Shabana Mahmood has described the anti-asylum activist Daniel Thomas as “a far-right and outright racist” who will feel “the full force of the law” if his organisation commits crimes near contested asylum sites such as Piddington.
In an interview with the Guardian, the home secretary also “wanted to reassure” concerned villagers that asylum seekers due to move in to a neighbouring former defence site would not “put pressure” on local resources because they would be given “self-contained facilities”.
Her intervention came after Thomas, a convicted criminal known as “Danny Tommo” and the co-founder of the Patriot Platform, said thousands of his masked followers could descend “for days” on to the Oxfordshire village to prevent male asylum seekers being moved in.
At the launch of a crackdown on knife crime in Birmingham on Thursday, Mahmood said she wanted to distinguish between legitimate concerns felt by Piddington residents over a large-scale asylum centre and extremists who were “hijacking” community concerns.
“I understand the anxiety of local people when they’re about to see a change to their community. But it is important to distinguish that anxiety, where reasonable people can have a conversation, and the far right and outright racists like Danny Thomas walking into town, hijacking an issue and then using that to divide our communities,” she said.
“Their behaviour is completely unacceptable. And where they break the law, they will face the full force of the law.”
Piddington’s local population registered their opposition to the proposed asylum facility on Wednesday, casting 285 votes against 26 in a symbolic ballot to leave the UK and seek self-determination.
The parish has been approached by hundreds of other town and village councillors and residents for advice on replicating the campaign, which was backed by the Conservatives, Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats.
Thomas visited Piddington the day after the vote. He was dressed in a grey suit and white shirt and was not accompanied by people wearing balaclavas.
Joe Marshall, a parish councillor, said it was a private visit and Thomas was due to be given a tour of the village and a cup of tea by a resident.
“It is a closed meeting. We will engage with them and walk them around the village and have a cup of tea,” he said. “We have also had an open invitation to Reform, Labour, Conservatives and Restore to visit.”
Marshall said it was not clear that villagers would want security assistance from men in balaclavas, if it were offered. “This is a mild-mannered place,” he said.
Thomas visited the village hall briefly and later visited the entrance to the Ministry of Justice camp where the asylum seekers are scheduled to be housed. In an interview broadcast on YouTube with Dan Wootton, he said he had spoken to three residents.
“The people we are meeting are just normal mothers, normal grandmothers, normal men,” Thomas said. “We have to start somewhere. Right now there are no men in that camp. We are going to put a legal, lawful plan in place to help this community in a way that has never been done before.”
Asked how she would respond to Piddington residents after the vote, Mahmood said: “I want to reassure the residents of Piddington that actually our experience from other large sites where we already have, asylum seekers accommodated, whether that’s in Wethersfield or Crowborough, is that putting all facilities on to one site is actually the best way to manage pressures for local communities.
“Our experience of other large sites where we are housing asylum seekers is that we’re able to put on that site more of the facilities that asylum seekers need. It’s a relatively self-contained facility, and the knock-on pressure to those local areas, I don’t think we’re going to see.”
Mahmood said she understood the anxiety of people in the countryside towards large groups of asylum seekers, but she pointed out that many people in inner-city areas such as her Birmingham constituency had similar concerns.
“I do understand the anxiety that people feel, when they’re about to see a change in their community or they are reading misinformation on the internet, or when they’re just concerned that a village is about to have a facility nearby that maybe they think may pose them some challenges,” she said.
“I also hear that concern from communities such as mine, where there are large numbers of HMOs [houses of multiple occupation] and accommodation in which asylum seekers are held as well. There is concern across every type of community. Not just in the countryside or in those sorts of areas, but in inner-city areas as well.”
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Thomas and his supporters recently coordinated disruptive protests in Dover and Portsmouth, where masked supporters blocked roads and attempted to intercept newly arrived people.
On Thursday, Mahmood summoned police chiefs and urged them to improve their intelligence gathering and use all powers at their disposal, including new laws that allow for a blanket ban on face coverings at a designated location.
Hampshire police then sought to impose the ban on Saturday as an anti-asylum demonstration took place in Thomas’s home town of Portsmouth. Thomas urged his supporters to stay away.
A former bodyguard for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, Thomas established his anti-immigration movement after serving a prison sentence for attempted kidnapping.
In an interview with Robinson, broadcast on Friday night, he said: “How powerful would it be if 5,000 men … surround the [Piddington] camp. We take tents. We sit there for days and we don’t let them [the asylum seekers] get in. And then we reinforce [the blockade] with members from the north, from Scotland, from Ireland.”
In the interview, Thomas said he was not racist and welcomed people of other nationalities into his organisation. “Racism within our organisation is just not acceptable. That is the stance we have. We are not a white nationalist movement. I have friends that are black.”
Thomas has been approached for comment.
Mahmood made her comments as she launched an anti-knife crime programme. More than 230 areas affected by knife crime will share £26.25m to pay for police patrols, CCTV and early-prevention work as part of a knife-crime crackdown across 27 police forces in England and Wales.
Each area, roughly the size of 10 football pitches, will receive more police patrols, alongside programmes designed for young people most at risk of being a victim or a perpetrator of knife crime. Action in small, targeted areas was the most effective way of driving down knife crime, the Home Office said.
Mahmood launched the initiative at the Acocks Green boxing gym in south Birmingham, which plays a role in the local area in supporting vulnerable young people to stay away from crime. She was joined by the anti-knife campaigners Lynne Baird, Lorraine Jones Burrell and Pooja Kanda. Each has lost a child to knife crime.
Additional reporting by Amelia Gentleman
