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Dover’s masked menace: The racist establishment reaps what it sows

Dover’s masked menace: The racist establishment reaps what it sows

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Last weekend saw frightening scenes, as masked far-right protestors amassed at the Port of Dover. On Sunday, a similar demo in Portsmouth saw thugs attempting to stop a boat of refugees. This is a serious escalation – and a wake up call for the left.

A few months ago, race riots shook Belfast. In cities up and down Britain, meanwhile, the far right mobilised for the third summer in a row.

This past weekend, the country was greeted to a similarly grim spectacle. Hundreds of balaclavaed men descended on the Port of Dover – clad head-to-toe in black, and shouting ‘stop the boats’.

The following day, at a separate but similar protest, hundreds of far-right thugs marched into Portsmouth to block buses intended to transport 140 refugees who had arrived on Britain’s shores, having made the gruelling 10-hour journey across the Channel.

Both these events – but particularly what took place in Dover – suggest a more organised and coordinated movement, in comparison to the mostly sporadic and spontaneous far-right protests seen in mainland Britain in recent years.

First things first, let’s be clear on who is to blame. This masked menace, numbering in their hundreds, is the result of years of migrant bashing and racist rhetoric – pumped out from the top of society, by the British establishment and its media mouthpieces.

This vitriol comes from the likes of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, and Tommy Robinson, of course, and from the gutter press, including the Daily Mail and The Sun. But it has been aped by the Labour leaders also, from Starmer to Burnham, and by the rest of the capitalist media.

Only recently, for example, Britain’s latest prime minister was shaking hands with his French counterpart as they agreed to combine their efforts to “scale up” action against small boats.

They are all responsible for stirring up the forces of reaction now terrorising working-class towns and communities.

 

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Organised mob

So far, it appears that the Dover protest was organised offline by a group called Patriot Platform, the head of which is Danny Thomas, an ex-bodyguard for Tommy Robinson.

Thomas livestreamed the whole march as it happened, and posted several videos to his Instagram afterwards. He praised the ‘discipline’ of the group, and explained that “this was a warning”, saying that further actions were being planned.

In one video, a sea of figures in balaclavas can be seen pouring out of a rental van, before marching to the port.

The whole operation suggests that there is some serious organisation and money behind these protests – so much so that the council and police were caught off-guard.

Mainstream media sources have underreported the genuine scale of the protest, no doubt trying to downplay these events and help the unprepared authorities save face.

Most journalists estimated the Dover mob to have been a couple of hundred strong. By contrast, RCP activist and eyewitness Andy Southwark reported the following:

“It was massive – easily 500 people, if not 800.

“We arrived in Dover just as they were marching into the station as a bloc. We had to wait for them all to pass to get out. It easily took five minutes of a constant stream for them all to get through the train barriers.

“They were obviously highly organised, all in black and masked. Some were obviously proper Nazis, very large and muscled. But interestingly, there were a lot of older women among them.”

Not much is known about Patriot Platform, at this stage. A cursory glance at Thomas’ social media offers a hotchpotch of Christian imagery, alongside captions explaining how the group is explicitly modelling itself on the EDL.

What is clear is that many of these individuals are genuine fascists, set on intimidating migrants and local communities.

Frankenstein’s monster

This latest eruption suggests that the far right in Britain feel emboldened. And no wonder. The entire establishment is blaring out the same ‘stop the boats’ slogan as them, in unison.

On the same day as the Dover protests, for example, Farage posted on X: “We will not rest until the boats are stopped forever.” Hours later, he only condemned the fact that people used face-coverings, which he stated is “not the British way”.

New PM Andy Burnham came out more sharply, condemning the “thuggish and intimidating behaviour”, and promising that Labour had a “solemn responsibility” to stop the “politics of poison seeping into our streets”.

The bungling Labour MP for Dover and Deal, Mike Tapp, meanwhile, managed to soothe his soul by saying that “they [the protestors] wouldn’t know small boat crossings are down by 40 percent and we are working hard to fix the mess”.

What Burnham, Tapp, and co. are incapable of grasping, however, is that Labour’s whole programme is feeding and fuelling the ranks of the far right.

Austerity; militarism; attacking the most vulnerable in society; and then scapegoating migrants for society’s ills: all this is providing reactionary thugs with the fertile ground they need to recruit, grow, and act with such confidence.

Labour ministers have constantly joined the cry to ‘crack down on small boat crossings’. Meanwhile, they boast and brag that there have been 60,000 deportations since they came to power.

These ladies and gentlemen are all responsible for creating the Frankenstein’s monster of racist violence and far-right protest that now regularly rears its ugly head in Britain.

The capitalist establishment has conjured up and given rise to these reactionary forces. But they are powerless to diffuse them or keep them on a leash, as they maraud through society, causing panic and terror along the way.

Any criticism or denunciation of this far-right threat from those at the top is purely cynical: motivated by a fear of the explosive backlash from workers and youth that these racists thugs can provoke; and by a desire for ‘calm’, ‘order’, and ‘stability’, in order to go back to ‘business as usual’.

Police hypocrisy

The scandalous role of Kent Police in these events is also worth highlighting.

Details are still emerging. But, at the time of writing, it appears that Kent Police were tipped off to the fact that hundreds of people had suddenly popped up in the sleepy village of Preston-next-Wingham, bragging in the pubs that they were going to Dover to ‘attack Muslims’.

Despite this, Kent Police took no action. In fact, they’ve gone so far as to say that “the information [available to them] was not fully assessed”.

Perhaps even more notably, despite hundreds of masked men occupying Britain’s busiest port for 45-minutes, no arrests were made.

Contrast this to the familiar scenes of elderly women being manhandled by police officers for holding up signs in support of Palestine Action. Or recall the fact that half of all terrorism arrests since 9/11 have come in the past year, targeting peaceful Palestine supporters.

This shows the brazen hypocrisy of the police, and of the capitalist politicians who tell us to entrust our protection to the long arm of the law.

How to fight the far right

What is clear is that neither the police, nor any part of the state can be relied upon to combat this far-right menace. Similarly, we can have no trust in Burnham’s Labour.

Burnham and his new ‘warfare’ chancellor, John Healey, are preparing to attack ordinary people with a new wave of welfare cuts. The bosses at major manufacturers like Jaguar Land Rover, meanwhile, are announcing thousands of job cuts.

All of this is tearing at the fabric of society, providing no shortage of grist for the far right’s mill.

Workers and youth must therefore trust only in their own organisation and strength, and not in any of the liars, racists, and warmongers in Westminster.

This latest episode represents an upping of the ante. These far-right thugs feel confident enough to amass in their hundreds, in order to terrorise migrants. This should be a wake up call for the left.

We need a serious struggle against the far right, and against the decrepit capitalist system in which they thrive.

This means mobilising and fighting on our own terms: as a united class; with militant methods; on the basis of a bold socialist programme; against the real enemy – the bosses, bankers, and billionaires.

Only in this way can the ground be cut from underneath the feet of these far-right goons.

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