What happened in Portsmouth last night was extraordinary. Citizens waded into the bitter sea to try to prevent the arrival of foreign men who were all but ferried in by the authorities. Ordinary people stepped up as reluctant, unpaid border guards while actual border guards rolled out the red carpet for a hundred blokes from heaven knows where. Everyday Brits stood vigil over our shores while the state threw those shores open to all-comers.
The last frontier of our kingdom’s hard-won sovereignty is a ragtag line of fuming Portsmouth locals
How do we even define this? What do we call it? The media has reached for that small, familiar word “protest”, as if this were a mere outburst of public anger over government policy. It was so much more than that. This was ordinary men and women stepping into the breach left by the state’s desertion of our borders. It was working-class self-organisation in defence of our national sovereignty. It is unprecedented.
I can scarcely believe what I am reading about Portsmouth. Dozens of protesters waded into the choppy seas at Eastney Beach as a mega-dinghy arrived with 140 people on board. “Stop the boats!”, cried this volunteer army of border wardens. Later, protesters blocked roads to try to prevent coachloads of the migrants from being spirited to processing centres and essentially just let into the country. And what did Border Force allow to happen? The dinghy was escorted into UK waters and its criminal passengers were brought ashore.
Just think about this. Literally the only resistance met by that law-breaking mega-dinghy was from the sea-braving protesters on Eastney Beach. The only cry of opposition heard by the mostly male intruders straddling that vessel was from angry Brits running down a beachfront crying: “Enough is enough!”
After leaving Baie de la Seine, the dinghy was “shadowed for around ten hours” by French boats “in case it got into difficulty”. It was then chaperoned through British waters by Border Force. Only when they heard the distant roar of “Stop the boats” will the dinghy people have clocked that what they were doing was illegal and immoral. Only then will they have realised that Britain is a sovereign nation whose people – well, some of us – frown upon brutish incursions into our territory.
In other words, the only thing standing in the way of these men from distant, regressive lands was a few angry souls on a Portsmouth beach. The French did nothing to stop them. The British state seems incapable, or unwilling, of turning such vessels around or swiftly deporting those who manage to breach our beaches. It’s mesmerising: the last frontier of our kingdom’s hard-won sovereignty is a ragtag line of fuming Portsmouth locals.
And what is their reward for seeking to defend the UK from interlopers? They’re called thugs. They’re branded far right. The government has slammed the “intimidating and thuggish behaviour” of the Portsmouth protesters. But what’s more thuggish: joining a rowdy protest or allowing the borders of our kingdom to go to rack and ruin? If I had presided over a historic erosion of our territorial integrity, and the entry into our lands of men who have committed heinous crimes against women and children, I’d be a little more circumspect about throwing around the slur of “thug”.
The government is on a hiding to nothing if it ignores working-class fury over our broken borders. Indeed, just last week an Iraqi national was charged with raping a 14-year-old boy in Portsmouth. In such circumstances, wouldn’t you also be worried, perhaps even scared, about the arrival of yet more unvetted foreign men?
The government is on a hiding to nothing if it ignores working-class fury over our broken borders
It’s not “bigotry” that motors protests like the one in Portsmouth: it’s a desire to defend individuals and communities from unscreened blokes from afar. It’s a love of Britain, not a hatred of foreigners, that underpins the growing public anger over our swirling, unsustainable levels of immigration.
What we witnessed in Portsmouth was a public explosion of the deepest fissure in British society right now. On one side stands a state that has abdicated its prime responsibility, which is to defend Britain’s territory and Britain’s people from external forces. And on the other stand everyday citizens enraged by this managed suicide of British statehood, by the sacrifice of our sovereignty at the altar of a phoney globalist virtue that says borders are bigotry and migration is splendid.
A Home Office whistleblower has said what many of us have suspected for some time: that the vast majority of “asylum seeker” claims are false. In fact, he says, only around one per cent are genuine. For the state to keep foisting strong, fit, aggy men onto communities that don’t want them, while barking “They’re asylum seekers, you racists”, is wicked and preposterous. If the state wants to put a stop to the kind of vigilantism we saw in Portsmouth, then it just needs to do one simple thing: its job.
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