Britain has a remarkable talent for importing America’s most tiresome inventions just as the Americans themselves are starting to look for the receipt.
We got drive-through coffee, gender-reveal parties, Black Friday and people saying “reach out” when they mean “ring”. Now another container appears to have cleared customs: masked nationalism, Christian branding and political grievance packaged for social media. Next stop: Piddington.
The sleepy Oxfordshire village has become the latest immigration flashpoint after residents backed a symbolic referendum to “leave” Britain over plans to house up to 1,200 male asylum seekers at a nearby former military site.
And now Daniel “Danny Tommo” Thomas, leader of Patriot Platform, has indicated that thousands of his goons could descend on the area and remain for days in an attempt to stop migrants being moved in. You can almost imagine the tour T-shirt: Dover. Portsmouth. Piddington. Coming soon to an angry community near you.
This is the model America has already perfected: identify the grievance, locate the cameras, mobilise online, arrive in numbers and make certain there is enough footage for Telegram before moving on to the next flashpoint.
Call it grievance tourism. No Ticketmaster required here – just a flag, a phone and preferably a balaclava. Where local people see a difficult argument about asylum accommodation, national activists see a ready-made stage. Piddington risks becoming the latest stop on a travelling political roadshow where somebody else’s village provides the scenery and somebody else’s anxiety provides the content.
Anyone familiar with America’s hard-right street movements could be forgiven for thinking the cosplay container had simply arrived several years late.
Patriot Platform describes itself as a “Christian national resistance movement”. Its emergence has involved black-clad, masked demonstrations, anti-migrant slogans and Christian-nationalist imagery. America road-tested parts of this formula years ago.
The Proud Boys combined macho street politics, nationalism and confrontation with increasingly visible religious ritual. Members prayed together before the January 6 attack on the Capitol, asking for protection and invoking God, country and culture. Former chairman Enrique Tarrio was eventually sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy before Donald Trump pardoned him after returning to the White House.
Then there is Patriot Front, which provides an even better match for the wardrobe department. Hundreds of its members marched through Washington this July in uniform clothing, their faces hidden behind white masks and sunglasses, carrying flags and chanting “Reclaim America”. The group has become known for masked, flashmob-style demonstrations engineered to produce striking images. Patriot Platform appears to understand the same basic truth.
Two hundred men in jeans can look like the queue for a replacement bus service. Put the same men in matching black clothing and balaclavas and suddenly the photographs suggest something considerably grander. The uniform is content. The march is content. The confrontation is content.
Apparently nothing screams fearless defender of the nation quite like making absolutely certain nobody can see your face.
Religion is another part of the familiar package. Thomas was jailed for two years following his conviction over an attempted kidnapping in which a man was targeted at knifepoint. After prison, he says he began attending church, and Christianity later became prominent in his activism.
Christianity is founded on forgiveness and redemption. People sincerely find faith in prison and after hitting rock bottom, and nobody else can know what is in Thomas’s heart. But politics has produced enough dramatic conversions to make you wonder why the road to Damascus appears to have such an efficient connecting service from the probation office.
The bigger point is what happens when faith becomes part of the political branding. Immigration stops being an argument about numbers, borders, housing or public services and becomes something more elemental: God, family, homeland, civilisation, good against evil.
America’s Christian-nationalist movements have been mixing those ingredients for years. Britain appears to have finally found the recipe card. And, as ever, we are several seasons behind. The same Americanisation can be seen much higher up British politics, although the organisations and methods are clearly different.
Nigel Farage condemned Patriot Platform’s masked demonstrations, describing the balaclavas as “horrible”, and Reform should not simply be conflated with Thomas’s organisation.
Yet Farage has spent years demonstrating how effectively elements of Donald Trump’s political playbook can be repackaged for Britain: direct communication with supporters, relentless conflict with institutions and the media, insurgent language and an exceptional ability to occupy political oxygen. Temu Trump may be an unkind description, but the joke endures because the resemblance in political marketing is sometimes difficult to miss.
Now even the money is going American. Reform has received £72 million from cryptocurrency billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne – £36 million apiece, jointly the biggest political donations in British history. Reform says neither man expects favours in return.
Nothing says plucky anti-establishment uprising quite like having £72 million worth of billionaires behind it. But Piddington may tell us more about where the next phase is heading. Because this kind of politics thrives on motion, it needs another town, another row, another crowd, another livestream. Today Piddington. Tomorrow wherever the cameras are pointing.
The American playbook is brutally simple: find the flashpoint, flood the scene, turn local anger into national theatre, harvest the pictures and head for the next postcode. That leaves communities such as the Oxfordshire village in danger of becoming little more than film sets in somebody else’s political production.
Residents become extras. Their genuine concerns become props. Their village becomes the next TikTok. America has already seen this show. Britain, apparently, has bought the remake rights. Same grievance. Same God-and-country branding. Same social-media machinery. Just cheaper costumes – and more rain.