Dover and Portsmouth: Protests

Debate between Lizzi Collinge and Sarah Jones

Monday 7th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

We are not pandering to the right-wing agenda at all. The police will come down hard on criminality, as we would expect. No one was arrested in Dover on Saturday, or in Portsmouth, but as I just said, the police will review all the evidence from the weekend. Where crimes have occurred, they will make the appropriate arrests.

[Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)]

At the weekend we saw masked men, dressed all in black, block roads, block a port and intimidate people in Dover and Portsmouth. We know that a large proportion of the people arrested at other disorderly anti-migrant protests had already been reported for domestic abuse. In fact, the leader of this weekend’s protest, Danny Thomas, spent two years in prison for trying to kidnap someone at knifepoint. Does the Minister agree that this is not about a legitimate policy debate? The men who decide to come out in balaclavas are not driven to thuggery by political passion; they simply like violence and intimidation, and they should not be given the fig leaf of political legitimacy that some people in this place wish to give them.

[Sarah Jones]

I agree that we should not give them political legitimacy. Of course, there are well-known connections between violent men and the types of violence they inflict, and it is not always in one area; it can be across lots of different behaviours—sexual violence, domestic abuse and the rest. We have no truck with these awful groups, and the gentleman to whom my hon. Friend refers seems particularly awful. Of course, the police will do what they need to do. They need to disrupt and remove the protesters so that people can go about their business, and in both cases that is what they did. We will ensure that we learn lessons and that arrests are made where they need to be. From the conversations that I have had today with the police about their response, it is clear that they were proportionate and managed to get the result that we wanted, which was the removal of the protesters and enabling people to go about their business.