It was a busy weekend for the insurgent and hard right, as Reform party delegates redoubled their commitment to women’s safety by physically attacking a female protester and Patriot Platform, a new group established by Danny Tommo, real name Daniel Thomas, arrived in Dover on Saturday, then Portsmouth on Sunday, dressed in balaclavas. No arrests were made in Dover, and therefore the protest was deemed peaceful. “A message was sent!” Thomas exclaimed later on his socials. “Now imagine how powerful the next message will be.” The next powerful message of peace the following day spurred the issuance of a dispersal order from Hampshire police, alongside some smashed windscreens (of police cars) and advice for local people to avoid the area.
The “stop the boats” narrative, along with a lot of Reform’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, has become increasingly bound up with a concern for the safety of women and children. It might be a slyly vague sentiment from Robert Jenrick, in which he doesn’t want his daughters sharing a neighbourhood with men “who broke into the country illegally, about whom we know next to nothing”, or it might be Zia Yusuf’s much more explicit complaint that the nation is prepared to “sacrifice British women and girls on the altar of diversity”. Protesters outside hotels housing asylum seekers get all their righteous wrath from the danger posed to women from foreign nationals, and Thomson stated his aims straightforwardly on Instagram – posting video of Saturday’s protest, he wrote: “Protect our country! And more importantly our women and children! This is our warning!”
Observers trying to remain neutral and fair-minded accept that there certainly is a crisis of violence against women in this country, but point out that more than 90% of perpetrators of rape and sexual assault in the UK are known to their victims; anyone serious about preventing this violence would not start with the spectre of recently arrived refugees. But the Home Office’s literature for recent arrivals about the importance of consent just plays into the hands of the hard right, which then – this is Yusuf again – call this “an implicit admission that, as we all know, these undocumented fighting-age men pose a threat to the British public and women in particular”.
It is pointless trying to battle this narrative with statistics, because it is cynical and strategic rather than a mistaken point of view, authentically held. It is worse than pointless trying to meet it halfway as a “legitimate concern”. And we can see that from the remarkably high tolerance these protest movements have for domestic abusers within their own midst. After the 2024 Southport riots, it later transpired that 41% of the nearly 900 arrested had been reported for crimes associated with intimate partner violence; one police force had that figure as high as 68%.
In the higher ranks of Patriot Platform, meanwhile, Thomas has served prison time for a botched kidnapping, Kevin Jones of the Thanet Patriots has pleaded guilty to wounding and assault of his partner and her mother, and Adrian Clark, also of Thanet, gave a rousing speech in August which climaxed: “We’ve all done stupid shit, but if any of these other people want to sit out there and say ‘Oh you’re a domestic abuser’, what do you think these people on the boats have a better criminal record than me? You having a laugh?” It should be stressed that only one of these lieutenants has been convicted of violence against women, and some are merely violent towards other men. It should also be stressed that nobody at Reform’s conference has been arrested, despite viscerally unpleasant footage of one man trying to grab a woman by her neck and another apparently trying to whack her with his crutch (to be fair to West Midlands police, they have appealed to the woman to come forward).
So yes, Danny Tommo is right: Patriot Platform is sending a message. Zia Yusuf is right: people should be terrified. But that message is: “Anyone taking our commitment to women’s safety seriously is a mug.” And what we should be terrified of is the laundering of this thuggery by what claims to be a mainstream political party.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
