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.
