‘It sent a message’: anti-migrant feeling pervades Hampshire town where hundreds protested

Alan Dale was in two minds as he gazed across at Portsmouth harbour in the late September sunshine and reflected on the latest show of force by far-right activists on the south coast against a supposed disembarkation of asylum seekers.

A stone’s throw away, masked followers of the anti-migrant activist Daniel Thomas had been cheered on Tuesday night by hundreds, many of them local, who had gathered after social media rumours that authorities planned to land the migrants in the Hampshire town of Gosport.

Most shockingly to outsiders unfamiliar with the depth of vitriol towards migrants among some here, children had been seen chanting “let them drown” into a megaphone.

The gathering had at least “sent a message”, said Dale, a retired Royal Navy veteran who echoed a common local sentiment that Gosport and Britain more widely had changed, and that migrants were being put “to the front of the queue” for public services.

“Is it going to be heard though? I don’t think so. It’s almost like the government is sticking its fingers in its ears and saying: ‘We are not listening to you’.”

As for the masked vigilantes called out by Thomas – who calls himself “Danny Tommo” and was filmed earlier in the day using a blade to slash an inflatable dinghy in the Channel while a rescue worker was onboard – Dale admitted to feeling uncomfortable about their face coverings, but insisted: “With any protest you are always going to get troublemakers.”

Many local people from a block of flats close to Gosport’s marina indeed appear have swelled the numbers of those who turned up in what senior Reform UK figures including the Hampshire MP and former home secretary Suella Braverman had cheered on as a show of “people power”.

But a far-right presence – and hostility towards migrants – was discernible in the town in a part of England where organised activists from their ranks have been building links for a number of years with anti-migrant campaigns.

Red and white far-right posters emblazoned with the word “resistance” and slogans such as “protecting our children’s future” were plastered on lampposts around the bench where Dale sat in Gosport’s Falkland Gardens.

At least two outsiders were among the six people arrested on Tuesday night by police: a 19-year-old and a 36-year-old, both from Salisbury, who were detained on suspicion of aggravated trespass.

In the end, the small boat carrying 51 people docked in Dover, Kent, at about 12.30am on Wednesday after spending 33 hours at sea.

While there was no plan to land them in Gosport, Home Office sources have insisted, the events have once again placed Thomas in the spotlight – even as he faces the prospect of a police inquiry into his knife-wielding at sea – and saw a blurring of the lines between his activities and local protesters who were praised by Reform.

“It’s a depressing situation that so many people turned up but there is another side here as well and you have people in Portsmouth who are organising gigs to raise funds for the RNLI,” said a local man who had worked with young people in the area where the protest took place but declined to give his name.

He also cited the fact that Gosport’s nearby Rowner area had been allocated money – as much as £20m – from the government’s Pride in Place initiative, a long-term strategic effort launched under Keir Starmer’s premiership to counter the electoral threat posed by rising nationalism and the far right in areas where such sentiment finds some sympathy.

A diversity of views could be found again on Wednesday morning among those gathered for a Bible study group inside Gosport’s Holy Trinity church, a short stroll from the seafront. They included the retired priest Margaret Hay, who said the first thought that came to her mind was that Jesus was an immigrant too, while at least one other participant voiced discomfort that many of those crossing the channel appeared to be men.

The group also included Tyler Palmer, a young churchgoer who watched the protests on Tuesday night from the edge of the crowd. “We’ve always been diverse here in Gosport and it’s forgotten. Turkish sailors who fought alongside us in the second world war were housed here,” he said.

“But we’re also a naval town and people are very proud. They’re reading things that scare them – whether that’s GB News or fearmongering on social media. These are everyday people, your plumbers, your plasterers, who you wouldn’t expect to be at protests.”