As Westminster’s attention was pulled across the Atlantic, shocking scenes unfolded in the Channel on the night of Andy Burnham’s trip to the UN.
Daniel Thomas, aka Danny Tommo – the Tommy Robinson associate whose balaclava-clad anti-migrant Patriot Platform disrupted Dover port earlier this month – appeared in video footage to slash a dinghy with a knife while there was still a French rescue worker onboard. The incident occurred during a rescue of 60 migrants who had spent more than 33 hours at sea after departing from Normandy. He followed in his own boat, and the passengers had to be transferred to a Border Force boat and taken on an alternative route.
Thomas has also had confrontations with the UK lifeboat service, RNLI. The day following the Dover protest, he assembled hundreds of supporters in Portsmouth in an attempt to block the arrival of a boat at Eastney Landing port, where footage revealed shouts of “traitor” and “scum” at the crew assisting there. Photos of the lifeboat volunteers were posted on social media, where there were calls to identify them and their families.
The night of his pursuit of the migrant boat, Thomas’s masked supporters gathered at Gosport, Hampshire, where it was rumoured the migrants would be taken ashore. According to a Times report, the chant “let them drown” was sung by a child over a megaphone, and police officers faced hostility and assault.
Why draw attention to this stunt? Thomas is known as a hot-headed, impulsive attention-seeker who’s always on to some new scheme. In the past he has tried to mobilise Brits to travel en masse to Calais to stop people making the Channel crossing. This merely resulted in about a dozen blokes waving a flag on the beach, shouting into the sea. He has been banned from France. And his previous fundraising efforts to buy a boat to stop dinghies in the Channel himself had previously failed (the boat sank).
Now, as one close and long-time Tommo-watcher put it to me, he is seeing “success”. The direct action at Dover was organised in secret; he was able to use his new Patriot Platform network to mobilise hundreds of men without publicly advertising the demo (far-right and anti-migrant protests are usually publicised for weeks in advance). He was also, simply through YouTube, able to gather a spontaneous group of more than a hundred people at Portsmouth the next day.
Now, it seems he has succeeded in encountering a genuine “small boat” at sea and attempted to interfere in the process of taking the migrants it was carrying to shore. As I have recently reported, pockets of vigilantism have been growing across Britain in recent years. This is something anti-fascist campaign groups such as Hope Not Hate have been warning about and drawing attention to for a while: so-called patrols, “citizen journalists” and “auditors” live-streaming from asylum accommodation sites. Attacks on properties believed to house asylum seekers in Belfast and Thetford, and the storming of a hotel rumoured to be housing asylum seekers (it was actually a Pakistani cricket team), are recent examples.
This vigilantism is happening with relative levels of “success”, and it appears the government still hasn’t woken up to what is happening – with the authorities, from police services to RNLI crews, caught off-guard and exposed. Without loud, widespread and repeated political condemnation, the government risks allowing Britain to drift into a quiet acceptance of street (and sea) thuggery – an attitude I reported on in a Kent village where some of Thomas’s men had stayed the night before their Dover protest.
If it isn’t a national priority to condemn and stop such lawlessness, then one result is beginning to feel bleakly inevitable. As with the break-ins and burning of houses in Belfast, the mob will come face-to-face with the migrant. They will infiltrate a hotel or stop a boat or find a house without any authorities present or powerful enough to stop them. And what will they do then?
[Further reading: You should know what the AfD means]
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Subscribe here to commentInteresting that the author seeks to treat the symptom and not the cause of the anger and frustration expressed by so may of the British public
In medical terms is quite usual for symptoms to be treated alongside an illness itself. So when the symptoms are as serious as trying to drown people at sea, I think it’s quite right that they’re treated.
Another mistake you’ve made is to think that people like Daniel Thomas are solely motivated by “concerns” about immigration. Blokes like that hold anti-democratic, misogynistic, homophobic views, and can be bought and paid for by almost anyone. There are increasing levels of crankery in the UK, and it isn’t only being spurred by immigration. Stuff like Liz Truss revisionism, 15 minute cities paranoia, or COVID conspiracies aren’t given life by legitimate causes. They come into being by way of stupid people overestimating the worth of their opinions. If you go around trying to molly-coddle every halfwit, all you’ll do is saddle to the greater mass of humanity with a ball and chain.
You wouldn’t want that, would you?
I guess my last comment did not pass the ‘woke sensor’