Hundreds of far-right activists descended on Portsmouth on Sunday night after a boat carrying 140 asylum seekers was intercepted near the Hampshire coast.
The vessel’s arrival prompted a major rescue operation involving lifeboats, a helicopter, an aeroplane, Border Force, police and ambulance crews. It’s thought to be the first time such a large group of asylum seekers has been brought ashore in Portsmouth.
The far right quickly mobilised in response. Protesters blocked roads for hours and attempted to prevent coaches carrying the new arrivals from leaving for the Home Office processing centre at Manston in Kent. Many wore black clothing and balaclavas.
One witness said: “The atmosphere here is still very tense. The coaches carrying asylum seekers have still not left. About 25-30 percent of the far-right protesters are wearing balaclavas and many are wearing black. Two police cars had their windscreens smashed by protesters. At one point they broke through the police cordon.”
The demonstration continued until about 3am, when Hampshire police finally imposed a dispersal order and threatened arrests.
Daniel Thomas, also known as Danny Tommo, used a livestream to encourage supporters to travel to Portsmouth. Thomas is a former bodyguard of Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and recently established the far-right Patriot Platform.
The same organisation blocked part of the port of Dover on Saturday. Thomas had previously established Operation Overlord, which planned to send far-right activists to France to “stop the boats”. He and his supporters filmed themselves slashing abandoned dinghies on a French beach, after which the French authorities banned him from the country.
The Portsmouth mobilisation was therefore no spontaneous outburst by concerned residents. It was an organised attempt by far-right forces to physically intimidate a group of exhausted people immediately after a dangerous Channel crossing.
The fascist method is to take the fear, anger and insecurity created by capitalism and redirect them towards people with even less power. Workers face collapsing public services, extortionate rents, falling living standards and insecure employment. The far right tells them that the enemy is a refugee sitting on a coach under police guard.
There’s no mystery about whose interests this serves. Migrants don’t own the banks, energy companies, housing monopolies or corporations squeezing the working class. They didn’t impose austerity, privatise public services or transfer enormous amounts of wealth upwards. By turning workers against refugees, the far right protects the capitalist class from scrutiny.
Its nationalism also conceals the imperialist roots of mass displacement. Britain and its allies have spent decades bombing countries, arming reactionary governments, enforcing sanctions and extracting wealth from oppressed nations. People are then condemned as invaders when the resulting wars, poverty and instability drive them towards the imperial core. The movement of capital across borders is treated as sacred; the movement of desperate human beings is treated as a crime.
The government condemned the Portsmouth protesters’ “intimidating and thuggish behaviour”, declaring: “The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our democracy, but it must never cross a line into disorder.”
Yet the government’s quarrel with the far right is mainly over methods. While ministers object to masked groups surrounding coaches and smashing police vehicles, they continue to accept and promote the central far-right claim that asylum seekers are a hostile force against whom Britain must “restore control”.
The Home Office boasted: “This government is bearing down on dangerous small boat crossings and restoring control at our border. Joint efforts have seen over 48,000 crossing attempts prevented and 1,100 boats and engines seized since the election.”
It added: “But we must go further, which is why we have signed a payment-by-results deal with the French to put 40% more boots on the ground on French beaches.”
This is the division of labour between the capitalist state and the street right. The government criminalises migration, fortifies the border and pays France to deploy more police. Far-right organisers take the same politics to its logical conclusion, mobilising masked crowds to hunt down the people whom the state has already branded a threat.
Small-boat crossings are down by more than 40 percent compared with the same period last year. That hasn’t satisfied the right because the campaign was never really about numbers. One boat is enough to manufacture a crisis. One group of refugees is enough to provide a target.
The Portsmouth crossing also shows how border repression makes migration more dangerous. As shorter routes are closed, smugglers launch boats from more distant stretches of the French coast. Greater enforcement doesn’t remove the conditions forcing people to travel. It pushes them onto longer and deadlier routes.
The far right presents itself as a rebellion against the establishment while policing the victims of the very imperialist order that establishment maintains. Its activists can chant “Whose streets? Our streets”, but their politics leave ownership, wealth and power exactly where they are. Their enemy isn’t the ruling class. It’s anyone beneath them whom the ruling class has declared disposable.
