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 Normandy 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.
Its organisers say they are building a working-class “voting bloc” to persuade political parties on the right to adopt their agenda.
