The fury of the masses, Dover edition.

The fury of the masses, Dover edition. By Tom Slater in spiked.

The summer of 2024 brought riots. The summer of 2025 brought protests outside of migrant hotels. Now the summer of 2026 ends with hundreds of masked men in Dover, stopping traffic and chanting ‘Stop the boats’, and hundreds more in Portsmouth, blocking bus-loads of illegal migrants bound for processing centres. …

It is already being slurred as ‘far right’ by the newspapers and ‘thuggish’ by the government. But the truth, if anything, should be more alarming for the powers-that-be. Here was an organic, spur-of-the-moment uprising against illegal migration that could be a taste of things to come.

Word got out on Sunday that a dinghy, carrying 140 migrants, had arrived in Portsmouth’s Eastney Landing. Nationalist activist Danny Tommo (real name Daniel Thomas), an acolyte of Tommy Robinson, showed up. Tommo and a few others hopped into the water, refusing to move, while he called out over a livestream for ‘lads’ from across the country to descend on the ferry port and stop the buses, carrying the migrants, from leaving.

It worked. Hundreds arrived outside. …

 

Danny Tommo calls on patriots to go to Eastney, Portsmouth to stop migrants

 

This came only a day after the black-clad blockade in Dover, where a large group of activists, all in balaclavas, shut down the Kent port for hours on end, leaving a trail of traffic and stranded ferries in its wake. This was also the work of Tommo …

The only beverages consumed appeared to be bottled water, handed out at the roadside by well-wishers. It all took Kent Police entirely by surprise: a statement insisted the protest was ‘spontaneous’, despite the visible evidence to the contrary. … With no riot police or counter-protesters to clash with, this flash blockade came and went without any violence or arrests. …

Dover was an act of almost cosplay paramilitarism, for the delectation of the smartphone streaming cameras – echoing the aesthetics of Ulster loyalism, to which Tommyworld has long had links. Portsmouth, by contrast, was more haphazard, on-the-fly, suggesting Tommo – and Robinson – can now call non-trivial numbers of people out on to the streets at will.

The images from Dover flushed out more than a little hypocrisy. Left-wingers who turned a blind eye to masked-up Islamic sectarians marching up and down east London, or scrawny antifa types menacing gender-critical women for daring to gather in public, were suddenly clutching their pearls now that white working-class blokes were donning the same clobber. Meanwhile, right-wingers who all of five seconds ago were calling for face-coverings to be banned suddenly seemed to have found an exception, pretending that the sight of hundreds of men ballied up in public wasn’t menacing at all and was purely about evading facial-recognition cameras and state persecution. But this weekend’s remarkable scenes demand more than a discussion about the boundaries of permissible protest.

The state clearly views these demos primarily as a public-order problem, as a new ‘far right’ threat to be crushed rather than understood. …

Our rulers are obsessing over the symptoms rather than the cause – the deep sense of injustice over illegal migration that is now compelling some to take matters into their own hands. Vigilante border control is only the regrettable, but entirely predictable, consequence of catastrophic state failure. …

The political class can burble on about our humanitarian commitments or the legal complexity of the situation as much as it likes. What ordinary people see is migrants not only violating our sovereign borders but also being assisted in doing so – escorted into British waters before being picked up by British vessels and delivered on to British soil. The fact we have become accustomed to all this doesn’t make it any more normal.

It’s almost like Boston Harbor, 1773. British men protesting for liberty against a gargantuan state.