Who is Danny Tommo, the man behind anti-migrant protests in southern England?

Last weekend, the south coast of England experienced anti-migrant protests in the port towns of Dover and Portsmouth. On Saturday morning, a highly organized group of up to 500 black-clad, masked men blocked the main roads leading to the port of Dover, a major arrival point for illegal migrants crossing from France in small boats. The non-violent protest caught police off guard as demonstrators carried legal rights paperwork and had lawyers on standby. On Sunday evening, another spontaneous protest erupted in Portsmouth, 190km west, after a dinghy carrying 140 illegal migrants arrived. Masked protesters confronted British border officials attempting to transport the migrants to a processing center in Kent, resulting in scuffles with the police.

Both protests were organized by Daniel Thomas, a 37-year-old anti-migration agitator who goes by "Danny Tommo" on social media. Thomas has been active in Britain's hard-right scene for the past decade following his release from prison for a 2016 attempted kidnapping conviction. He operates within the alliance between Britain's political hard right and the right-wing Christian evangelical movement. The Dover protest was held under the banner of the Patriot Platform, a group Thomas launched this year to engage in "direct action." During the Portsmouth incident, Thomas filmed himself confronting the police, threatening to call 1,000 men to the scene, after which several hundred protesters arrived.

Thomas has a close ten-year relationship with Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), Britain's most prominent hard-right figurehead, for whom Thomas has served as a bodyguard. Although Robinson was not directly involved in the Dover or Portsmouth protests, he actively promoted and defended the actions of the protesters and Thomas on the social media platform X. These recent events indicate that Britain's anti-migrant movement is becoming increasingly organized and willing to take direct action, with its most active growth centered on the south coast, even though official government figures show small boat arrivals are in steep decline.