Army of Patriots: Why the British Government Must Be Terrified of What’s Been Happening in Dover and Portsmouth

Original article here

In August of 2011, the British government—a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron—discovered just how tenuous its grasp on law and order really was.

The most serious urban riots in a generation were kicked off by the death of a mixed-race man called Mark Duggan on August 4 in Tottenham, north London. Armed police intercepted the car Duggan was traveling in and shot him. The officers said they believed he had been carrying a gun, and a converted pistol was found at the scene; tight gun laws in the UK mean criminals often convert deactivated pistols and starter guns into live weapons. Initial reports claimed there was an exchange of gunfire, but the story quickly changed. Duggan wasn’t holding the gun at the time he was killed. It took until 2014, and a full judicial inquest, to establish that Duggan had indeed been lawfully killed.

In the days after the shooting, riots spread through London’s boroughs—Hackney, Croydon, Ealing, Brixton, Clapham—and soon infected other major towns and cities. Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Bristol all saw major disorder. Something like 15,000 people took part, mostly young men from ethnic minorities and poor backgrounds—people Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke described as the “hardcore of the criminal classes.” There were more than 1,600 burglaries, 1,900 acts of arson and criminal damage, and hundreds of violent offenses. About 2,800 homes and businesses were attacked. Five people were killed. The financial cost was later estimated at more than £500 million. For comparison, the George Floyd riots of 2020, which lasted from the end of May to the beginning of June, are estimated to have cost about $1 billion.

It took the deployment of tens of thousands of British police, including 16,000 officers in London alone, to bring the rioting under control, which it did by August 10.

Justice was swift and harsh; Prime Minister Cameron wanted to send a “tough message.” Close to 4,000 people were arrested, and 3,000 appeared in court. Courts sat for extra hours, some through the night, to process the influx. Just under 2,000 were convicted and sentenced, and two-thirds of those received an immediate custodial sentence, a significantly higher proportion than normal. The average sentence was 16.8 months, again significantly higher than normal, for a combined total of 1,800 years in prison. (Apologies if it feels like I’ve bashed you over the head with statistics. At least it wasn’t a steel pipe or a baseball bat.)

Some sentences bordered on the absurd. Jordan Blackshaw, aged 21, and Perry Sutcliffe, 22, both received four years in prison for creating Facebook events that invited people to the riots. Their posts were never linked to any actual harm. One man received six months for stealing a £3.50 bottle of water, and another 16 months for stealing ice cream. A mother of two who didn’t even attend the riots was sent to prison for five months after a friend gave her a pair of stolen shorts. But still, most of the longer sentences were upheld by the Court of Appeal, which ruled that taking part in the riots, in any form, was a “severely aggravating factor,” and that sentences were rightly harsh. A “community-wide breach of the peace” had occurred against which strong deterrence was required.

By all accounts, the British government was absolutely “terrified” by that summer’s events: caught completely off guard; taken aback by the scale and speed; desperately scrambling to understand how new social media and mobile platforms like BlackBerry Messaging helped the riots to spread, as they were also helping the so-called “Arab Spring” to spread across the Middle East and North Africa. So the British government set about finding new ways, beyond the traditional remedy of a long stretch behind bars, to ensure rioting on that scale would never happen again.

Among other things, this quest led to the creation of a new kind of contingency planning referred to as “controlled spontaneity.” In basic terms, the government plans for a high-profile event or disaster—a police shooting, an Islamic terrorist attack—by preparing strategies in advance to guide public opinion away from explosive demonstrations towards gestures of solidarity, togetherness, and love. The aim, if you will, is to sublimate negative affect into positive on a large scale. The strategies for doing so form a toolkit that can be used whenever the need arises.

The website Middle East Eye first blew the lid on “controlled spontaneity” in 2019, revealing that the British government’s special techniques “have been deployed during every UK terrorist incident in recent years, including the London Bridge attack in June 2017 and the Finsbury Park mosque attack that took place two weeks later.”

“Within hours of an incident, campaigns are swiftly organized, with I ‘heart’ posters designed and distributed according to the location of the attack. Plans are also drawn up for people to hand out flowers at the scene of the crime, in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support.

“The purpose of the operations, according to a number of people involved in their creation who spoke to [Middle East Eye], is to shape public responses, encouraging individuals to focus on empathy for the victims and a sense of unity with strangers, rather than reacting with violence and anger.”

You may remember the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, when a North African migrant blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert and killed 21 people, the youngest just eight years old. The British government encouraged the use of social media hashtags, including #WeStandTogether, and crowds sang the Oasis song, “Don’t look back in anger,” probably at the government’s instigation too—as if anger is an illegitimate emotion when children are murdered in cold blood by a man who should never have been in the country and whom security failed to tackle, despite his suspicious behavior, because they were afraid of being accused of racism. A source who spoke to Middle East Eye said government planners felt they could “play the hashtag game in Manchester, where there’s a lot of young people, and they like it.”

The foundations for “controlled spontaneity” had been laid almost a decade before, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, who passed the Civil Contingencies Act in 2004, after fuel protests brought the country to a standstill and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease led to millions of livestock being slaughtered. This led to the creation of a National Recovery Working Group within the Cabinet Office to plan for the “process of rebuilding, restoring, and rehabilitating the community following an emergency.” Much of the planning for “controlled spontaneity” appears to take place through the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), a secretive propaganda unit that’s part of the Office of Security and Counterterrorism.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because if you want to understand what’s happening in Britain today, you need to understand just how heavily the government here relies on active manipulation to maintain an uneasy peace. Behind the use of those techniques still remains the same recognition, the same fear that led to their creation: disorder could happen at any moment—all that’s needed is a trigger—and on a large enough scale the British police and security services might simply be unable to cope. What would come next, if that happened, isn’t clear.

Maybe we’re about to find out.

On Saturday morning, at around 7 a.m., hundreds of men dressed all in black, wearing balaclavas and other face coverings, descended on the port at Dover, where over 200,000 “small-boat” migrants have illegally entered the UK since 2018. They linked arms across the A20 road, chanting slogans like “Stop the boats!,” “England till I die,” and “Whose streets? Our streets.” The protest caused four-mile tailbacks on the roads around the port and delayed freight and passenger travel in both directions for about five hours, until the protesters dispersed. No arrests were made.

The next day, hundreds more—many clad from head to toe in black again—descended on Portsmouth after a migrant dinghy carrying 140 people was intercepted and brought ashore. Again, they blocked roads, this time to prevent the migrants from being taken by coach to a processing center in Kent. According to GB News, the French coastguard confirmed that the migrant boat set off from a beach near Cherbourg, about 200 miles from the usual launch sites near Calais and Dunkirk. Protesters clashed with police wearing riot gear. A dispersal order was issued, forcing the protesters to leave. Some attempted to follow the buses as they left Portsmouth.

Videos of both events circulated widely on social media.

Kent Police described the event in Dover as “spontaneous” and said they had no prior knowledge, although it was obviously coordinated with some precision, as local MP Mike Tapp noted. Police were also taken completely by surprise in Portsmouth. The protests looked nothing like those we’ve seen in recent years, for example, after the Southport murders in 2024, when the son of a Rwandan migrant murdered children at a Taylor Swift dance class, or in Southampton after the murder of Henry Nowak by a Sikh man wielding a legal ceremonial dagger. If anything, the protests looked more like the kind of thing you see in Northern Ireland, where resistance to mass immigration, and especially the settlement of large numbers of migrants in local communities, has taken on a recognizably paramilitary flavor as a result of decades of training in sectarian violence. In Northern Ireland, protesters take great care to conceal their identities and strike hard and fast, picking key targets like housing for migrants and local companies that aid in resettlement.

The Dover and Portsmouth protests were apparently organized by one man, Daniel Thomas (aka Danny Tommo), who leads a network of patriotic groups called Patriot Platform. Thomas is close friends with Tommy Robinson, the “far-right” bogeyman of British public life. Patriot Platform describes itself as an “army of patriots,” “the resistance standing against the downfall of the United Kingdom.” The group is explicitly Christian and traditionalist: “We are the sons and daughters of this island who still believe in freedom, fairness, family, faith, and a fierce love for our homeland.” The group emphasizes “real plans” and “boots on the ground,” and the aim is “lawful, purposeful action.” “Britain doesn’t need more commentators. It needs people to act.”

Hope Not Hate, the left-wing activist group that revealed my identity two years ago, has compared Patriot Platform to a football “firm,” the supporters’ clubs that for decades were synonymous with hooliganism and tribal violence in the UK. While there may be some overlap in terms of the constituencies involved—patriotic young men—the comparison belies the remarkably calm, organized nature of these new protests. The scenes at Dover and Portsmouth could not have been more different from the rampages associated with the Millwall Bushwackers, the Chelsea Headhunters, or the Newcastle Gremlins, at home and abroad. Daniel Thomas has repeatedly said he wants “discipline,” not “drinkers” and violence, which is the opposite of what the average firm has traditionally looked for. Read Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs.

If these latest protests tell us anything, it’s that the British government can no longer control and redirect public opinion on immigration as it would ideally like to; the narrative is no longer the government’s to shape, and a boundary has been passed. The scale of the disaster facing Britain, the constant parade of atrocities—the murders, the rapes, and the sexual assaults—the communities living in terror, and the widespread realization that the country is changing beyond all recognition and without the consent of the British people mean the government simply cannot keep a lid on popular feeling. Not anymore. “Controlled spontaneity” was created to manage isolated incidents, not a permanent state of outrage.

For decades, it was impossible to talk publicly about immigration in Britain without being labeled a “racist” and being made subject to various forms of social, legal, and extra-legal punishment. The omerta on immigration was enforced by a broader system of what Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny,” but we Brits call it “two-tier policing” or “two-tier government.” It’s a species of divide and conquer that’s as old as Aristotle’s Politics (read book V in particular), but it’s taken on a new shape in the hands of successive governments that seem hell-bent, whether left or “right,” on replacing their own native citizens with transplants from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

Daniel Thomas has promised further demonstrations. A few days before his “army of patriots” arrived in Dover, he told them they were “going to send a message.”

“And when you see it and when you feel it, I guarantee the whole thing will change for the better,” he said.

“Because once the message is sent once, imagine the sheer numbers that will be sent on the second, the third, the fourth message.”

The third, the fourth message—things are about to get very interesting.