“Let’s get rid of that boat. This is England, this is no longer France,” he shouts into the camera, as he pulls out a knife. Tensions linked to anti-migrant protests in the United Kingdom are back, where there is a storm over right-wing extra-parliamentary extremist Daniel Thomas, known as Danny Tommo. In recent hours the man was the protagonist of a private boarding in the waters of the English Channel – conducted aboard a motorboat acquired specifically by his movement and publicized on social media – against a dinghy with alleged “illegal immigrants” arriving from France on board, as well as at least one French rescuer.
Danny Tommo rips open a dinghy in the English Channel
The affair has revived the climate of threats denounced by some NGOs, but also by British sea rescue institutions, while there is talk of police investigations and a possible arrest of Tommo. The images taken by his associates show him in the foreground following two dinghies transporting some asylum seekers from France to the United Kingdom. The migrants have recently disembarked on a rescue vehicle. Tommo pulls over the small boat, on which a rescuer has boarded in the meantime, and warns the occupants that they would be “entering British waters”. Finally he tears open the hull with a knife.
Who is Danny Tommo
The blitz is only the latest extreme action promoted by Daniel Thomas, alias Danny Tommo, who has emerged in recent weeks as the leader of an extremist movement and organizer of marches of “hooded” people against the ports of Dover and Portsmouth, landing places in the south of England. Marches denounced as expressions of “hooliganism” by Andy Burnham’s Labor government, which then ordered the police to crack down on anyone protesting with their face covered, and even criticized by Reform UK, the anti-immigration British Trumpian right-wing party led by Nigel Farage.
Tommo is indicated by the British media as the former driver and bodyguard of Tommy Robinson, a member of the English nationalist ultra-right who was tried and convicted in the past for crimes of street violence, incitement to racial or religious hatred and common crimes, and known for his Islamophobic positions.