When hundreds of masked men dressed in black and wearing b­alaclavas blocked roads around the Port of Dover earlier this month, the spectacle looked improvised and chaotic.

Afterwards, Patriot Platform leader Daniel Thomas—better known as Danny Tommo—called it a “dummy run”.

Thomas is a convicted attempted ­kidnapper, an incurable self-publicist and a close ally of the fascist Tommy Robinson.

His description of Dover is a warning. A dummy run is a rehearsal—a chance to discover who turns up, who follows orders, whether communications stay secure and how the authorities respond.

Patriot Platform is nowhere near the ­disciplined militia Thomas pretends it is. Much of its politics consists of ­swagger inflated through social media­, and its future is far from guaranteed.

The racist riots of the summer of 2024 exposed the strength and weakness of Britain’s far right street movement. Rumours and incendiary posts brought thousands onto the streets, producing extreme violence with little preparation.

But these crowds were unstable. They assembled rapidly and dispersed in the face of arrests and mass anti-racist opposition. The spontaneity that made them dangerous also made them  difficult to control or reproduce.

Thomas wants to craft something more reliable from those explosions—a smaller layer whose details are known to him, whose commitment has been tested and who can receive private ­instructions. That is why Patriot Platform is a threat.

Its present size should not be mythologised, and its development is not inevitable. But it represents a serious attempt to build a real street force.

Who are they?

Patriot Platform appeared this summer after Thomas split from Raise the Colours, the loose network associated with campaigns of intimidation and putting flags on lampposts.

But he had already experimented with this kind of organisation through the ludicrously named Operation Overlord.

The project promised Channel patrols and expeditions into northern France, where far right activists would harass refugees and aid workers.

Its mass “deployment” ended in farce, but the recruitment surrounding it was more significant.

Appeals went out for stab-proof vests, thermal cameras, drones and encrypted radios. Potential recruits supplied personal details that allowed them to be sorted and categorised.

Organisers promised face‑to‑face meetings and vetting to exclude anti‑fascists and suspected informants.

An operation can fail but its database survives, identifying people prepared to travel, spend money and submit to Thomas’s authority.

Patriot Platform has built on experience. Thomas has held meetings and developed links with other like‑minded groups. Many grew through hotel protests and flagging.

Repeated activity creates relationships, trust and a route from circulating racist material online into collective action.

Digital spectacle is part of this process. Thomas stages pseudo‑military operations while sympathetic streamers broadcast them.

This is a trick of digital fascism—making a weak force appear stronger through its image, then using that image to recruit. Masked men moving together advertise discipline before it fully exists and invite viewers to participate in the illusion.

At Dover, trusted streamers received enough warning to arrive before an operation whose location remained hidden from opponents. The streamers were not observers, but part of an infrastructure connecting secrecy on the ground with mass visibility online.

Patriot Platform is overwhelmingly male. Its networks include the self‑employed, established fascists, Christian activists and online “auditors” who film confrontations.

Some are based in particular workplaces and local areas. South London Patriots, for instance, has connections to a scaffolding business and a church in Morden.

Thomas offers these men more than an opinion about immigration. The black clothing, concealed faces, marching in ranks and shouted orders distinguish them from the ordinary racist. It offers an aggressive form of belonging—purpose, comradeship and a fantasy of recovering masculine authority through intimidation.

The far right draws disproportionately from the lower‑middle class. These are men accustomed to exercising limited authority at work. Their economic insecurity coexists with attachments to property, status and hierarchy. Thomas offers some of them a taste of greater social power—the chance to command.

Patriot Platform’s imagery appears designed to attract younger men looking for action rather than another afternoon of flags and speeches. Thomas is selecting for commitment—those prepared to travel, mask up and take his barked orders.

Laboratory of tactics

The far right is experimenting rather than executing a settled masterplan. Dover tested concealed preparation and disruption around important infrastructure. A day later, violence in Portsmouth showed how its networks could intervene after migrants were rescued in the Channel were brought ashore.

Then, Thomas brought around 35 masked supporters to the Daily Mail’s London offices after it published a hostile profile of him. He demanded that the paper buy his mother a new house and threatened to return repeatedly if it refused.

The demand was absurd and the turnout small. But a harder layer had followed Thomas into central London over their leader’s private dispute.

An organisation supposedly resisting a national “invasion” had become Danny Tommo’s personal complaints department.

Other experiments have failed more straightforwardly. Operation Overlord never delivered its promised army. Attempts to gather similar formations—albeit somewhat more disciplined—in Scotland have attracted only small numbers.

Black uniforms can generate powerful photographs without proving that durable organisation exists behind them. Thomas is himself a source of instability. He is prone to exaggeration, financial opportunism and volatile alliances. He has a history of wild fits of anger, which leaked voice notes suggest might be linked to steroid abuse.

Networks assembled via hot-headed online influencers can fragment through personal feuds as rapidly as they were created.

Patriot Platform should neither be dismissed as cosplay nor inflated into the paramilitary force its propaganda projects. The danger is that Thomas learns from experiments that work.

The targets are also widening. Agitation is now aimed at the RNLI lifeboat volunteers who rescue people at sea.

Once migrants are presented as invaders, anyone helping them can be reclassified as a collaborator. The movement is testing how far “stop the boats” can legitimise intimidation against people whose supposed crime is assisting refugees.

Tommy Robinson has a problem

Patriot Platform emerged from the movement around Tommy Robinson, but it also attempts to solve one of its central weaknesses. Robinson has accumulated an enormous audience without building a conventional membership organisation.

He operates as a hub linking anti‑migrant campaigns, streamers, donors, fascists and hundreds of thousands of online followers. He can amplify an action without formally organising it and benefit while remaining one step removed from responsibility.

But an audience is not an organisation. Somebody willing to share a video will not necessarily get on a train at six in the morning after receiving instructions.

Robinson’s demonstrations can bring enormous crowds into London without leaving stable organisation behind.

Thomas is trying to fill that gap by recruiting, vetting and directing a more selective activist layer, while Robinson supplies digital clout at decisive moments.

This creates a kind of McRobinson’s franchise chain.

Local groups retain their own organisers and identities while adopting shared communications and methods of action. Robinson need not command the franchise directly to benefit from it.

This is an adaptation born from weakness as much as strength. Greater organisation can produce cohesion, but it also produces identifiable leaders, meeting places and networks. The more concrete the far right becomes, the more concrete the possibilities for opposing it.

We must organise

The far right does not build in empty political space. Governments and ­politicians have spent years presenting refugees as an invasion and­ asylum accommodation as a threat to local communities.

Small boat crossings have fallen sharply, yet the movement ­constructed around them has become more aggressive. Racism has developed a ­political momentum of its own.

But growth is not automatic.

Whether local agitation consolidates into a fascist network depends partly upon the opposition it encounters. An unopposed hotel protest allows participants to meet, exchange numbers, identify reliable activists and claim to represent “the community”.

Repeated often enough, protest becomes infrastructure.

Counter-protest can interrupt that process. It isolates hardened fascists, gives confidence to local people who oppose racism and undermines the fiction that the far right speaks for an entire town.

The big anti-racist mobilisation in Glasgow against the far right Unite the Clans in July showed what sustained organisation can achieve. Stand Up To Racism, trade unions, refugee groups and community organisations substantially outnumbered the far right and broke its attempt to claim the streets.

Such mobilisations depend on patient local work, workplace organisation, community relationships and national networks capable of concentrating forces when a threat appears.

Socialists need the broadest unity in action against fascists while ­retaining the political freedom to oppose the ­government racism that feeds them. Trade unions have a vital role because they can offer a different form of solidarity—based on class rather than nation, and collective power rather than the invention of a migrant enemy.

Thomas understands something ­elementary but important—rage alone is insufficient, a viral audience is unreliable and lasting political power requires organisation.

Patriot Platform wants to turn ­eruptions of racist anger into a force whose members can be identified, ­contacted, summoned and deployed.

Denying it the streets, easy victories and the local roots through which an audience can become an organisation can make these experiments fail.

Thomas is trying to learn how to build an army. The anti-racist movement has to ensure that the lesson he learns is defeat.