Shabana Mahmood dubs far-right activist Danny Tommo ‘outright racist’ and issues warning

Shabana Mahmood has branded anti-migrant activist Daniel Thomas a “far-right and outright racist” and warned he will feel “the full force of the law” if he or his organisation commits any crimes near asylum sites.

The convicted criminal, who is known as "Danny Tommo”, co-founded The Patriot Platform – the group behind the anti-migrant protests which saw masked men flood Portsmouth and Dover earlier this month.

He was jailed for two years in 2016 after pleading guilty to attempting to kidnap a man at knifepoint.

Ms Mahmood’s remarks came after he said thousands of his masked followers could descend on Piddington – the Oxfordshire village which has been at the centre of a row about asylum accommodation – “for days” to stop male asylum seekers from being housed there.

In an interview with far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, Thomas said: “How powerful would it be if 5,000 men … surround the camp. We take tents. We sit there for days and we don’t let them [the asylum seekers] get in. And then we reinforce [the blockade] with members from the north, from Scotland, from Ireland.”

Speaking to the Guardian in Birmingham on Thursday, the home secretary said there was a difference between legitimate concerns felt by Piddington residents over a large-scale asylum centre and extremists who were “hijacking” those fears.

“I understand the anxiety of local people when they’re about to see a change to their community. But it is important to distinguish that anxiety, where reasonable people can have a conversation, and the far right and outright racists like Danny Thomas walking into town, hijacking an issue and then using that to divide our communities,” she said.

“Their behaviour is completely unacceptable. And where they break the law, they will face the full force of the law.”

Earlier this week, Piddington voted overwhelmingly to become an independent state in a symbolic “referendum” after the government announced plans to house 1,256 male asylum seekers at a nearby former military base.

Mr Thomas visited Piddington alone the day after the vote, saying he was coming to “speak directly with the locals and to see, for myself, what is actually happening”.

In an interview broadcast on YouTube with former GB News presenter Dan Wootton, he said he had spoken to three residents.

“The people we are meeting are just normal mothers, normal grandmothers, normal men. We have to start somewhere,” he said. "Right now there are no men in that camp. We are going to put a legal, lawful plan in place to help this community in a way that has never been done before.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Ms Mahmood said: “I want to reassure the residents of Piddington that actually our experience from other large sites where we already have asylum seekers accommodated, whether that’s in Wethersfield or Crowborough, is that putting all facilities on to one site is actually the best way to manage pressures for local communities.

“Our experience of other large sites where we are housing asylum seekers is that we’re able to put on that site more of the facilities that asylum seekers need. It’s a relatively self-contained facility, and the knock-on pressure to those local areas, I don’t think we’re going to see.”

She insisted she understands the anxiety felt by people in the countryside, but said many people in inner-city areas such as her own Birmingham constituency had similar fears.

She said: “I do understand the anxiety that people feel, when they’re about to see a change in their community or they are reading misinformation on the internet, or when they’re just concerned that a village is about to have a facility nearby that maybe they think may pose them some challenges.

“I also hear that concern from communities such as mine, where there are large numbers of HMOs and accommodation in which asylum seekers are held as well. There is concern across every type of community. Not just in the countryside or in those sorts of areas, but in inner-city areas as well.”