They came by night from all over England. Hundreds of men in black, their faces hidden by black balaclavas, descended on the ports of southern England.
At dawn on Sept. 5, as many as 200 men seized the rotaries on the approaches to Britain’s busiest port, Dover in Kent.
The men in black took the police by surprise. For four hours, they blocked the highway to London and disrupted England’s lifeline to the European continent.
The next night, they descended on Southsea, near the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth, Hampshire after a British lifeboat landed a “mega-dinghy” of 140 illegal immigrants who had crossed the English Channel from France. Separately, local protestors blocked the coaches that the British government uses to ferry the illegal immigrants to hotels, while the men in black faced off against riot police into the small hours.
They returned to the Hampshire coast on Sept. 21. This time, they forced the rescue vessels to dock at Dover.
The next day, their leader, Danny “Tommo” Thomas, and a small crew took to the seas to head off two dinghy-loads of illegal immigrants.
“This is England!” Tommo shouted as he slashed at a dinghy with a knife.
They call themselves Patriot Platform. They are next-generation English vigilantes.
England’s ports are once more its frontline against invasion. The illegal immigrants who cross the English Channel from France and Belgium and claim asylum in England are the customers of global trafficking networks.
Instead of turning the illegals back, Britain’s government takes them in. This is the first of many breaches in public trust that are radicalizing ordinary Britons against their government and making them sympathetic to extremists such as Patriot Platform.
The government gives the new arrivals taxpayer-funded welfare and free accommodation. It gives them taxpayer-funded lawyers who coach them on how to work the asylum system. It refuses to release statistics confirming that, as elsewhere in Europe, migrants figure disproportionately in rape and murder statistics.
Many of the illegal immigrants drop their passports into the English Channel before claiming asylum as refugees under false names and nationalities. Processing an asylum case can take years. Meanwhile, they can come and go from their hotels and camps.
The British state is partnering with organized crime against the British people. The taxpayers are forced to subsidize the invasion of their country and tolerate appalling crimes in the name of diversity.
The British state has broken the social contract. It is deliberately failing to honor the elementary duties of democratic government.
It surrendered its borders to international law and its immigration policy to activist lawyers and bureaucrats. It created an immigrant crime crisis that it refuses to acknowledge.
It uses “two-tier” policing, indulging the violence and intimidation of the Islamo-leftist alliance in the streets while prosecuting members of the law-abiding majority for daring to object as the English way of life is demolished before their eyes.
The result is both predictable and terrifying: the breakdown of law and order amid ethnic and extremist mobilization.
As in blue-state America, street politics in England already features black-clad, masked Antifa units and black-clad, masked gangs of Islamists marauding through their streets and shouting “Allahu akbar.”
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. Identity politics for one group means identity politics for all. Patriot Platform is the native English on the march.
Patriot Platform’s leader, Danny “Tommo” Thomas, is a 37-year-old father-of-four who served as a tank driver with the King’s Royal Hussars. After leaving the Army, he was jailed for joining the attempted armed kidnapping of a drug dealer. He became a born-again Christian in prison.
When Tommo got out, he connected with English nationalists including the popular hero Tommy Robinson. He set up Patriot Platform in June.
“The time for polite silence is over,” Patriot Platform’s website says. “Stand shoulder to shoulder with fellow patriots who refuse to let Britain fall.”
Patriot Platform harnesses the organization and strategies of the radical Left and the Islamists to the goals of white identity politics. Its membership, which Tommo numbers at 40,000, is cellular and decentralized. It uses online secrecy, flash mobs and masks to outsmart the police.
Previous nationalist groups such as Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League were shambolic. Like the Islamists, Patriot Platform is against drink and drugs. Like Antifa, it affects paramilitary style. And while Robinson’s followers bellowed soccer chants, Tommo’s echo the MAGA war cry “Christ is King.”
Tommo calls for discipline and “coordinated lawful action.” Patriot Platform, he says, is building “the practical infrastructure” for a national movement that will document and confront the state’s complicity with illegal immigration.
Britain has seen nothing like this since the 1930s, when Oswald Mosley and his “blackshirts” marched for fascism.
This is the nightmare scenario that Britain’s security services have long feared.
In Hampshire, Tommo’s men beat the mighty British state. The county police commissioner, Donna Jones, said the burden on her officers is now “unsustainable.” She and local leaders called on Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary in London, to stop the landings in Hampshire.
The next skirmish will be in Piddington, near Oxford. The government plans to dump over 1,250 illegal immigrants at a disused military site next to a village of little more than 350 people.
Shabana Mahmood promises to use “the full force of the law” if Patriot Platform marches on Piddington. But Mahmood of all people should know that Britain has already crossed the Rubicon of ethnic mobilization. How else did she win her seat in Parliament?
Dominic Green (@DrDominicGreen) is a Wall Street Journal Free Expression columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
