Usually after a Reform UK Conference, I would be writing about a few things.
Generally speaking I would be talking about the policies that have been blurted at people and just how absurd they are - and to be fair, this year was the same. There was the announcement that the Royal Navy would be deployed to stop boats, with a very fancy signing of an accord with Jordan Bardella making a cameo for this pact (it being very important to note that neither Bardella nor Farage are currently leading their respective countries, so the whole thing was about as useful as a crochet condom).
There was the announcement from Richard Tice that he would be cutting energy bills by £250 and a plan by Robert Jenrick to raise the personal allowance from the current £12,570 to £15,0001. Both of them published lovely letters on Twitter offering to resign if either of their plans don’t come to fruition within 100 days.
How quaint.
I would have also been looking for the general batshittery that Reform UK has become so well known for - like Dame Andrea Jenkyns cringeworthily belting out songs, or Anti-Vaxxers being invited on stage to tell us how the King’s cancer is, in fact on the back of COVID vaccines.
This year, interestingly, the batshittery was dialed down to an extent - of course with the exception of a bunch of Rabid-Boomers assaulting a young female protestor, to which Robert Jenrick responded to on LBC with what sounded suspiciously close to “she was asking for it” in rhetoric.
What I want to write about instead though is a disavowal we saw from Farage himself. And no, I’m not talking about the downgrade of James Orr and Dan Jukes from long-standing allies to now apparently being “contractors” like they’ve been hired to do a quick project and overstepped their mark.
I’m talking about the disavowal by Farage of the masked protestors who stormed Dover on Saturday to disrupt ferry operations. If you have a look at the cesspit previously known as Twitter, you will have seen that that disavowal went down like a cup of cold sick.
Granted, many of the commentators are, without a doubt robots pretending to be human, but there are enough big names that are mighty worked up at the fact that Farage didn’t do his usual “people are angry, what did you expect” schpiel while nodding knowingly at the camera.
We have, rightly, been worried about the rise of Reform - but with Reform now looking seriously like they’re losing support from especially moderate and centre right voters, we should focus on what’s happening even further right of them.
And that is, largely, centred around two things:
Restore, led by the Angriest Grampa in the world, Rupert Lowe.
The growing online radicalisation led by the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka. Tommy Robinson).
The former is important, but is worth writing about in isolation - it’s the latter part that I want to get into a bit today, because to my mind, it is the most presently dangerous of the two.
The issue I largely have with the protest goes beyond that it was a disgusting show of intimidation. It even goes beyond the make up of the protest.
No, my issue is just how organised it was.
Hundreds of men travelled from all over in rented vans, all dressed up in black and in balaclavas, with a discipline that we haven’t seen in these movements in quite a while. Most of the flashpoint protests from the far-right we’ve seen so far have been chaotic, drunken messes. Southport felt like it was an outpouring of grievance through the medium of chucking stones at police and in general being utter bellends publicly.
This felt very different.
I will, of course add, that there is history here - we have in the past seen significant organisation within the far-right.
There was the now infamous Mosley Blackshirts who were explicitly uniformed, disciplined and organised for street politics. There was the National Front in the 1970s who had around 14,000 paid members at its height. There was also the English Defence League between 2009 and 2013, at the time led by none-other than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon himself.
The difference now is that after well over a decade of the modern far right becoming fragmented, online and usually just chaotic, we may now be seeing those organisational instincts returning.
The imagery that was shared on social media, with the black clad balaclava wearing men rushing around the streets of Dover sent chills down my spine. The road blocking was intentional and strategic. While the objectives in the Southport riot felt like it boiled down to “shout at that brown person”, this felt far more focused:
Disrupt. Intimidate. Push right up against the very boundaries of what is legal.
And that last point is pretty important - because what we saw in the Southport riots tended hard towards being fully illegal, widescale destruction and vandalism. Dover, on the other hand, was incredibly focused, intentional and, above all, disciplined.
And the fact that it was followed, not 36 hours later, by another coordinated intimidation attempt in Portsmouth is what has serious alarm bells ringing in my mind.
Because while Dover felt like the proof of concept, Portsmouth felt like it was the official launch. That there is the capability, willingness and resource for these demonstrations to be launched in very short periods of times.
They have gone from “We can organise a protest” right up to “We can react to an event and put bodies on the ground in a very short period of time.”
This level of organisation should immediately go to the top of the security services’ agenda, because we are no longer dealing with a few hundred pissed, angry men turning up somewhere to have a shout.
We are now watching the nascent actions of a movement that has learned how to organise, mobilise and, very crucially, test the boundaries of what they can and can’t get away with.
That seriously worries me.
People have been told on social media and by a certain subsection of politicians for years now that the UK is being actively invaded. They’ve now been convinced that politicians have betrayed them. The yarn has been spun that police protect immigrants over British people, and that courts, lawyers, charities and the media have all been conspiring against them.
Eventually people were going to start taking that literally - and it feels like we’re now at the point at which X rhetoric has started spilling into the south coast of this country. We are at the point where we have hundreds of men who firmly believe that their crusade is justified, that the invasion is real and they are now taking action into their own hands.
This is the point at which this moves from being just yet another ugly episode in the UK’s interminable argument about immigration - because the real hazard here isn’t that a few hundred men believe something extreme. The UK has a long history of extremists that believe very questionable things.
The hazard is that they are beginning to believe that they are entitled to act on those beliefs collectively, physically and outside of the democractic process.
This is a very different proposition than what we’ve seen to date.
A democracy is perfeclty capable of surviving people that are angry. It can survive protests, it can survive people believing stupid things. It can survive marches and even public disorder.
What it will struggle to survive is a political culture in which groups start deciding for themselves which laws, institutions and authorities are still legitimate, and starting to take things into their own hands.
Both events over this weekend don’t mean we are at risk of being taken over by some blokes in balaclavas. Far from it. But Dover showed largescale organisation, and Portsmouth showed rapid mobilisation. Put together, they show a capability we haven’t seen in the modern far-right - and that capability, rather than just the number of people involved, is what we should be paying serious attention to.
The Southport riots shook the nation to its very core, largely because a cohort of people lost control. Dover and Portsmouth should be frightening because someone appears to be learning how to control them.
Which somewhat surprisingly is lower than the £20,000 that was previously mooted, which is a strange reversal.
Bear.
I made the same points, more briefly, on BSky last night.
What we saw was a paramilitary exercise. The choice of black clothing being historically symbolic.
The threats were no longer so much about harming asylum seekers.
They were towards the authorities. Face masks to add menace and foil CCTV & facial recognition.
It was a challenge to good governance, order & civilisation.
It is also function of what happens when groups of humans enter into conflict. They innovate as they race to overcome each other.
Unless The PM grows a pair and acts this does not bode well.
Very perceptive. Fortunately parading around in black while wearing masks doesn't endear your cause to most people. And the people popping up defending these thugs are showing their true colours. That said, it's no time to be complacent.