchily.
“It’s IOPC,” chimed in a couple of the other balaclava wearing men, correcting their leader on the acronym for the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
“No, it’s IPCC isn’t it? International … Independent Police Complaints Commission. Am I right, am I right?”
Thomas was not right and he later appeared to make a bigger mistake. “Oh no – who’s got my fucking keys,” he groaned, as he and his peers left the harbour around 4am.
“Fuck,” said Thomas before ending his live stream. “If there were 10,000 lads here it would be different,” he told his disappointed viewers of the decision to accept the police’s dispersal order. “There’s about 200 lads, not even that,” said Thomas looking around. “You know what – I’m done.”
It may not have been perfect – but for all the elements of farce on display in Portsmouth, the events of recent days suggest that those behind the latest wave of anti-migrant unrest to hit the south coast of England are, as Thomas told his followers, “starting to do things differently” – and they want people to know it.
On a sunny Saturday morning in Dover, it had been Anthony Barnes, who goes by the pseudonym AY Audits or the Hotel Inspector, who was providing rolling footage to his 134,000 YouTube subscribers. A regular at demonstrations outside hotels accommodating asylum seekers, Barnes, 46, is due in court later this month for allegedly breaking a community protection notice banning him from Surrey.
Breathing heavily, Barnes, a thick-set man, told his viewers as he walked on the seafront in Dover that “something is happening”. “I’ve got a funny feeling we are about to see the first resistance of the Patriot Platform,” he panted. It was Barnes’ contention that they were “making history”.
Thomas, a former tank driver with the King’s Royal Hussars who was medically discharged before seeing active service and previously drew attention as a regular visitor to London’s Speakers’ Corner where he filmed himself arguing with Muslims, has been working on Patriot Platform for a number of months.
Doubts had been voiced that anything would come of it, but he has been travelling the country, visiting gatherings of far-right political parties and anti-migration meetings, seeking to bring the disparate far-right movement together.
The apparent modus operandi of Patriot Platform – generating coordinated flashmobs and maintaining discipline in dress and conduct – appears to borrow heavily from the anarchist left as well as from groups such as Extinction Rebellion.
Thomas told his black-shirted followers in Portsmouth – who had joined what was initially a local demonstration at the interception of a large dinghy in the Solent between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight – that he also had the best lawyers advising him.
“Tommy has given me his absolute word that every man here has the very best representation possible,” Thomas told them, later citing article 10 and 11 of the Human Rights Act at police in defence of his group’s right to assemble.
The gathering in Dover and Portsmouth were told not to film or take photographs, a tactic that was used by far-right agitators in Belfast during recent riots there. And while the police have faced criticism for an intelligence failure before the Dover blockade, there is seemingly tight control over communications.
“They are operating in a cell-like structure, where regional organisers are putting together the groups,” said one veteran researcher of the far right, who admitted that it had been more difficult than usual to get into the organising groups online.
“It’s almost like a spiderweb where you have lots of hyper-regional groups – Essex or Sussex patriots and so on – then ostensibly with a network above it,” added Joe Mulhall, the director research at Hope Not Hate. “And that is almost like the way football hooligans have operated. Thomas is the leader of the firm and then sends messages off to each group, who themselves each has a public facing element with Facebook groups and the like.”
Mulhall said there was a religious tint to the new organisation. “Patriot Platform is a self-professed Christian ‘army of patriots’ formed to, in Thomas’s words, ‘reclaim our borders, restore order and send a clear message: Britain belongs to the British people’,” he said. “The group functions as a vigilante unit to combat immigration and revive what it says are Christian values, ready to spring into action across the country at Thomas’s word.”
In Portsmouth, Thomas had encouraged his followers to chant: “Christ is king”.
The government has condemned what Emma Reynolds, the chief secretary to the Treasury, described as the “thuggish and intimidating behaviour” in Dover and Portsmouth. But not everyone experienced it in that way.
Police and coastguard vehicles were damaged in Portsmouth and a small number of officers were injured by flying objects, but there were no arrests. The crowd did leave the marina, albeit reluctantly, once a dispersal order had been executed.
Sue Dewey, a member of the boat and sailing club Eastney Cruising Association, said some staff members had been trapped at her club and had to sleep on sofas all night, but she expressed her own concerns about the small boat landings.
“It didn’t get too rough, but I did get the smell of wacky baccy floating up to my balcony,” she said. “This is the closest I’ve been to an insurrection. I’m unhappy at the way it’s going. These people are here illegally and the French are enabling them to come. This should make Andy Burnham wake up to what is going on.”
Mark Calcut, who was walking his dog near the scene on Monday morning, said he did not attend the demonstration but dismissed the idea that what had happened was thuggery. “I know people who attended – they were just ordinary people trying to stop that boat coming in here,” he said.
On Monday afternoon, the Reform UK home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, visited Portsmouth and met Thomas, who said Reform should not criticise his followers for wearing balaclavas. “What do you expect the men of this country to do when they see violence against women, sexual assaults, what would you do as a man … just wait?” he asked.
Thomas told Yusuf that the men wearing masks were not doing wrong and were instructed not to take drugs, drink, shout or carry out acts of violence. He insisted what they were doing was lawful and said children were shaking hands with them at the protest in Dover.
Yusuf said he would take the message back to the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage. “I think it’s important we listen to people,” he said of Thomas. “He was making his points respectfully. It was a respectful conversation.”
