𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The response to this weekend’s protests on the South Coast represents a colossal failure of police intelligence gathering and operations, alongside a demonstration of the policy failures relating to public disorder by successive Westminster governments.

The timing – coinciding with Reform’s party conference – was surely not accidental, perhaps seeking an opportunity for Restore Britain and others to capture the narrative on the Right over the issue of unlawful immigration. The whole issue of immigration in our country – particularly boats crossing the Channel and unloading large numbers of unlawful migrants – is undoubtedly a colossal crisis. But that crisis does not excuse further lawbreaking – including unlawful protests.

It is perfectly clear that the protesters who gathered in Dover this weekend were highly organised – and as such, opportunities should have been available to the police to act pre-emptively.

Kent Police’s somewhat absurd statement – that the protests were “spontaneous” – was an effort to imply that the police were not to blame for failing to pre-empt the protests. There was, however, nothing “spontaneous” about hundreds of young men, almost uniformly wearing black clothes and masks, appearing in rented vans around first light on a Saturday morning in Dover.

The group’s tactics appear to have been carefully considered in advance: specific roads were blocked, splinter groups peeled off towards the port and immigration facilities, and livestreamers narrated the events for a global audience.

On Sunday, there were protests in Portsmouth – albeit they appear to be different in nature to those in Dover – where mostly local people gathered in response to the arrival of a boat carrying around 140 migrants. The boat had been escorted by French vessels halfway across the Channel, with escort duties then coordinated by HM Coastguard and the RNLI for the remainder of the crossing.

Police in Portsmouth should have been ready for a public outcry over the weekend, given the news that an Iraqi man had been charged with raping a 14-year-old boy in the town.

And yet the police appear to have been caught entirely by surprise – indeed, the contention that the Dover protest was “spontaneous” is tantamount to an admission that this is the case.

In the midst of the 2024 summer riots, following the horrific murders of three children in Southport, the then prime minister pledged to create “a national capability, across police forces, to tackle violent disorder”. The need for this capability, Sir Keir Starmer said, was because: “These thugs are mobile. They move from community to community. And we must have a policing response that can do the same. Shared intelligence. Wider deployment of facial recognition technology. And preventive action – criminal behaviour orders. To restrict their movements. Before they can even board a train”.

No doubt the Home Office will claim that its plans to create a National Police Service and push through police force mergers will help fix the problems here.

But two years on from Starmer’s commitments – and given it will be some time before a National Police Service is actually up and running – this weekend’s events show that the capability available both now and for the foreseeable future is utterly ineffective.

As is so often the case when it comes to policing’s current woes, many of the wider policy failings here have their roots in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

Large reductions in police funding led to both a collapse in police intelligence capabilities and sufficiently trained public order officers available for deployment – neither have ever recovered from this act of wanton destruction by the state of its own capabilities. Simultaneously, legislative changes by the coalition government reduced police powers to deal with protest – particularly in the area around Parliament.

The response to the worst excesses of historic police tactics against domestic extremists has been an almost total withdrawal from this arena of policing. The Under Cover Policing Inquiry, currently chaired by Sir John Mitting, was announced in 2014 by Home Secretary Theresa May and is still ongoing 12 years later. With few signs of an end in sight, the inquiry may well have finished off for good the idea of intrusive police intelligence operations against domestic extremists.

Once this weekend’s disorder in Dover was unfolding, the operational policing response was far too passive. Yet interfering with the running of the Port of Dover is no ordinary highway obstruction.

Section 7 of the Public Order Act 2023 makes it an offence to interfere, intentionally or recklessly, with the use or operation of key national infrastructure. Section 8 of the Act expressly lists harbour and road infrastructure as being protected by the Act.

The correct response by the police to gangs of men paralysing our national infrastructure should be immediate arrests, not officers “engaging” with protesters while the disruption builds around them. The group involved may well have violently resisted their removal – requiring the use of considerable force by the police – but if that is what it takes to maintain the free-flowing operations of our key national infrastructure, then so be it.

Similar scenes of police inaction have been observed around Parliament over recent years. On November 15, 2023, coinciding with the King’s Speech, the police failed to take action against pro-Palestinian protesters who prevented parliamentarians from having free access through all the normal routes to and from the Palace of Westminster. This was despite protest groups announcing their intentions on social media over 48-hours in advance.

As Policy Exchange has previously demonstrated, part of the answer to the police’s hesitation is the legal fog which has hung over protests since the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in DPP v Ziegler. That judgment held that deliberate, physically obstructive protest could amount to a lawful excuse under section 137 of the Highways Act 1980, even where the disruption is more than trivial. Repeated efforts by some parliamentarians to correct the error by the Supreme Court have not been supported by HM Government.

Failures by the police when it comes to protest are compounded by a trap of their own making. Having been so conspicuously hands-off with pro-Palestinian and other Left-Wing protesters, the moment officers do move decisively against those on the Right, they invite the charge of “two-tier policing”.

This weekend, the police were rescued only by the fact that the crowds involved dispersed after only a few hours. No doubt the groups involved will be making plans for further campaigns.

Left and Right protest groups will have learned from this weekend – and are outflanking the state in the process. When protest groups from either side of the political spectrum elect to take unlawful direct action, they should meet the same firm response. What this weekend revealed is that currently the state has neither the foresight to anticipate disorder nor the confidence to act when confronted with it.