On Sunday, a 14-metre inflatable boat carrying around 140 migrants reached the south coast of England after an unusually long and perilous journey from Utah Beach in Normandy, far to the west of the areas around Calais and Dunkirk from which the overwhelming majority of illegal small-boat migrants have so far attempted to cross the English Channel. The journey had taken around 11 hours and was roughly three times as long as the usual crossing between Calais and Dover.
It was the first recorded migrant boat to have departed from so far west, and possibly yet another example of the familiar dynamic of Britain’s migrant crisis: when the authorities put pressure on one route, the smugglers find another.
The passengers were picked up by lifeboats from the RNLI, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Portsmouth Harbour and Southampton, however, refused to receive them, citing a lack of suitable facilities, after which they were brought ashore at Eastney in Portsmouth.
There, several hundred people were waiting. For three hours, they blocked the only road in and out, preventing the three buses that were supposed to transport the migrants onwards from leaving.
The previous day, a similar action had taken place in Dover, where several hundred black-clad, masked men appeared early in the morning and blocked key roads to and from the port, causing tailbacks stretching for miles.
The actions were organised by the newly formed Patriot Platform under the leadership of Daniel Thomas, better known as Danny Tommo and formerly a bodyguard for Tommy Robinson. And they differ in one crucial respect from the many anti-migration demonstrations to which Britain has by now become accustomed: their purpose was not merely to protest, but to act.
For years, Britons have demonstrated against illegal migration across the Channel. They have protested outside migrant hotels, voted for parties promising to regain control of the border, and Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom demonstrations have drawn enormous crowds in London.
But the boats keep coming.
The actions in Dover and Portsmouth are therefore difficult to regard as anything other than an escalation. The demonstrators physically placed themselves in the way, but made considerable efforts to do so within the boundaries of the law and with respect for the police and rescue services.
Patriot Platform itself describes its purpose as turning concern into organisation and organisation into “lawful, purposeful action”. Danny Tommo has insisted on discipline and non-violence and warned that violence would destroy everything the movement is trying to build.
The demonstrators in Dover had even brought with them copies of the UK Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in DPP v Ziegler, which concerns, among other things, the relationship between the right to peaceful protest and criminal liability for obstructing the highway. In other words, they were acutely conscious of how far British law permits a protest to go, and according to Tommo, the group also had lawyers in telephone contact with senior police officers.
They did not set out to disregard the law, but with the law in their hands to find its outer limits. And when Hampshire Police, after hours of confrontation in Portsmouth, issued a dispersal order, the demonstrators left the area. Reluctantly, certainly — but they left.
It is this detail that makes Portsmouth so interesting.
At first glance, the images suggest something else: masked men dressed in black, organised in groups, communicating by walkie-talkie and capable of mobilising at very short notice. Patriot Platform has deliberately organised itself in a way that makes it harder for the authorities and counter-protesters to know in advance where the group will appear.
But the masks, too, have a context. When Tommo was asked after Portsmouth about the covered faces, he explained that people were hiding their identities because they did not want to be identified and branded “far right”.
Only a few months earlier, on 16 May, the Metropolitan Police had, in connection with the Unite the Kingdom demonstration in London, used Live Facial Recognition for the first time as part of the policing of a protest. Afterwards, police reviewed video footage in order to identify people suspected of offences.
The authorities are thus expanding their capacity to identify demonstrators, while demonstrators are organising themselves in ways that make them harder to identify and monitor.
This is what a crisis of legitimacy looks like when it takes another step.
The rule of law depends not only on citizens respecting the law, but also on their trusting the state to enforce it. And that is precisely the distinction Portsmouth exposes: confidence in the law remains, while confidence in the authorities is disappearing.
That is why they are now trying to stop the buses themselves.
There is a crucial difference between shouting at the state and physically standing in its way. The first is protest; the second is direct action. But there is also a crucial difference between direct action within the bounds of the law and an actual rebellion against the state — and that is precisely where Patriot Platform has, for now, positioned itself.
Danny Tommo has made no secret of the fact that Dover and Portsmouth are not intended to be isolated events. After Dover, he wrote: “This is only the beginning”, and he has said that support for Patriot Platform has far exceeded his expectations.
That suggests that the demonstrations against illegal immigration and the authorities’ inability to stop it may now be giving way to concrete action.
The paradox — and the heartbreaking part — is that the demonstrators have not turned their backs on the rule of law. On the contrary, they are still appealing to it: they examine what the law allows, try to go exactly that far and no further, and disperse when the police order them to do so.
What is disturbing is that citizens in a Western democracy have lost so much confidence in the authorities charged with enforcing the law and controlling the country’s borders that they are beginning to physically obstruct the actions of those authorities themselves.
What from a distance may look like the beginning of a rebellion against the British rule of law can therefore just as readily be understood as a desperate cry to preserve it.
These people are not saying that they no longer want a state that enforces the law and controls the country’s borders.
They are saying that they desperately want it back.
And that may be the most serious signal to emerge from Portsmouth.
