Patriot Platform wants the streets—and the ballot box

Danny Tommo’s latest declaration about Patriot Platform gives a clearer glimpse of the political project he is trying to construct, and it should not be dismissed simply as another piece of far right boasting. Writing that Patriot Platform will become “the most powerful patriot-driven organisation in British history”, Tommo says it will create a “voting bloc” capable of putting “the people back in charge”, while insisting that, “They have used the law against us. It is time to use the law against them.”

Men in shorts - Mussolini and his squads

At first sight there is an obvious contradiction between the two sides of this project, because the same network that is experimenting with masked street actions, quasi-military discipline and confrontational demonstrations is also presenting itself as an electoral force capable of influencing governments and political parties. Historically, however, there is no contradiction at all between fascists organising on the streets and attempting to use elections, parliament and the institutions of the existing state.

Italian Fascism combined both from the beginning, with Mussolini’s squads attacking socialist offices, trade unions and cooperatives while Fascist leaders manoeuvred within parliamentary politics and struck deals with sections of the ruling class. The Nazis followed a similar path in Germany, particularly after the failed Munich putsch of November 1923, when Hitler increasingly pursued power through elections and the constitutional system without abandoning the SA street organisation that fought socialists and communists and terrorised political opponents.

The electoral organisation did not replace the street movement, because the two strengthened one another as different parts of the same political project, and that is the most useful way of approaching what Tommo appears to be trying to build today.

The recent Daily Mail action gives us a sharper sense of how this might work in practice. Richard Donnelly in his blog Unrecovered Country reports that several dozen men, mostly dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, marched through Kensington before assembling outside the paper’s offices, where Tommo delivered an ultimatum over its reporting on his mother and threatened to bring Patriot Platform back “every other day”, warning that “next time, we bring everyone”. 

The numbers were small, around 35 according to that account, and there is no reason to inflate what was in many respects a bizarre and farcical operation, but the political form is more revealing than the turnout. The article makes the important point that the action “exposed a harder core” of people prepared to travel at Tommo’s instruction, and that he was attempting to turn “a loose constituency into a portable formation with its own habits, rituals and loyalties”. 

That goes directly to the heart of the contradiction between a street force and a voting bloc. Tommo does not necessarily need Patriot Platform to become another political party, because a movement can operate around the electoral system while maintaining a much harder activist layer outside it. It can tell politicians that it possesses activists who can be deployed on the streets, a substantial online audience and a wider body of voters who can be steered towards Reform UK, Advance UK, independents or whichever electoral vehicle appears most useful.

The Daily Mail mobilisation also suggests that Tommo is attempting to create precisely such a harder activist layer. Ricard Donnelly notes his repeated attempts to behave like a “sergeant major”, barking orders at participants and referring to them as “his men”, while arguing that the demonstration was less important as a show of numbers than as a test of whether a smaller group would turn up wherever he directed it. 

That fits closely with his own language after recent actions, when he praised supporters because they had “stuck to the plan”, “maintained complete discipline” and operated under “total control”. They suggest an ambition to transform part of a loose and largely online far right constituency into something more reliable, organised and deployable.

The emerging model can therefore be understood as an attempted chain running from online audience to street mobilisation, from street mobilisation to an activist cadre, and from that cadre towards a wider electoral constituency capable of exerting pressure on mainstream politics.

The Dover action and the Daily Mail mobilisation show two different sides of that process. Dover demonstrated that hundreds could be moved towards a major piece of border infrastructure under conditions of secrecy, while the Daily Mail action tested whether a smaller core would respond to Tommo personally and march over a grievance that principally concerned him. As Donnelly puts it, “there was a method inside the farce”, and each mobilisation gives the participants another opportunity to practise becoming something more disciplined. 

Details matter because repeated mobilisation requires money, transport, communications, trusted broadcasters and organisers. A movement that presents itself as a spontaneous uprising of “the people” still has to solve the very mundane organisational problems of who pays, who knows the location in advance, who turns up with cameras, who gives the orders and who is expected to obey them.

Tommo’s language about “the people” should also be taken seriously, because fascist and radical right politics have historically depended upon dissolving real class divisions into an imaginary national community supposedly united against an alien enemy. Workers and bosses, landlords and tenants, small traders and millionaires are rhetorically fused into “the people”, while the real conflicts produced by capitalism are displaced onto “globalists”, migrants, Marxists or whatever group is designated as standing outside the nation.

His description of a “globalist, Marxist-communist, anti-Christian group” ruling Britain performs precisely this ideological function, replacing an analysis of class power with a conspiracist struggle between the authentic nation and hidden enemies controlling society.

The Christian element strengthens that politics rather than sitting awkwardly beside it. Tommo’s own invocation of “Jesus’ name” similarly turns political conflict into a moral struggle in which the movement can present itself not merely as opposing immigration or liberalism but as defending civilisation, faith and national survival.

From a Marxist perspective, however, we should not telescope 2026 Britain into Italy in 1922 or Germany in 1933. Patriot Platform has nothing remotely resembling the mass social base or paramilitary strength of the Fascist squads or the Nazi SA, and the social crisis in which it operates is profoundly different from the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary crises that produced classical Fascism.

What we are looking at instead is an attempt to build a radical right movement infrastructure within which fascist tendencies can develop, bringing together online propaganda, a disciplined street layer, nationalist Christianity and an ambition to exert electoral pressure.

The crucial question is whether Tommo can move beyond spectacular actions and social media rhetoric towards permanent organisation, with recognised local organisers, regular meetings, fundraising structures, membership systems and coordinated political intervention.

Without that development, claims about becoming the most powerful patriot organisation in British history remain largely theatrical boasting. If those structures begin to appear, however, then the apparent contradiction between the masked street formation and the “voting bloc” will look increasingly like a division of political labour, with one part of the movement building disciplined forces outside parliament while another seeks legitimacy and leverage through elections and the institutions of the state.