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. Welcome to broken-borders Britain, where the long-fraying patience of the public appears to have snapped.

We need to talk about what happened last night in Portsmouth. What really happened. 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. On his livestream, Tommo shouted impromptu speeches at the police, berating them for their cowardice, and joked with port volunteers who brought him and his friends water and blankets. When his phone battery began to run low, he asked for anyone with a boat to deliver him a power bank. An older woman named Joy obliged, showing up on a kayak, leading a million memes to fly on right-wing social media. Tommo told the crowd to leave at around 3am, after the police issued a dispersal order, insisting this was never about violence or getting arrested.

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 first flexing of muscles by his new group, Patriot Platform. Going by his X account, Tommo has spent months meeting people in parks and car parks, cultivating regional groups reminiscent of Robinson’s long-defunct English Defence League, which called on the nation’s football firms to gather in city centres for provocative demonstrations in the 2010s.

The street-protest wing of the radical right, once a byword for geared-up brawling and disorganisation, appears to have developed a measure of revolutionary discipline. In Dover, they assembled early, marching in neat lines. 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.

Dover’s finest were caught so unawares they were reduced to standing back before escorting the masked men back to the train station, despite having new legal powers at their disposal allowing them to ban face coverings at demos and crack down on those obstructing critical infrastructure. With no riot police or counter-protesters to clash with, this flash blockade came and went without any violence or arrests.

Robinson praised the masked Dover men as ‘patriots’, and posted regular updates from Portsmouth, hailing his old understudy. This itself is significant. Robinson has spent the past few years organising his Unite the Kingdom demonstrations, purposefully cultivating a more family friendly vibe, where attendees fly flags and masking up is explicitly discouraged. Tommo, a key figure in the Operation Raise the Colours movement that has taken the nation’s lampposts by storm, now says flag-raising is no longer enough. As public attitudes towards illegal migration are hardening, so are the tactics of these right-wing activist-influencers.

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. But if these protesters were paid-up fascists, they’d have struggled to fill a minibus. The government would do well to ask why there is a growing appetite for this new breed of street nationalism; why working-class people, from Epping to Dover to Portsmouth, many of whom will never have been on a demonstration before in their lives, are now answering the call. 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.

‘Blood is on your hands.’ Those words were sprayed on the ground in Dover on Saturday, outside of a holding facility for migrants – a clear nod to the string of sexual assaults and murders committed by those who should never have been here, and the authorities’ inability to deport these scumbags even after they have inflicted horror on Brits. Last night in Portsmouth, the sister of Rhiannon Whyte, stabbed to death by a Sudanese man who was staying at the migrant hotel Whyte worked in, was reportedly among the crowd. These are, by definition, preventable crimes that have been inflicted on working-class towns disproportionately, purely because the migrant hotels and HMOs there are cheaper.

These are also the places that, at every opportunity, have voted for parties promising to make it stop, which voted for Brexit to take back control of our borders, only for migration to soar and Britain to become borderless. When they spoke up, they were smeared as racists and xenophobes. When voting never seems to work, and when reasonable concerns are met with a hailstorm of vitriol, what are you left with? Despair, or the streets.

The number of migrants crossing the channel might be down 43 per cent this year, as the government never tires of telling us – taking credit for what appears to be a Europe-wide dip in illegal entrants. But it is far from over. The pull factors remain. The ECHR hamstrings deportations. The boats are getting bigger and the routes are getting more perilous, spreading across the English south coast. The 140 migrants who arrived in Portsmouth yesterday set off from the Bay of the Seine, 170 miles from Calais, where small boats usually launch from given it looks out over the narrowest part of the English Channel. French vessels shadowed the dinghy for 10 hours before it reached UK waters and was picked up by lifeboats from the Isle of Wight. A reception centre was hastily erected in Portsmouth, complete with blankets, clothes and buses to spirit the newcomers away to the Manston processing centre in Kent.

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. And now here they are, coming ashore in Portsmouth, historic home of the Royal Navy. The symbolism couldn’t be more potent if Tommy Robinson had scripted it all himself.

This should all go without saying, but here goes anyway. Peaceful protest is a right, violent or disruptive protest is not. Wearing balaclavas is a funny way to make women and children feel safer in their communities. But above all, opening your borders to anyone, from anywhere, so long as they have the cash to pay a people smuggler and the willingness to endure the crossing, is a recipe for crime, tension and fury. If the government wants to stop these protests, it should try stopping the boats.