British Treasury Chief Secretary Emma Reynolds has condemned hundreds of protesters who blocked streets in the English coastal city of Portsmouth late on Sunday to try to stop the arrival of migrants from France, labeling the demonstration as “thuggish.”
This gathering marked the second consecutive day of anti-migrant demonstrations, following an incident on Saturday where masked men disrupted traffic at the port of Dover, chanting “Stop the boats”—a reference to the vessels carrying asylum seekers across the English Channel.
Both protest groups appear to have been led by Daniel Thomas, an ally of veteran far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, widely known as Tommy Robinson.
“Perhaps the scale of the protest was something that we hadn’t seen before, but the police have brought this under control,” Reynolds, who serves as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told Sky News on Monday regarding the events in Portsmouth.
Successive British governments have faced persistent accusations from opposition parties and anti-migration activists of failing to curb the numbers of asylum seekers arriving in Britain, often in overcrowded, inflatable boats crossing the Channel.
Reynolds countered these criticisms by highlighting a substantial reduction in arrivals, noting that the number had fallen sharply to approximately 17,000 from January 1 to September 1, representing a 43 per cent decrease compared to the same period last year.