Masked men, lorries and road blocks: How anti-migrant activists are changing tactics

At around seven o'clock last Saturday morning, dozens of men dressed in black climbed into the backs of lorries in a quiet Kent village called Preston-next-Wingham.

The men had arrived under cover of darkness the night before, leaving their cars everywhere: in the village hall car park and on the recreation ground.

In an operation with a degree of military precision, the small fleet of lorries departed for Dover just after sunrise, where the men staged an intimidating show of strength near the port.

In disciplined, serried ranks, they wore paramilitary-style balaclavas as they blocked roads around the port. There were at least three waves of arrivals, including the men who had spent the night in Preston-next-Wingham. Glaring ominously at motorists and police officers, they stood their ground.

Hardened anti-immigration campaigners were using their newly developed tactics for the first time.

It bore little resemblance to the running battles seen in cities in the Midlands in the days of Tommy Robinson's original vehicle, the anti-Muslim English Defence League (EDL).

"I seriously thought we'd been invaded by Russians," a Dover resident, Robin Burkhardt, told the BBC.

The main organiser Danny Thomas, known to his supporters as Danny Tommo, said on Instagram afterwards: "This is our warning."

The style of protest is a new development in the crowded world of British hard-right and far-right politics. It was visually striking, and the men - who were part of a new group called Patriot Platform - chanted "Christ is King" as well as "Stop the Boats".

On Sunday, using a social media live stream, Thomas was able to organise a second, more impromptu protest of a few hundred people in his home city of Portsmouth.

His activists tried to block coaches that had come to collect migrants, who had arrived illegally, brought ashore after making the long journey from Normany in France.

On Thursday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood met senior police officers and urged them to make full use of their powers to stop activists wearing face coverings.

"These scenes have caused disruption for people and, given that people are dressed in black wearing balaclavas, there is a fear factor and obvious malign intent being communicated to our residents," she said.

"This makes it different from other protests, so we need to make sure we are learning lessons."

Some of Patriot Platform's disruptive, eye-catching tactics seem to have been borrowed from environmental groups like Just Stop Oil. But its leaders are also getting ideas and funding from the growing "Christian nationalism" seen in the United States.

It organisers say they are building a working-class "voting bloc" to persuade political parties on the right to adopt their agenda.

The website for Patriot Platform was registered on 18 May this year, two days after a big anti-immigration "Unite the Kingdom" march in London.

Thomas, its most visible founder, first posted about the group on YouTube on 8 June.

"We need to be a bit smarter," he said, referencing arrests or offences including the assaults on police officers and violent disorder during recent Unite the Kingdom marches, that had been organised by Robinson. "Good men and women are now away from the fight stuck in jail cells."

Thomas told his supporters he had a few ideas that would be "more powerful than committing acts of violence and criminal damage".

There needs to be a "different MO", he said. "We are looking for the strong, the able, the ones that are willing to do things a bit different."

What sets Patriot Platform apart is the scale and co-ordination of their action, says William Allchorn of Anglia Ruskin University, an expert on far-right movements.

"There hasn't [previously] been co-ordinated mass activism with hundreds of people descending and trying to take matters, as it were, into their own hands," he says.

Thomas spent the summer posting further videos about the group and staging meetings in the North West, Essex, Leicester and Kent. He said he was trying to organise a "mass resistance" movement.

What happened in Dover demonstrated some of his new ways of working. The protesters were almost exclusively male. They arrived in well-organised waves in the backs of lorries. They did not engage with the media, and said little to members of the public whose journeys and weekends they were disrupting.

Then, after a few hours, before the police could get organised, the men all marched off to Dover Priory Station and left. Estimates vary as to how many were there but it looks like between 200 and 500.

The anti-racism group Hope Not Hate said Patriot Platform should be seen "for what it is: a far-right network of men happy to intimidate and inconvenience an entire town for what was effectively a publicity stunt".

Nick Lowles, the group's CEO, said Thomas had "been upfront about his intention to create a 'patriotic army that is able to take control of the United Kingdom'".

At a protest outside the Daily Mail offices in London on Wednesday, Thomas could be seen giving clear instructions to his supporters about his preferred tactics.

"Don't intimidate anyone," he ordered. "No one talk. Keep a distance. Five metres away from police".

Patriot Platform is coming into a crowded space of activists campaigning against immigration. Robinson's is the most high-profile brand. A former close associate of Danny Thomas, Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) has given Patriot Platform public support since Saturday.

But there is also Paul Golding's Britain First, Turning Point UK and the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative.

Thomas was once close to Ryan Bridge, the founder of a group called Raise the Colours, who have put up flags in towns across England over the last year.

But the pair have since publicly fallen out, with Thomas telling Bridge in an online rant: "Do I need to stab you in the eye?"

Thomas was jailed for two years in 2016 after he and two others tried to kidnap a man at knifepoint in Portsmouth in a dispute over money linked to drugs.

What seems to be different about Patriot Platform's approach now is that Thomas is explicitly talking about creating a "voting bloc" of supporters to back a yet-to-be decided party, which offers policies closest to what he wants, at the next general election.

"I do not support any political party at this moment in time," he said, adding that once the bloc was established, it would be made "extremely clear" which way the group's vote would go.

It's not clear whether Reform UK would get his backing. In a public confrontation with Reform UK home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf in Portsmouth on Monday, Thomas complained that Nigel Farage had branded his Dover protest "disgusting".

"The working class do not vote," Thomas said. "We are going to make it a fashionable thing to take all your family members to the voting booth.

"But if your leader keeps slandering people, it's going to push them to other parties."

Waiting in the wings is the new party Restore Britain, launched by Rupert Lowe after he was suspended from Reform UK. On X, the party said it "stands with the patriots peacefully protesting against the invasion".

It is not clear how much support Thomas has. Parties like Reform and Restore will be very aware of the potential power that activists like Thomas and Robinson can now wield with their large social media followings. On X, Robinson has two million followers to Farage's 2.3 million, while Thomas has almost 163,000.

At Wednesday's protest, Thomas offered to pay supporters for any work they had missed to be there - in cash.

This kind of generosity might help explain why his activism - and that of his some-time mentor Robinson - have such a strong Christian message now. The Christian right in America can be a good source of funds.

Christianity is now a big part of Danny Thomas's brand. His calls for action are peppered with the occasional "Amen", pronounced in the American way, with the first syllable said "ay" rather than "ah".

He was pictured at St Lawrence church in south London in February and March.

The local diocese told BBC News that while it welcomed "people of various political and ideological perspectives", it remained "committed to the inclusion of all people" and the focus of worship would "always be the person of Christ, who is for everyone".

Thomas has spoken publicly about his new-found faith: "I have repented my sins and, under Jesus Christ, I am a new man."

Thomas is trying to raise money for Patriot Platform through a popular American Christian crowdfunding platform. Just below the "Give" and "Share" buttons, there is a "Pray" button.

On the page, Thomas says he is trying to raise £5,000 a month to pay for the likes of transport, boats and a studio. This month alone he has raised around £9,000.

This attempt to build Christianity into the brand is potentially also a way of painting the UK as a Christian country, and Muslim immigrants as outsiders.

As for what comes next for the Patriot Platform after its initial surge in supporters, far-right expert Allchorn thinks it's an unclear picture.

"A lot of these groups don't really have an end goal in mind," he says. "This often comes kind of later on when they are kind of forced to to come up with more concrete proposals and goals."