DK Renton: Patriot Platform can’t spread fear and call it protest

Since the emergence of the new rightwing group, Patriot Platform, the attitude of the police has been to leave them alone even when they seem to have broken the law. Supporters of Patriot Platform marched through Dover last month dressed in a uniform of black trousers, shirts and balaclavas. Officers’ decision to do nothing about them was surprising – political uniforms have been illegal since the days of Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.

Patriot Platform obstructed the A20 for over an hour. Hampshire police left their protest alone. The right often complains about what they call “two-tier policing”, the idea that progressive protesters get favourable police treatment. But in 2024, when Just Stop Oil’s Roger Hallam blocked the M25 to draw attention to climate change, a judge sentenced him to five years inside. If the police do indeed give certain protests sympathetic treatment, then it’s the political right, not the left, who benefit from those double standards.

Patriot Platform emerged from followers of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson. Twenty years ago, Yaxley-Lennon was a member of the British National Party, before launching a new organisation. His English Defence League declared itself a one-issue anti-Muslim party. In more recent years, he has spread a different kind of rightwing politics: transphobic, homophobic, anti-feminist, anti-left and avowedly Christian.

The last five years have seen a significant curtailment of the rights of people to protest. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 empowered the police to ban demonstrations. The Public Order Act 2023 banned locking on. In 2025, Yvette Cooper proscribed Palestine Action. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 made it a crime to hide your face at a protest – another law that the Hampshire police chose not to apply.

You might say it’s surprising that no-one on the left has made the case for the rights of Patriot Platform to be protected. After all, when the state prosecutes political campaigns, other and more idealistic campaigns are likely to face even worse treatment afterwards.

The world most activists would like to see is one in which the state has many fewer powers in relation to protests and a much larger number of people get the chance to speak. Activists well understand that if you weaken the state in relation to society then a very wide range of voices will be heard and that will include people who disagree with us – campaigners whose views are annoying, noxious, involve making cruel jokes, or playing up to the algorithm.

But Patriot Platform aren’t interested in hearing from the many voices that make up our society, they want to shut them down.

A few months before the birth of Patriot Platform, Yaxley-Lennon’s supporters were on the streets of central London. The journalist George Monaghan found himself between Yaxley-Lennon’s supporters and a small group of counter-protesters. According to Monaghan, this is how Yaxley-Lennon’s crowd dealt with criticism. They sang “na-na-na-na: sieg heil.” They called the people demonstrating against them “Fucking Jews” and chanted homophobic and pro-Hitler songs at them. They snatched signs held by anti-fascists, and pelted them with beer cans, glass bottles, fireworks and smoke bombs.

Last week, Charlie Downes, the spokesman for Restore Britain, the electoral party whose views are closest to those of Patriot Platform, put out a tweet saying, “Invaders expelled, traitors imprisoned, Britons put first. That is the promise of a Restore Britain government”. The key phrase there is the second: traitors imprisoned.

Article 10, schedule 1, of the Human Rights Act gives everyone the right to freedom of expression but Article 17 removes that protection from people who “perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms” of others. So when riot police eventually took action against Patriot Platform supporters blocking roads in Portsmouth, don’t be surprised that progressives looked on and shrugged.