Residents of Gosport, the Royal Navy harbor town across the water from Portsmouth, spent Sunday under police orders that let officers direct people to leave town, as a migrant boat from France made its way toward their coastline.
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary imposed a Section 34 dispersal order covering the entire town under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, running until 7am Tuesday. It lets officers order people to leave an area and not return, and refusing is a criminal offense. Police stacked several more restrictions on top:
- Protesters were confined to a single designated area inside the Walpole car park under Section 14 of the Public Order Act.
- Face coverings at protests were banned across both Gosport and Portsmouth.
- Haslar Bridge was closed.
The boat left Normandy, near Utah Beach, on Sunday morning. Late Sunday evening, two RNLI lifeboats brought 149 people ashore in Gosport, who were then put on coaches to Kent for processing, health, security and biometric checks. It was the third crossing headed for the western Channel coast in a month, a route that had been rare in recent years.
Two weeks ago, a boat carrying around 50 migrants was rerouted to Dover after locals protested.
On Sunday, around 350 demonstrators turned out anyway, according to the Portsmouth News, with reports of flares and scuffles with police. By Monday, 12 people had been arrested, for offenses including assaulting a police officer. Six people were arrested at a similar protest last month.
Footage posted overnight shows the lifeboats coming in after dark, and the police escort that then moved the coaches out of town.
Tensions on this stretch of coast have been building for weeks. On Sept. 22, Hayling Island native Daniel Thomas, an anti-migrant activist known online as "Danny Tommo" whom Breitbart describes as a Tommy Robinson ally, allegedly slashed a migrant boat in the Channel with an emergency responder on board. The 37-year-old has pleaded not guilty to criminal damage and to refusing to give police his phone PIN, and a judge at Portsmouth Crown Court denied him bail on Sept. 29. His trial is provisionally set for March 2027.
The local Conservative MP, Caroline Dinenage, wants the boats sent elsewhere. "Gosport is not a safe or suitable location to disembark small boats," she said, arguing that any small boat intercepted in the Channel should be taken directly to Dover by water, as the Home Office did two weeks ago.
George Madgwick, who leads Reform UK on Hampshire County Council, put it more bluntly: "It's heart-breaking because Portsmouth Harbour is the home of the Royal Navy... Britain is Broken."
Then there is the bill. Hampshire's Police and Crime Commissioner, Donna Jones, says every one of these landings now comes with a price tag for local taxpayers:
"On each one of the protests that are happening every time we have one of these threats of a small boat landing, it is costing me £150,000 of taxpayers' money from my police budget, which I can ill afford to spend."
In a video message, Jones called on the Home Secretary to make sure Border Force has vessels big enough to transfer people off the dinghies at sea and take them to Dover for processing.
On Monday, a government spokesperson said: "We have established contingency plans to make sure we can securely disembark, check and process all small boat arrivals."