Dover in Balaclavas: Britain's Far Right Rehearses Its Next Move

On Saturday 5 September, hundreds of men in black clothing and balaclavas locked arms across the A20 and shut down the main road into the Port of Dover for hours. The next day, a similar crowd tried to block coaches carrying migrants in Portsmouth. Kent Police called the Dover blockade “spontaneous”. It was nothing of the sort: it had been organised for weeks by Daniel Thomas, a far-right influencer known online as Danny Tommo, through a group called Patriot Platform that he founded in June 2026.

Thomas is not a new face. He served two years for a knifepoint kidnapping attempt, then emerged as a close associate of Tommy Robinson, harassing migrants and aid workers on the beaches of Calais until France banned him. He was separately banned from Dover, Ramsgate and Folkestone in August — and organised a mass blockade there anyway less than a month later. None of this is incompetence on the far right's part. It is exactly the “boxing clever” discipline Thomas has told his own followers to practise: masked, coordinated, camera-ready, and calibrated to stay just inside the law while terrorising migrants and anyone who gets in the way.

What should worry anyone paying attention is not really Thomas himself, who is a symptom, but the vacuum he is moving into. Hope Not Hate has documented his network's history of violence against women and warned that police “inaction” let a small, plotted event balloon into a nationally organised blockade of critical infrastructure. A Labour MP wants mutual aid from the Met on standby. A government minister called it “dressing up in costumes” rather than name what a coordinated, masked paramilitary-style mobilisation against migrants actually is. Meanwhile Reform UK's Robert Jenrick, who claims to oppose the balaclavas, spent his airtime validating the underlying “frustration” that supposedly justifies them. This is the same script as every other country's slide: liberal politicians tut about tactics while accepting the premise, and the actual organising space is ceded to men with convictions for violence.

The premise itself is a lie built for the cameras. Channel crossings in 2026 are down 43% on the same point last year — not a flood, a decline. The people in the boats are fleeing Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iran, and the Home Office's own figures count over two thousand of them as likely trafficking or modern slavery victims. None of that stops Patriot Platform from filming migrants on beaches for content, nor stops the state from handing Border Force the job of deciding where terrified people get landed — in this case, by sheer bureaucratic carelessness, at the exact ferry stage from which Thomas's own local supporters could be summoned within hours.

Antifascists in Britain and everywhere else should read Dover for what Thomas himself said it was: a “warning”, a rehearsal for something “more powerful” next time. The response cannot be limited to hoping better policing intelligence catches the next blockade before it happens. It has to include naming who organises this, tracking the money and platforms that let a man with Thomas's record build a mass following in three months, and standing physically with migrants and the aid workers being hunted on both sides of the Channel. The right doesn't need a majority to win the street. It needs an opposition too polite to say what it's looking at.

Sources

BBC News: What we know about anti-migrant protests and organiser Danny Thomas
The Guardian: Black-clad Dover vigilantes will return if police do not act, say campaigners
Hope Not Hate: Patriot Platform - Danny Tommo's handpicked men convicted of violence against women