6 Contentious Migration in Dover

In France, debates, demonstrations and campaigns around migratory issues largely crystallised around the situation in Calais. Indeed, the existence of settlements such as the ‘jungles’ in Calais intersect with two important political issues within the public arenas of Western Europe. The first is that of immigration, the rejection of which is an essential element in the development of the far right.¹ The second is that of sovereignty: the control of borders in the face of transnational circulations is a political issue at a time when the opposition between communitarians and cosmopolitans has become an increasingly important political cleavage.² Moreover, the border areas between France, a member of the Schengen area, and the United Kingdom, which has just left the European Union, have a very high media profile. This major axis of transnational exchange at the heart of Western Europe is the stage for spectacular images: whether ‘jungles’ in Calais or treacherous small boat crossings. It has also become the subject of political discourse by a series of actors and moral entrepreuneurs: political parties, local elected officials, NGOs, pro-refugee social movement organisations, and on the opposing side, anti-migrant social movements.

The previous chapter examined the tactics used by anti-migrant groups in Calais that originated from the repertoire of vigilantism in a very tense and sometimes chaotic situation. This chapter will reflect upon the ways in which anti-migrant social movement actors attempt to construct migratory flows in Dover as a securitarian issue. The situation in Dover and its surroundings differs significantly from the one in Calais, which is a staging point where people are stuck for weeks or months. Conversely, Dover is an arrival point through which refugees transit before applying for asylum or leaving for large urban centres. In addition, in order to avoid potential political unrest, public authorities have put in place a policy³ which consists of swiftly collecting and receiving asylum seekers’ applications without creating a ‘stockpile’ population as in Calais.⁴

As a result, for anti-migrant moral entrepreneurs’, making migratory processes visible has become essential to their mobilisation of public opinion. The increase in highly visible small boat crossings has offered an opportunity in this regard. Indeed, until recently, the majority of crossings between France and England were made by hiding in trucks. From 2019 onwards, small boat crossings have become more common. French and British Navy and Border Force vessels usually spot and escort the boats into the port of Dover, where asylum seekers are registered and their asylum claims processed. They are then directed to accommodation (Napier barracks, Penally Camp, hotels or shared accommodation). According to the British Home Office, the year 2020 saw a significant increase in small boat crossings: more than 8,400 arrivals in 2020, compared to nearly 1,600 in 2019.⁵

The objective of groups that are active in the field of migratory issues is to make this process visible and, above all, to spin a counter-narrative that presents migrants as a securitarian issue rather than a humanitarian one. Indeed, following the 1951 UN Charter, asylum seekers and refugees are legally considered as vulnerable populations that need to be protected by international law.

By drawing on the typologies of Cas Mudde⁶ and Fabian Virchow,⁷ three types of actors in the field of the contention of migration can be distinguished. The first type is that of political organisations in the form of a party-movement, but whose running in elections is not a central part of their political activity. Even though some of these organisations have been running for office, their activity is not only geared towards electoral perspectives (Britain First, Patriotic Alternative, the For Britain Movement). The second is that of single-issue organisations, often small localised actors rarely bringing together more than a dozen activists. They mobilise on a specific and localised aspect of the migration process (the surveillance of the coast of the South of England, the Penally Camp, marriage fraud, the investigation of smuggling networks). Finally, the emergence of a third type of actors can be noted, video activists. These video activists, not aligned with particular movements, exploit the possibilities offered by broadcasting on social media in order to make the situation visible and to put forward their narrative. The description and characterisation of the repertoire of action of all actors will be developed further.

The aim of this chapter is to understand how a series of actors stemming from the far right (either from the radical right or the extreme right) use social movement tactics in order to construct migration as a threat in the eyes of the public. Their aim is to present migrants not as vulnerable populations in need of protection but, on the contrary, as a criminogenic social group requiring securitarian treatment. Practices of vigilantism (mainly symbolic and performative in the direction of social movements) seem to be an essential element of this framing of migration.

In the first place, however, two distinct sets of questions need to be addressed. The first concerns locating anti-migrant mobilisation in the political field of the British far right. Does this represent a renewal of political discourse? Are the categories of civic nationalism and ethno-nationalism relevant to the understanding of these discourses? Are the campaigners only active on migratory issues or do they integrate these social movement activities into a broader political commitment? Is it possible to detect common matrices in activist trajectories? Do the ideological framings of the groups and organisations intersect with individual appropriation of ideologies?

Let us recall that Graham Macklin distinguishes two poles within the British far right: ethnic nationalism on the one hand, and civic nationalism on the other.⁸ This distinction is based on respective conceptions of the nation. Ethnic nationalism is based on ethnos and the idea of race; civic nationalism concerns the defence of Western culture in the face of a perceived threat from Islam. These ideological mutations have been influenced by the French New Right, which – although remaining within the field of ethno-nationalism through its theorisation of blood, soil and culture – opens the way to a cultural racism rather than a racism defined by blood and heredity.⁹

The second set of questions relate to the specificities of the activist repertoires of far-right social movements. Indeed, these mobilisations are far from presenting the canonical characteristics of social movements as defined and theorised by Charles Tilly: Worthiness, Number, Unity, Commitment.¹⁰ If they present themselves as demonstrating worthiness and commitment (as evidenced by the repeated injunctions to donate in order to allow this commitment to continue), maximising their numbers does not seem to be a particular objective. Nor is unity (given the very polemical nature of the framing of the migratory situation by these groups). In this perspective, it is interesting to hypothesise that the action of far-right groups can be best understood as the action of an ‘active minority’,¹¹ that is to say, that their framing aims above all to exert social influence on the British political field and public opinion, rather than mobilising numbers directly on the ground.

How does this particular positioning differentiate them from classical social movements? How does it orient their repertoire of action and practices? This dimension will be examined through the analysis of two sets of practices intrinsically linked to the use of social media. The first can be understood as social media spectacular vigilantism, whose aim is, as we have seen previously, to try to change the perception of asylum seekers, from vulnerable persons to be protected to the status of potential criminals justifying securitarian treatment. The second series of practices relate to video activism, defined as the production of images and videos by individuals and groups engaged in social movements as a specific activity. This also renews the way social movements address media and the public. Indeed, reaching mass audiences becomes possible without gaining clearance by gatekeepers of classic media. This shift renovates the stakes around the mobilisation of resources and the role of social movement organisations, as social media allow some actors to bypass classical grassroots organising usually characteristic of social movements. Video activism opens new possibilities of professionalisation of activism. It also allows individual actors to become important or even central actors in the framing of mobilisations around migratory issues.

Our field research in Britain presented two major methodological difficulties which had to be overcome. Specific investigative strategies were necessary in order to yield results of interest. The first is a structural difficulty: social sciences have difficulty accessing actors within the field of the far right. The second is situational: the Covid-19 epidemic and the subsequent restrictions that followed made access to the field complex, leading to a re-evaluation of the research protocol and a switch towards online methods.

Cas Mudde¹² points out that far-right groups are reluctant to be investigated by social sciences for several reasons. The first is that these groups see social sciences and academia as assimilated within the left and broadly aligned with the global elites these groups denounce; their work is therefore considered ‘biased’. In addition, membership of far-right groups is socially stigmatised, making activists reluctant to reveal their commitment for fear of backlash.¹³ Finally, the activities of these groups may be illegal for a variety of reasons (hate crimes, street violence, etc.), and refusal to participate may be linked to concerns about self-incrimination. These issues have been documented and highlighted by Joel Busher, Bert Klandersman, Nigel Copsey and Amy Smith.¹⁴

The second difficulty was that after March 2020 access to the field became impossible due to social distancing, and lockdowns. In order to mitigate these difficulties, the decision was made to switch to online methodologies, such as online interviews and digital ethnography.¹⁵

The structural difficulty of access has led many researchers to opt for work on open sources and to analyse the textual and visual content produced by various far-right movements. Although this is obviously essential for study in this field, the research has not been limited to open-source material. Instead, a mixed methods approach has been adopted. Digital ethnographic observation tools allow us to capture interactions that are not accessible in open-source analysis. An ethnographic approach (already adopted for previous research) is capable of going much deeper, making it possible to capture the mechanisms of individual engagement as well as the diversity of the ideologies of grassroots participants.¹⁶ It also allows for an analysis of activist trajectories using methodological perspectives developed by Eric Agrikoliansky.¹⁷ The combination of these methodologies yields very interesting results in terms of acquiring an in-depth understanding of social dynamics that open sources and secondary data can only touch upon.

However, this raises the question of access: these groups are notably distrustful of social sciences as previously mentioned. Furthermore, the researcher has expertise in getting access to interviews. Several methods were used to gain access to interviews, drawing on the experience of the researcher. The first was an introduction by the researcher that may not put off first interviewees. Another way to gain access to interviews was approaching former members of these groups that may have a critical point of view regarding their past engagement.

Another important element has been the adaptability of the number of groups studied. Indeed, the far right is experiencing strong organisational instability (appearance of new groups, splits, etc.), and large numbers of activists who do not belong to formally established groups are mobilising. For this reason, the scope of the groups included in the study takes into account this essential dimension of organisational plasticity.¹⁸

The following methodological tools were employed:

Semi-structured interviews with activists of the groups included in the study were conducted in order to understand the trajectories of their activists and the actions they have undertaken. Access to such primary data is very interesting because it allows us to understand the motives that lead individuals to participate in such groups, as well as to grasp the ideological divergences within these groups that cannot be understood by a study limited to such groups’ official communications. Gaining access to interviews was significantly more difficult than expected, as the switch to online methods limited the means of approach to potential interviewees. Identifying who to interview and reaching out to them became significantly more difficult. In the end, members of eight out of the thirteen social movement groups were interviewed, comprising a total of nine interviews.

Social media content analysis: semi-structured interviews were supplemented with content analysis of the social media output of ten actors, as detailed in Table 6.1. This output was analysed thematically, identifying categories that allows us to understand the contours of the group’s communication framework. 500 social media postings were drawn at random during the period between March 2020 and April 2021. This timespan includes a time of significant social movement activity, especially around the summer of 2020. This output was analysed lexicometrically using the Reinhert method using the free software Voyant Tools, which proceeds in the same manner as the Alceste method. The automatic methodology proceeds by splitting the text into several types of textual units, within a global corpus: random units cut mechanically (pieces of sentences of similar size) and initial units, determined by the researcher. The lexicometric analysis was carried out on this corpus of 500 postings which were treated as a single text; each posting was treated as a paragraph. The advantage of this methodology is that it defines, by taking into account the structure of the text (sentences, paragraphs), coherent sets of word usages and allowed the researcher to free himself from his methodological a priori. In addition, six corpora of five videos produced by video activists were also analysed thematically, as well as hermeneutically.

This mixed methods approach did not focus on one group, but rather on the field of social movement activity against migration around Dover and migrant accommodation in Britain per se. This allows a panorama of framings, repertoires of action and activist trajectories to be drawn up that may further the detailed understanding of the dynamics and interactions between actors in this field.

Thirteen different actors whose activity was relevant to the field of anti-immigration social movements belonging to three categories of actors – political organisations, single-issue social movement organisations and video activists – were identified. The contents of the semi-structured interviews were complemented by the thematic and lexicographic analysis of 10 corpora of 50 social media postings, as well as by the hermeneutic and thematic analysis of six video corpora (30 videos). As many actors have been banned from mainstream social media, most of the social media postings are extracted from the Telegram channels of these groups, with the exception of Chris Johnson (on Facebook), Steve Laws and Small Boats (on Twitter). The videos have either been published on YouTube or on Telegram.

The first step in our attempt at an understanding and interpretation of the field of contentious mobilisations around migration will be a description of the political actors and the repertoires of action they use. The anti-migrant social movements in Dover and more widely in Britain use a different repertoire of action than in Calais. In Dover, the situation is more diffuse, as there are no central Dover-based actors, and the mobilisation is carried out by several actors whose form and repertoire of action vary. As mentioned before, three types of actors can be distinguished: political organisations, single-issue organisations and video activism.

The first type of actors comprise what Cas Mudde calls political organisations: groups that present a party form, but do not stand for elections or, if they sometimes run for office, do not prioritise electoral competition.¹⁹ Instead, they focus on propaganda actions, mainly on social networks, as well as forms of street action that typically belong to the repertoire of social movements. Fabian Virchow describes these formations as ‘party-movements’ with a mixed form between a classical political party and a social movement organisation.²⁰ The particularity of these groups’ actions is that they do not take place in broad coalitions that many members of the public may join. Participation is limited to core members and sympathisers of these groups. They most often have a prominent leader figure which embodies the party. Quite often, the leader has written a book, and is the most important face of the organisation on social media. Several organisations engaged in social movement activities on migratory issues can be identified:

Britain First. This group, created in 2011 by former British National Party activists, has an estimated membership of 500 members and is led by Paul Golding.²¹ This nationalist group focuses on the denunciation of Islam and immigration, which are closely linked and presented as a civilisational threat. Moreover, the group claims a strong Christian identity, which stands in opposition to the peril supposedly posed by Islam. The group was barred from running in elections by a 2017 decision by the British Electoral Commission.²² Its politics are characterised by a heavy reliance on social media where the group acquired a massive audience. Before it was deplatformed, the Facebook page of Britain First was followed by nearly two million people.²³ Apart from organising public meetings and leafleting, the most frequent type of action undertaken by this group is the staging of ‘performative’ vigilante actions. For example, regarding migration, several ‘spectacular’ actions were carried out: patrols on the cliffs of Dover, in the former WWII bunkers, but also attempts to float a boat to patrol the Channel. The group also specialises in ‘video patrols’ where activists go to ‘migrant hotels’ and film asylum seekers in order to ‘expose’ them, a concept that belongs to digital vigilantism: the public staging of a social actor on social media as problematic through public exposure and stigmatisation.²⁴

The For Britain Movement. This party-movement is led by Anne Marie Waters, a former Labour Party activist, who was also a leading figure in UKIP. This group can be categorised as civic nationalist (although it does contain former members of the ethno-nationalist BNP). The For Britain Movement is one of the few British far-right groups to have local elected representatives – standing more than 50 candidates in the 2021 local elections. Illegal immigration is one of its main campaigning issues, linked to the supposed danger posed by Islam. The For Britain Movement organised two demonstrations in Dover and in front of a hotel housing asylum seekers, gathering a few dozen supporters in August 2020.

Patriotic Alternative. This organisation was founded in 2019 and is led by Mark Collett, former leader of the British National Party youth organisation, and by Laura Towler (Deputy Leader). This organisation is ethno-nationalist, and close to neo-Nazism. For this party, the issue around the refusal of migration is a ‘demographic issue’ to be understood as the preservation of a certain percentage of ‘white Britons’ in the United Kingdom. This assertion of a racial conception of nationality is quite different compared to most groups that perceive migration above all as a religious and cultural threat. Since its creation, the group’s repertoire of action seems to be focused on community building: hikes, rubbish collection, video game tournaments. The only social movement action on the subject of migration has been a video banner drop, but the migratory issue is very important for the group, which runs a specific website on the subject, ‘We were never asked’,²⁵ and the member of the leadership that we interviewed conceives it as a single-issue organisation whose main field of action is ‘demographics’.

Social movement activities around the migratory situation in the UK are also carried out by single-issue organisations. These organisations are small structures with a few activists and have a localised scope of action. They present the particularity of organising specifically around migration, and more precisely in relation to a specific aspect of migration: small boat crossings in Dover, a specific camp and marriage fraud. Several of these single-issue organisations engaged in social movement activity in the period from spring 2020 to spring 2021.

The first was South East Coastal Defence led by Elaine Renton. It is based in Romney Marsh, not far from Dover. Its primary objective is to put forward demands for the closure of the borders. Its main actions are leafleting, patrolling (not very developed) and participation in demonstrations.

Little Boats, led by Jeremie Davies, is another single-issue organisation that organises in relation to small boat crossings. In addition to numerous tweets on Twitter, the stated objective of this group, which claims around 20 members, is the investigation and exposure of illegal activities around migration in Dover. Its action takes the form of a citizens’ investigation into criminal networks organising crossings between France and the UK (coastal surveillance, tailing supposed traffickers). The group has been raising funds in order to buy a small boat to patrol the Channel.

Stop UK Marriage Fraud, led by Michelle Nawar, focuses specifically on marriage fraud: foreign men who meet women online and take advantage of their vulnerability to obtain papers, exploit them financially and abandon them. Activists of this organisation participate in demonstrations and actions in Dover.

Another group is Protest against Penally Camp. It specifically organises against the establishment of a camp hosting asylum seekers in Penally (Wales). Its leader and spokesperson is Darren Edmundson. This group has led a specific campaign around the demand for the closure of the camp, with grassroots mobilisation of the population and demonstrations. This has links to the local elected representative of UKIP, Neil Hamilton, member of the Welsh Senned Cymru who acts as the institutional relay for the group’s activities.

Finally, Migration Watch UK holds a specific place in the field of single-issue organisations. This does not organise or engage in protest actions. On the contrary, it produces studies that intend to produce an alternate factual discourse and framing on migration. This is similar to many actors of social movements against migration in countries such as Italy or the United States.²⁶ This includes detailed reports on the social and economic impacts of migration on land reclamation in Britain or a count of small boat crossings of the English Channel. Migration Watch UK claims to be solely concerned with migratory issues and does not support any political party. However, one of its founders, Oxford University Emeritus Professor David Coleman, is a controversial figure. He has been criticised for his membership of the Galton Institute, is in favour of eugenicism, and funds birth reduction programmes in Ethiopia.²⁷ David Coleman is also the author of a demographic model predicting that by 2060 white Britons will become a minority unless a drastic restriction on immigration is implemented swiftly.²⁸

Another set of individual activists with significant audiences on social media are self-styled video activists. They film, and then post on social media, images of migrants arriving in Dover. Their objective is to stream online everything that happens: small boat crossings as well as social movement activity such as demonstrations. The phenomenon of video activism constitutes an emerging trend in social movements, which has also been witnessed in the French Yellow Vest movement (Fly Rider, Oliv Oliv, Eric Drouet).

If their practices can sometimes border on digital vigilantism as they implement activities of surveillance, their actions should not be reduced to this dimension. Quite the contrary; their position is a mix between social movement activity and journalism: they do not adhere to journalist deontology and phrasing – however, they provide footage and live coverage. The first category of images is typically the factual documentation of the crossings: the number of people arriving each day and how they are received – this belongs to the construction of alternative factual discourses around migration and attempts to make the phenomenon more visible, similar to the work of Migration Watch UK. Video activists give visibility to social movement activities: rallies during trials, demonstrations around barracks but also protests. They also play a mobilising role: the 5 September 2020 demonstration was initially called by ‘Little Veteran’ and widely shared on social media.²⁹ Similarly, the demonstration in defence of the statues of the Lads and Vets in July 2020, which brought together several thousand people, initially originated from a call by Tommy Robinson,³⁰ former English Defence League leader turned video activist, before being followed up by social movement organisations such as the DFLA (Democratic Football Lads Alliance).

As far as the situation in Dover is concerned, several important video activists can be distinguished. The first is a group of four video activists who call themselves the ‘migrant hunters’: Little Veteran, Active Patriot, Steve Laws and Tyrant Finder UK. Their videos and social media postings are mainly centred around the situation in Dover, but not exclusively. They also broadcast demonstrations in London against Covid-19 restrictions as well as demonstrations demanding the deportation of persons convicted in grooming gang scandals. If their main objective is increasing the visibility of small boat crossings, they provide links for these videos with commentaries, and offer a political framing within the field of civic nationalism, linking Islam, terrorism and illegal immigration.

This group, which has managed to reach a very high level of notoriety on social media, does not have exclusivity on video activism on migration. Activists such as Darren Edmundson from the campaign ‘Protest against Penally Camp’ has shot and broadcast videos on his YouTube channel in order to publicise demonstrations, the camp itself and moments of tension with agents of the private security company guarding the camp. Chris Johnson, based in the South-East of England, has documented small boat crossings on a daily basis, but unlike the ‘migrant hunters’ offers a very limited political framing, as he mainly documents the crossings. The migratory situation in Dover has also been addressed by video activists covering a wider range of themes, making immigration one of the several themes in their video production. This is the case of John Lawrence, a Manchester-based activist who produced numerous videos on immigration and occasionally travelled to Dover for banner drops or demonstrations.

The mobilisations around Dover were not the consequence of a single social movement organisation, nor of a coalition that organised a more or less unified campaign around a common frame. During the period between April 2020 and April 2021, a series of actors mobilised around the issue in a dispersed and uncoordinated way. Groups integrated the situation in Dover into their repertoire of action quite diversely. Political organisations included the migration situation in their overall political framing of the situation. They articulated their actions around Dover and facilities hosting asylum seekers with other issues and campaigns such as Islam, coronavirus restrictions or grooming gangs. In contrast, single-issue actors focused on a specific aspect of the situation and constructed a counter-narrative around it. The number of activists engaged in these activities was quite small: ranging from several dozen to several hundred (for the most important demonstration in Dover on 5 September 2020). But it is above all on social media that the action of activists finds discursive space. This remained the case despite having their access to social media platforms hindered by the move to deplatform far-right groups, accentuated by the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 by Donald Trump supporters.³¹ Therefore, the situation in Dover was not a focal point in which these social movements acted in concert, but rather a political issue on which the far-right narrative was shaped by a series of actors varying in size, repertoire of action and territorial dimension.

In fact, the repertoire of action of these different groups can be broken down into several elements:

First of all, the various actors organised demonstrations in the town of Dover but also around the camps and hotels housing asylum seekers. These were held at regular intervals but generally attracted few participants. For example, the demonstration organised by the For Britain Movement outside a hotel housing asylum seekers attracted between 20 and 30 participants.³² Similarly, according to the BBC, the demonstration organised in front of the Penally Camp in Wales in autumn 2020 attracted more than 55 participants.³³ The demonstration of 5 September 2020, called by the video activist Little Veteran, is the one that brought together the largest numbers: around 400 participants. However, this is still a far cry from the thousands of people who attended the freedom of speech demonstration in March 2018,³⁴ the EDL protests³⁵ or the mobilisation in defence of the Lads and Vets statues in June 2020.

The small numbers mobilised might suggest that, as in a classic social movement model, these low turnouts would demobilise more than anything else. However, this is not the case: despite these low numbers, these demonstrations mobilised others in the online space. As a result, a larger audience was secured and thereby opened the possibility of wider and more direct influence on public opinion. For instance, the audiences of different Telegram channels can be measured using Telemetrio, and their reach is between dozens of thousands a month and hundreds of thousands. Take Britain First: their 24 posts a day were each viewed on average 4,227 times in the week between 7 August and 14 August 2021.³⁶

In order to reach wider audiences, actors also deployed the repertoire of ‘spectacular’ social media vigilantism: they staged actions related to vigilantism such as patrols, security interventions and more general actions designed to render ‘deviant’ acts visible. In Dover, and in relation to migration issues on British territory, three types of social media vigilantism can be observed: staging patrols, building an investigation around the criminal actions of smugglers and the practice of ‘exposure’, which belongs to the field of digital vigilantism.³⁷

Finally, another element identified by Castelli Gattinara and Simonneau in their study of anti-migrant mobilisations in France, Italy and in the US³⁸ was the construction of alternative knowledge aimed at giving a ‘factual’ basis to anti-immigration discourse. The first modality was implemented by Migration Watch UK: the production of knowledge with claims to scientific objectivity – statistics on Channel crossings and the production of reports on the impact of migration on the UK. The Patriotic Alternative website ‘We were never asked’ also presented a number of statistical data purporting to predict that white Britons will become an ethnic minority by 2060.³⁹

The second type of factual discourse by these actors was the production of images, mainly by video activists (photos and videos). The aim was to make Channel crossings visible. While the approach was similar, the produced content was different – the production of images, the gaze of the video activists, all deemed essential in making the phenomenon visible. Fabian Virchow highlights the importance of the image in far-right politics, as does Michael Rasmussen when he analyses Donald Trump’s communication. According to him, far-right politics are not using images in order to push forward their ideas.⁴⁰ On the contrary the essence of its politics is image rather than discourse: to show a phenomenon is to confer it existence, as the video activist Steve Laws phrases it on his personal website:

I suppose the easiest way to explain would be to go back to my first video I uploaded. It was a poor-quality video but what it showed was roughly 30 illegal immigrants being loaded onto coaches ready to be transported to hotels. The video was seen by over a million people on social media, this led me to believe that an awful lot of people was completely unaware that this was happening. … Myself and others who constantly slung out the content forced the mainstream media to report on this issue.⁴¹ [so he claims]

Significantly, the mobilisation of far-right actors around small boat crossings between France and England is different from previous years. Indeed, in 2016, in Dover, the main demonstration organised by far-right groups led to large-scale clashes between anti-fascist protesters and anti-migrant demonstrators: throwing of bricks, stones, smoke bombs and numerous fights.⁴² Although some scuffles between police and demonstrators broke out during the demonstration on 5 September 2020, they were not on the same scale as January 2016. More generally, the use of violence does not appear to be part of the repertoire of action of these demonstrations. Thus, unlike in Calais, there were no acts of halo violence as part of the performative social media vigilantism. This use of non-violent social movement tactics can be explained by several factors. First, a change in actors: it was not the same groups that mobilised in January 2016. The 2016 demonstration was organised by the North-West Infidels, a group whose members can be described as neo-Nazi hooligans,⁴³ and by National Action, a political organisation dissolved for its support of the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox.⁴⁴ These actors were no longer present in 2020–2021. Moreover, according to Gareth Harris⁴⁵, other factors also explain this abandonment of violence. The first would be utilitarian in the sense that Ted Gurr gives to the term.⁴⁶ Faced with numerous and determined anti-fascist opponents, the confrontations would not necessarily turn to the advantage of the far-right activists, potentially leading to a fiasco as in Liverpool in 2016⁴⁷ and in London in 2020. Moreover, there are also political reasons that may explain this non-use of violence: the mobilisation campaigns of far-right groups were hybrid campaigns, attempting to embed far-right activists in local communities through the single issue of migration. In this context, the use of violent tactics could have a demobilising effect, a phenomenon that was observed in Calais, in particular in the aftermath of the patrols of ‘local residents’ around the Calais Jungle (see the chapter on Calais).

A final series of actions was carried out by Patriotic Alternative. Beyond occasional banner drops and leafleting actions, most of the actions were undertaken from a ‘community-building’ perspective. Its leader considers that the ‘White British’ majority is the only community that does not have a communitarian life as such; PA’s action goes beyond politics in the sense that most of the activities are aimed at building a ‘White British’ community: hiking, video game tournaments, collecting waste on natural sites, helping to report burglars, but also helping each other to write CVs and cover letters. This community-building action was justified by the organisation’s leader. Collett stressed the need to build group cohesion, which he believes was lacking in all major British nationalist parties such as the BNP and UKIP. This kind of repertoire of action, from a structure that defines itself as an ‘organisation’ and not a political party, is best understood as a reinterpretation of the categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of the friend/enemy categories of the political scientist Carl Schmitt.⁴⁸ Building a ‘white British’ camp does not involve the practice of political struggle against enemies, but the implementation of a community – an ‘us’ delimited by adherence to the ethno-nationalist project. These positive practices construct the ‘we’ that would then allow the political struggle to be conducted:

And now, we’re aiming to bring people together but our movement isn’t just about democracy, it’s not just about standing in an election, it’s something far greater. It’s more of a community-based movement.

Now, while we do believe in electioneering, our primary focus is building a community of people who are like-minded people who get on with each other. … I think we stand out from right wing, other right-wing political movements, based on the fact that we are a community first, that we bring people together …

Those people find friends, some people have found their wives and husbands at these events. This year we’ll be having some of our first patriotic alternative babies being born … We’re far more than just a political movement, we are a social movement, we are a community-based movement … we have book reviews, we do gaming nights, we do, as I said, hiking, fitness, all of these things are things that we’re engaging because we’re not just about people going out and putting out leaflets, trying to win elections we’re about building a genuine community.

… every other ethnic group here in the West has a community-based movement to represent their interests and I’ve got absolutely no problem with that. If the black community wants to come together and have a community-based movement, fair enough, the Jewish community come together, they’ve got a community-based movement, the Muslim community, the Hindu community, but I think that people of European descent should be allowed to have communities-based movements too. That should not be closed off to them and that’s what we are running.⁴⁹

Although the substance of Patriotic Alternative’s political discourse is similar in its designation of an enemy external to the national body, the proposal for the construction of a political body is very different from usual far-right discourses: instead of affirming an ‘us’ defined by solely by the threat of the enemy, Patriotic Alternative intends to construct the ‘us’ (defined on ethno-nationalist grounds) through practices of metapolitical social linkage, allowing, according to the leadership member we interviewed, a cohesion superior to that of the other British nationalist formations.

How can the claims, framing and ideologies of social movement actors be understood? This social movement activity intends to reach out to members of the public who do not belong to the immediate sphere of the far right. The communication of actors can be analysed using the theory of frames. Frames are interpretative schemas that allow individuals to ‘locate, perceive, identify and label’ the social world.⁵⁰ Social movement organisations identify a problem (diagnosis framing), a way to address it (prognostic framing) and invoke the need to act (motivational framing). Their conjunction forms a ‘collective action framing’, i.e. ‘a set of beliefs and representations oriented towards action’.⁵¹ Furthermore, it is necessary to add that framings are distinct from ideologies as defined by Mannheim⁵² in the sense that they are voluntarily reduced to the identification of a problem, the need to act and a means of addressing it – allowing actors from different political currents to be brought together around this voluntarily minimalist framing. In order to better understand this process, the actors’ discourses will be examined as constituting two sets of frames.

The first is the narrow framing specific to the migratory issue, which crystallises around small boat crossings in Dover and ultimately relies on mechanisms similar to those that present immigrants as disaffiliated individuals in the sense that Robert Castel give the term,⁵³ unknown to the community and therefore potentially criminogenic – and who would be entitled to ‘luxury hotels’ to which indigenous members of the national community, such as ‘vets’, would be deprived.

Second, this narrow framing of immigration, which can be primarily understood as a social movement framing, will be contextualised (in different ways) by the actors of these movements in a narrative linked to the political discourse of the far right. The migratory issue would be typically connected to other issues that are also the focus of movement mobilisations, such as Islam, grooming gangs and so on.

Two further analytical distinctions can be used to better characterise these discourses. The first is the distinction made by Cas Mudde, who divides the far right into two subgroups according to their compatibility with liberal democracy. For Mudde, the far right has an extremist wing, the so-called ‘extreme right’, and a more moderate, ‘radical-right’ populist wing. The extreme right’s perspective is geared towards the creation of a post-democratic, authoritarian nationalist regime and it often engages in political violence. In contrast, the radical right accepts the general framework of liberal democracy even if it questions certain aspects of it, notably in terms of fundamental freedoms, while pushing forward claims for full popular sovereignty.⁵⁴

The second distinction of interest is that between civic nationalism and ethno-nationalism, which is based mainly on characterisation of the national body and, in particular, the danger posed by the ‘enemies’ of the people. Ethno-nationalism, in the historical lineage of the British extreme right (BUF, NF, BNP), is based on an ethno-racial vision of the British nation. The latter is defined above all on racial and biological grounds in connection with an anchorage in the British Isles and the culture attached to it. The danger posed by immigration to this current is the prospect of a demographic change which would see white Britons becoming a minority or even disappear.

Civic nationalism, which emerged from the counter-jihad movement, presents another conception of the national body. Its community can be defined above all by the cultural adherence to civilisational values characteristic of the West: Enlightenment, rationality, human rights, secularism and, for some, Christian values. This national community, close to the conception of the nation developed by Ernest Renan,⁵⁵ is not defined on ethnic or racial grounds but on cultural grounds – adherence to national and Western values guarantees the integration of individuals from other backgrounds. This conception of the nation is also compatible with the French conception of nationality, which is granted on the basis of acquisition of the French language and adherence to republican values. However, what makes this brand of civic nationalism specific and places it within the field of the far right is the belief in the existence of a worldwide fight to the death between Islam and Western civilisation, which manifests in international relations (international terrorism, Israeli–Palestinian conflict) as well as in the internal situation: Muslim immigrants are believed to not be assimilable and their objective is held to be to establish Islamic supremacy in the West. Immigration would be the marker of this civilisational peril in the sense that it would favour the Muslim invasion, potentially leading to a great population change sometimes called the ‘Great Replacement’.⁵⁶

It becomes possible to classify the actors into two main groups, by cross-referencing the variables of civic nationalism and ethno-nationalism on the one hand and the radical right and the extreme right wing on the other. The first and most important group of actors, which is simultaneously positioned in the field of the radical right and civic nationalism includes most single-issue organisations, video activists and the For Britain Movement (although the For Britain Movement does include former members of the ethno-nationalist BNP). The second, smaller group is, on the other hand, positioned at the intersection of the extreme right wing and ethno-nationalism, and includes groups such as Britain First and Patriotic Alternative.

The framing of immigration relies on two elements. The first is the illegality of the migratory process. This tends to frame migrants arriving in Dover as individuals whose status is ontologically illegal. The second element is the lack of knowledge about incoming migrants and, given the impossibility of prior checks, raises the possibility that some migrants may be potential criminals or terrorists. According to activists, not every immigrant is a terrorist, but they oppose the risk that the uncontrolled nature of the migration process supposedly poses to the British public. As mentioned above in the fourth chapter regarding the social reaction to migration, it is possible to draw a parallel between these discourses and those in the 17th and 18th century regarding vagrants outside of local communities, who were not eligible for assistance and, because of their outsider status, would pose a potential threat to the local community..⁵⁷ Thus E. tells us:

I have been called a xenophobe a million times. [This is] Absolute rubbish and I keep saying to people it is not about skin colour, it is not about race, religion, creed or skin colour, it is about national security and that’s what they don’t get. [migrants have] no fingerprints, no Interpol checks, no police checks, no background checks at all, no passports or identification for people, and these people are flooding into our country, a lot of them are just disappearing.⁵⁸

J., head of a single-issue organisation, presents a similar viewpoint:

We are not targeting the people in those boats, because they are human beings, … The thing is, our problem is we have people arriving on our shores that we don’t know anything about, and it is totally different if they were to come here via the normal channels … We are not complaining about that, but we are complaining about those people who we don’t know anything about. … I’m more angry at the government than the migrants themselves. If they are genuinely coming from a war zone that’s totally different. We had it in Vietnam in years gone by, the ‘70s, people came here and started new lives because they were being killed. … But this is wholesale usering, this is economic migrancy on a massive scale, and as we just said earlier, they need to be deported. But this has to be a no-go area.⁵⁹

Similarly, K., activist in a single-issue organisation, says he is not anti-migrant but rather opposed to uncontrolled immigration policies:

We are not anti-migrants, obviously, we are anti our government allowing people who we know nothing about coming into the country. [If] they were coming through the correct routes, not coming over illegally, right, I would support them, I would be there, I would give them my old clothes, I’d be there giving them food, but they’re not. They’re doing everything illegally. I’m not racist, I’m not far right at all, but they’re doing it as the wrong routes and they’re coming over here and the crime rate has gone up by about 80 per cent I think at the minute since the migrants have been there. Yeah, that’s my views on that.⁶⁰

The issue of government assistance is also juxtaposed with the position of those Britons that need assistance. This can also found in Hilary Pilkington’s research that revealed that the feeling of competition between white British and immigrants in securing access to social housing and benefits was a key driver behind support for the EDL.⁶¹ It is also worth making reference to the work of Olivier Schwartz, who describes the social perception of the French working classes as characterised by a ‘triangular social consciousness’.⁶² According to Schwartz, theirs is an identity defined in relation to the ‘they’ of the dominant classes but also to the ‘they’ of immigrants who are precarious and in need of assistance. They are likewise perceived as potentially criminogenic and as competition for access to the benefits system. It is in this perspective that the discourse on migrants must be understood. Furthermore, migrants are set side by side with army veterans, with the latter deemed to be worthy of assistance and yet denied it, whereas the former are deemed as unworthy and yet benefit. In this perspective, and in a context of scarcity of resources where it would not be possible to provide for everyone, priority should be given to people who are legitimate by virtue of their nationality, and even more so to veterans who have fought for the national community. Thus J. told us that:

I think one of the big problems we have, … is the homeless in Britain. I am sure it is the same in France. We have a lot of members who are British, who worked … or for whatever reason whether they were in the military or had drug or alcohol problems, they are on the streets and to us that is wrong. … The other thing is we noticed a great deal of the migrants coming here, a lot of them have the latest mobile phones that we can’t afford, a lot of them. We see it. We saw it, you know, the other … last week, and you will see them and you wonder ‘who are these people and why are we putting them in hotels’, and some of them have thousands and thousands of euros on them.⁶³

D., an activist from a single-issue organisation, thought that migration is best explained by the draw of the British benefits system:

That’s my opinion, yeah, the benefit system. I think they believe they come over here and they’ll have a better life. They don’t have to work at the minute; they’re getting benefit, asylum seeker benefit and I believe they’re also working illegally.⁶⁴

K. made a similar point, saying that the British population is dissatisfied with migration because migrants:

Are given free housing, healthcare, priority treatment over an estimated 80,000 British living on the streets including war veterans.⁶⁵

Anne Marie Waters, leader of The For Britain Party, shared this view:

The vast majority don’t work, so we are told they are paying tax. Give me a break! Give me a break! The benefit bill just gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger. … the vast majority do not work, will not work, so the idea that it’s an economic opportunity is ridiculous. We are paying through the nose for this. We have 13,000 British veterans sleeping on the streets in this country. People who put their life on the line to fight for their country and to do, at the behest of a corrupt government, to put their lives on the line for a corrupt government. 13,000 of them sleep on the streets in this country every night. Migrants arrive, strangers, and are housed in 4-star hotels by our government. Well look, if you, look, if we are talking about immigration of people coming in to work in the financial district or to work in technology or medicine and sciences, that would be fine. That would be an economic addition to the UK. This is not what is happening in the vast majority of cases. The vast majority are coming here as refugees, asylum seekers, not neither. They meet the definition of neither and will spend the bulk of their life on benefits, so I don’t understand. So, what we are doing is taking millions of people from these cultures, third world cultures, and putting them into Europe. Now a lot of them are illiterate in their own language, much less in ours and this has been, the benefit bill is astronomical. The vast majority of people who come to the UK from these countries don’t work, will never work.⁶⁶

Activists do not simply develop a discourse on immigration at Dover and small boat crossings. This issue is linked with related political issues.

The first is the security threat supposedly posed by Islam. For example, D. linked Islamist terrorist attacks in the UK to refugees:

The Manchester Bomber, the Arena Bomber, the Arianna Grande Bomber, his parents was refugees, asylum seekers from Libya, and they were linked to extreme groups already, and there has been dozens of other attacks done by refugees and immigrants, and I believe we are getting too many in, way too many, and that’s why the crime figures have gone up across the board in England on particular crimes.⁶⁷

Anne Marie Waters shared this point of view and articulated it with a negative feeling towards Islam itself, and added that she was specifically against immigration originating from Muslim countries:

I am very, very clear that I don’t like Islam. I think it’s a dangerous, violent religion and I’ve studied it in depth for years. … as someone who knows the religion, has studied the Quran, has studied the Hadith, the Sunnah, the Muhai, … I know that it’s a violent religion and it’s a massive threat to our safety and our freedom, and that is proven every day. For that reason, I don’t believe there should be immigration from Muslim societies into ours. We are not compatible. There are individuals, of course, but as a collective. I’m not suggesting every individual Muslim is the same, that would be absurd, but as a collective, we are not compatible. Free democracies, for example, France is not compatible with Pakistani culture. … So, what we’ve done is move millions of people from the Muslim world into Europe, without any regard for the cultural differences, the religious differences, the difference in values. We were told that everyone was the same, which is an absolute lie, a blatant lie, and an absurdity and now we are reaping the reward of that. People are being beheaded in France for cartoons is the reward of that. You cannot, you simply cannot put oil and water together and expect it to mix.

No this may sound trivial to you, but it is just an example of how different we are. We’ve had take-aways, fast food, run by Pakistanis, for example, where we’ve found faecal matter, human faeces around the place … even our toilet habits are so spectacularly different, that we ended up with take-away venues being found to have human faecal matter strewn around the place … What I am trying to say is we are completely different.⁶⁸

The civilisational danger posed by Islam is also linked to sexuality. The sexuality of Muslims, driven by different cultural values, is deemed a threat to British women. Thus M., organiser of a single-issue social movement organisation, told us that:

I’ve obviously been around a lot of Muslims myself, and they are, some of them can be quite fanatical about their religion and I do think that the extremists talk within religion itself. Muslims basically believe that Western woman are whores and this is across, and the two reasons are, as I say, because I have also worked in the Middle East as I have said, the two reasons are because we don’t cover up and we generally have relationships before marriage.⁶⁹

She also established a link between marriage fraud, immigration, Islam and terrorism:

And men overseas, they basically groom them online, online grooming, sort of like a romance scam, sort of grooming … basically are really full on, so they are like, they become the only person in their life so, you know, if you look up the term love bombing, you will see it in English what that means. Rachid Redouane, which was the first London Bridge bomber, his estranged wife, Charisse O’Leary, was linked to one of my marriage fraud groups, so I believe that she was a victim of marriage fraud and as I say, he was a failed asylum seeker, and I do believe that he was on fake identity. … Terrorism is linked to the marriage fraud. Obviously, what is going on in Dover is linked to marriage fraud.⁷⁰

Similarly, D. considered that adult asylum seekers would have no problem having sex with 12-year-old girls. He emphasised the need for education to fill that cultural gap:

Educate them on our laws, obviously. Obviously they thought it was OK to sleep with a 12 year old, have sexual intercourse with a 12 year old, when that’s not the case at all. We asked one of them saying, ‘Do you know the legal age to have sex in this country?’ and one of them turned around and said, ‘Yes, it’s 12 years old.’ …⁷¹

Finally, for some activists (it is not the case for all of the interviewees), migration endangers Western civilisation.

Some activists considered immigrants as fighters against Britain. If these comments by respondents seem extreme it is worth noting that they are held by members of single-issue social movement organisations, which tends to show that despite a relatively open position towards democratic institutions, some of them do view immigrants as an absolute enemy, an attitude that could be considered as belonging more to the extreme right wing rather than the radical right. This problematises the neat distinction between radical right and extreme right wing. One interviewee considered that the youth of migrants implied that they would be fighters and immigration is thereby considered part of a governmental design:

Why is it only men and why are they taking over our army barracks? Are these … and why is it fighting age men from the age of 20 to 35 only allowed in? I don’t know. I said, the people that are migrating into this country and taking over our army barracks they’re at fighting age, 20 to 35 and ISIS said years ago that they will take over Europe and it looks like they’re starting to. Now, are these men actually ISIS soldiers? We don’t know. … Yeah, exactly, yeah, but is the government forced? Why is the government allowing all these in? … I don’t really know.⁷²

For Anne Marie Waters, only Western countries would undergo the demographic transformations caused by immigration:

It seems to me that every Western white majority country is being transformed and this is what I said when I said it’s not about – we’re not living in a global world. Not all moving around. The traffic is coming in one direction from the rest of the world to the first world. That’s what’s happening. It’s not the rest of us. Japan isn’t changing. The West is changing.⁷³

Another activist linked the migratory processes to a possible disappearance of the ‘white race’ planned in a New World Order plot in which the British government is supposed to participate, the Coudenhove-Kalergi conspiracy:⁷⁴

Coudenhove-Kalergi was an Austrian, I think, and he came out with this, it is literally called the Coudenhove-Kalergi plan … every single thing of this seems to be aimed at getting rid of the white man, and the thing is I didn’t actually know until the other day, if you Google … it up whites only take up I think it is between 8 and 9 per cent of the global population? … Whites are the minority on earth. … I was really shocked. I had no idea, you know, the way all of this anti-white stuff is going on … We’ve got Muslim-only housing in London under Sadiq Khan. … This is blatant racism against whites in a predominantly white country, and our government are doing nothing about it. They want to depopulate the world, I mean you must have seen ‘The Great Reset’ … you must know about Bill Gates wanting to depopulate via a vaccine? … The invasion continues, they are trying to wipe out the white man. … Coudenhove’s plan was to flood Europe with people from the Middle East and from Africa, so that they breed with the white race so that there is one race on earth, and the whites need to be gone and it’s all in this plan … There is an anti-white agenda and the British government are very much playing their part.⁷⁵

Most discourses on immigration, especially from actors situated at the intersection of the radical right and civic nationalism, present the same lines of argument. These start with the illegality of immigration, highlight its uncontrolled and potential criminogenic character, and connect it to economic pressure on the benefit system, Islam, sexual peril and, for some of them, to an existential civilisational threat.

The discourse of actors situated in the field of ethno-nationalism is somewhat different. Thus, Mark Collett, member of the leadership of Patriotic Alternative, considers that the problem with migration is not cultural but above all ‘demographic’. Referring to the work of David Coleman, founder of Migration Watch UK, he considered that, due to the higher birth rates of immigrant communities (South Asian, Black African, Black Caribbean), white British people, although constituting the overwhelming majority of the population today, would become a minority within 40 years, in 2066. Moreover, contrary to the work of Professor Coleman, who considers that stopping immigration is a variable that may prevent this change, he asserts that immigrants have a much higher birth rate than white Britons, and that unless something is done quickly, in view of the changes in age groups, the process will very quickly become irreversible. He argues that an ‘electoral and non-violent’ political upsurge is needed and sets a target of about 90 to 95 per cent white British of the population as desirable for national cohesion. He does not specify how this demographic change would be achieved, which raises the prospect of potential ethnic cleansing in the United Kingdom:⁷⁶

That’s where [David Coleman’s work] we took that from, that’s where that’s from. … white people are not still the majority when it comes to younger ages and the interesting thing about that is not only they’re not the majority when it comes to younger generation but the younger you look at the younger age bracket you’re analysing, the smaller of the majority they become to the point where in certain areas the majority of people being born, well, there is no majority but the fact that the white Britons are a minority in terms of birth, so that tells you that the problem is actually … it’s not actually a problem that can easily be solved. It’s a problem that is very much embedded and there is a trend taking place and that trend is that we are an ageing population. The white Britons are an ageing population and that they are going to face a massive change in the near future and that change won’t take until 2066 to actually occur in a meaningful way. …

… for a long time, it was all a conspiracy theory. Now, the way my detractors talk about … this is very different. You actually now have people on YouTube who are saying white people, they are gonna be a minority in Britain, that they are already a minority in London, but those people celebrate that fact. So, you can find videos on YouTube where content creators are actually saying ‘Yep, white people, already a minority in London, gonna be a minority in 2066’ but they believe that’s a good thing, they’re celebrating.⁷⁷

J-L, video activist, also adhered to this ethno-nationalist vision of politics. He considered himself to be of ‘mixed race’ as he is the son of a Jamaican immigrant who came as part of the Windrush generation and was also committed to the left (this dimension will be further examined in the section devoted to trajectories). He explained why he adheres to ethno-nationalism:

We’ve got this Black Lives Matter thing going on and they always talk about transatlantic slavery … Black Lives Matter is now all white people are bad, that’s how they are talk and Diane Abbott, she talks like that, David Lammy he talks like … doesn’t … they generalise, they don’t pick specific but generalise on white people, and half my family are white so if anyone thinks that I should be supporting Black Lives Matter, then I would say to them ‘but what about my white family? What about my 50 per cent white family, what about them, now how do I treat them? And I am not going to treat them any less’.

Do you know what I mean? I won’t say, it angers me because as a mixed-race person, in the past six weeks I have seen one of my friends racially abused, a white friend of mine, I have seen this with my own eyes, and then I went to a protest where a black woman was saying an anti-white speech. … the white man is the enemy in the world in general, that’s how the left make the white man out to be and, again, I have got a half-white family, I could trace my family back in England on my Mum’s side, 22 generations. Not just like 5 or 10, 22 generations going back to, I think it goes back to 1300s, if not earlier, and I am not going to forget my other side of the family. I understand my heritage, my Dad was a great Jamaican, I talk about him a lot and, you know, I understand that, I understand the different culture in Jamaica and I have ate Jamaican food all my life …

I like … ‘Patriotic Alternative’. … Because one of the things they do, they talk about demographics, right and I believe … it is not so much I have got a problem with Islam, but our leaders, and demographics is crucial to me because I have talked about Eastern European immigration … Oldham has some of the highest Romanian immigration in the country … In the primary schools now, it has come in it is about 40 per cent, it is about, in the Primary Schools it is about 50 per cent or more Eastern European kids, secondary schools are down at between 30 and 40 per cent. I think.

So, there is a big change coming and I am not saying they are all bad, but because we’ve had the doors wide open, I keep saying this, we’ve had all … we have not checked people. We have had lots of rubbish and criminals, you know, I mean there is a load of evidence … there is certain kinds of crimes, sex crimes, all this people trafficking and all that lot, that’s all linked to Eastern Europeans mainly. … Patriotic Alternative want a majority white England. Now me, as a mixed-race nationalist, English nationalist, whatever you want to say, then I would have to agree in whoever’s country you are if you want a majority of your people there you can. … I would be happy with a 90 per cent majority white English in the country, and I can even give you that 90 per cent if we stopped all this mass immigration, remember I am talking in the span of 20 years, the past 20 years I said, yeah? I did a video and the net migration statistics that the government wanted to bring in has always been higher, and all the politicians know this, it has been in the news before, and instead of having immigration of tens of thousands, it has been hundreds of thousands, so if we could just take this past 20 years then my England would go back to how I would want … I would be happy with a 90 per cent white England.⁷⁸

This ethno-nationalist discourse is rather marginal in the framing of most actors. It certainly constitutes a minority and distinct discourse in the framings of migration within anti-migrant mobilisation.

Each actor’s framing of the migratory issue has been positioned in a bi-varied space. The first axis is positioned to the radical right/extreme right-wing distinction, in relation to the positioning towards democracy and its virulence in relation to the figure of the enemy. On the one hand the extreme right wing marks an adhesion to a strongly authoritarian regime and on the other hand, the radical right accepts the framework of the parliamentary regime. The second axis relates to the civic nationalism/ethno-nationalism distinction.

As Can Be Seen From This Breakdown, Several Trends Can Be Identified. Most Social Movement Actors Are Part of The Quadrant Combining Radical Right And Civic Nationalism. They Link Immigration To Islam, Terrrorism And Women’S And Sexual Minorities’ Rights, And Present A Relatively Homogeneous Political Framing And Discourse. This Discourse Presents A Stronger Intersubjectivity In The Sense That Gerald Bronner Gives To This Term⁷⁹ vis-à-vis British public opinion, meaning the potential for exerting influence on public opinion is much stronger than from other discourses. In addition, it will be seen further in the analysis of individual trajectories that a certain number of actors in this quadrant of social movement activity present similar trajectories starting with a Labour background, followed by involvement with UKIP.

The other pole, less important in numbers, is represented by Patriotic Alternative and video activist John Lawrence. They simultaneously combine an anchorage within the extreme right and a discourse centred on a racialised conception of the nation. It is also interesting to note that they both have a common point of origin, having been originally engaged in the BNP. This shows that actors that can be classified within the extreme right have been influenced by the legacy of radicalism embodied by the British National Party.⁸⁰

Two actors appear isolated, however: Britain First and Migration Watch UK. Indeed, Migration Watch, which is a reference actor in the factual construction of the immigration framework, seems to fully accept the democratic game and to focus its communication solely on the migration issue without inserting it into a political discourse that could be related to the far right. It is only David Coleman’s individual positioning in favour of eugenics and his work on demographic change that could position this organisation in the ethno-nationalist field. It should also be noted that Coleman’s research is the main reference point for Mark Collett’s claims concerning the demographic discourse of Patriotic Alternative, allowing it to be presented as ‘scientific reality’.⁸¹

Britain First seems to be isolated from the other actors by its radical nature, its repertoire of action based mainly on performative vigilantism, but also its seemingly hostile relations with other actors. However, as we shall see, these distinctions which allow us to characterise groups are much less operative at the level of individual activist careers. Their commitment and proximities seem much more fluid than the ideological distinctions presented above.

Moreover, even though ethno-nationalist and civic nationalist conceptions of the nation may appear essentially different, they still present similar elements. According to these discourses, the national body would be threatened with cultural or biological dissolution by an enemy simultaneously external and internal. Facing this absolute peril, an authoritarian restoration, whether situated within the formal framework of a democratic state (radical right) or not (extreme right-wing), would be necessary. Without entering the debate as to whether any of these groups may be labelled as fascist or not, it is nevertheless worth remembering that the historian Robert Paxton, when asked about the possible return of the fascist phenomenon, remarked:

The most interesting current cases are not those where old shirts come out of the closet. We must remember with George Orwell that authentic fascisms come dressed in the patriotic symbols of their own country. Authentic fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-black; in Western Europe, secular and anti-Semitic, even anti-Muslim; and in Eastern Europe, religious and Slavophile. The setting depends on the local culture. It is better to pay attention to the functions performed by these new movements, and to the circumstances that might open up a space for them, rather than to look for traces of the rhetoric, programs, and aesthetic preferences of the early fascist movements of 1900. The right question is the one that is appropriate for the second and third stages of the development of fascisms: do these movements promise to restore unity, energy, and purity to a community that feels threatened by decadence and humiliation? Are they willing to do anything to fulfill this promise?⁸²