Why are men in balaclavas descending on an Oxfordshire village?

0:29This is a global production. people of Piddington are going to be served by having people like that turn up on their doorstep. They are now the victims and find themselves the meat in the sandwich of a culture war. For a prime example, Piddleton. Piddington, where the migrants are about to go in. Where they're putting 1 ,250 into a picture. How powerful would it be if 5 ,000 men, when they know the MO, because we've proven who we are, how our conduct is, that we surround that camp. We take tents. We sit there for days and we don't let them get in. That is Danny Tomo. Remember him? He's the one that organised the protest that brought a halt to Dover.

1:17He's the one who led the protests in Portsmouth with all those men in balaclavas. And now he's suggesting 5 ,000 of his supporters descend on Piddington. Yeah, that village of 350 people was worried about a migrant centre on its doorstep. Now it sounds like they've got a whole new headache. Welcome to The News Agents.

1:46The News Agents. It's John. It's Maitlis. Let's just give you the context for what is going on in this tiny village of Piddington today, where they are holding a referendum because the villagers there are in Oxfordshire. It's a sort of, you know, small, quite affluent part of the world. And they are basically up in arms because the government has announced a planned asylum centre where they would be putting around 1 ,200 single men, immigrants, pretty much on their doorstep. And the residents of this village have been saying for weeks, really, we're not racist, but we're not feeling safe. We're not feeling great about this.

2:29That's going to be a massive influx of people that we don't know. There's not going to be any women in that centre. It all feels a bit too much, a bit too close. And so now the solution has come in the double form, it seems, of Danny Tomo, he of Patriot Platform, and the Reform MP Sarah Pochin, who is suggesting that, yes, his hard right anti-migrant protesters would be welcomed in Pittington because it's now going to be down to them and reform to sort this problem out. Who needs a referendum? Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? Because, look, you know, what you've got there in Piddington is a disused MOD storage depot, MOD BISTA.

3:17And there's been such a hue and cry about asylum seekers being housed in hotels. And you'll remember the furor there was, particularly over kind of Epping Forest and the one, the people staying. I think it was at the Bell Hotel and the protesters there gathered. And indeed, there was an asylum seeker who was convicted and found guilty of sexual assault, which also kind of magnified this sense that they're all kind of criminals. We've got a lot to be frightened about. And it is understandable that if you've got, you know, twelve hundred and fifty six asylum seekers, all men on the doorstep of this sleepy little village that people will feel concerned about it.

4:01And so what I find surprising is that you've got an elected MP, Sarah Pochin, essentially saying, come on, guys, the hard right. Come on, Patriot Platform. Piddington is waiting for you. Bring your 5000 guys down here. And you think, you know what, maybe we should leave it to the police and the forces of law and order in this country to retain order in this country. Yeah. I mean, I mentioned the referendum and we should explain that this is largely symbolic. It's not like Texas seceding from the rest of the United States. It is its own version of Brexit with absolutely no effect because around 130 women in Piddington have written an open letter, in other words, a sort of published plea to female MPs saying they face a crisis.

4:49They don't want to find this asylum centre on their doorstep. And that is why they're holding this sort of symbol of a referendum, which will suggest that they are ready to leave the UK in demonstration of their own opposition to Westminster. In other words, we've had enough. We're just not going to take it anymore. Right. So that's the referendum going on. And yet suddenly you've got Tomo appearing in his own version of the Superman cape, descending on this village of people who are really trying to hammer home that they don't think that they are being racist. They don't think they're being unreasonable.

5:31They just think it is quite a lot of people quite close to home in one go. And Tomo, the man who, as you know, as you heard, got his supporters to mask up, balaclava up and take to the streets of Portsmouth and Dover to protest and push back the boats coming in to the channel. Tomo thinks he is now going to be welcome here. And what you are starting to see, and I think this is really interesting, is this sort of eliding, elision of two parts of the hard right. You know, Tomo has just said, Danny Tomo has just said that his group is becoming so powerful now that within six months, he thinks that they could probably amass between five and 10 ,000 people on the streets of any given location within a matter of hours.

6:25Right. That is that is sort of vigilante on speed. You know, if I need my army, I can click my fingers or type my little signal, telegram, chat and they will appear. And yet here you've got the MP, Sarah Pochin, who is a member of parliament saying, great, wonderful. Come on in. So is that suggesting that reform is now welcoming them? Are they kind of aligning themselves or is Pochin kind of off on her own little weird tandem? Well, I think it's really interesting that, I mean, three weeks ago, had I heard of Danny Tomo? No, I don't think I had heard of Danny Tomo. We've now heard of him because of what happened at Dover.

7:06And who is Danny Tomo? There was a really interesting example of him this weekend. There was a protest in Portsmouth and there were people protesting about the small boats, entirely legitimate. There were some women part of the protest as well. Fine and dandy. he then stops some guy who's just walking by and he's got a camera rolling it's just some member of the public and danny tomo goes up to him and starts berating him if you're watching on youtube or listening to the podcast just watch and listen to this because i think it sounds really intimidating how do you feel about this do you like this i can tell that you don't is there can i just ask you can you just leave me alone yeah i'll leave you alone do you like do you support them do you support them?

7:53Can you just tell me you support them? Do you support the grandmothers? I saw what the way you just looked to them. Can I just ask you, do you support the grandmothers? Just answer the question. Answer this question. Do you support these grandmothers here? Just answer the question. I'll put the camera down. You can answer the question. Do you support the grandmothers holding the Union Jack and the St. George flag? It's people like you, if you don't support them, that are the problem because you think they're racist, don't you? You think they're fascist. I didn't say anything. I saw them. You didn't say anything, mate.

8:22I I saw the way you looked at those women as they... I don't think I'm going to go with them. Yeah, well tell the truth, say it then. Say I support them. I'm not saying that. Say I support those grandmothers right there that are standing up for their families. Go on, say it. Say it. I'm going to follow you until you say those grandmothers have done a good job. They care about their city. The way you've just looked at them walking through there like they're scum. Yeah? They are the grandmothers and mothers of this country, yeah, that are standing up. Do you think they want to stand there, dear?

8:50Did you see what happened in Eastleigh Beach? The way you've just looked at them like they're a piece of scum. You're lucky you're on camera, mate. Jesus Christ. I mean, the passerby did not utter a word. And yet, what is Tomo doing there? Well, he's doing it for the camera, right? He is doing it for the socials. He's probably doing it, quite frankly, to monetise. But he has basically taken a member of the public and tried to create a narrative of distrust. I mean, what is it with these guys and grandmothers? Why would you call any woman standing in a crowd holding a placard or otherwise a grandmother?

9:29Because you are trying to create the sense that you care about women. You care about the elderly. You care about young girls. Oh, for fuck's sake, give me a break. You probably care about intimidating members of the public and making cash. That's what's going on here. Look, we know that Danny Tomo has got a conviction for kidnap. I would have been deeply uncomfortable if I had been that man in that position. What is the hell is it to do with Danny Tomo? What he thinks. He's a passerby. He's walking on the street. He's minding his own business. And Danny Tomo is trying to impugn what this guy thinks, that he somehow thinks that all the women there are racist.

10:13He's just not saying anything. He doesn't want to get involved. And I just think that this self-righteousness of Danny Tomo to think that he has the God-given right to assail anyone he fancies in the street to say, well, unless you tell me what you think, I know you're just on their side. It's just harassment. It's just harassment. It's horrible. It is really, really horrible. And the idea that the good people of Piddington are going to be served by having 5 ,000 people like that turn up on their doorstep. And look, it is deeply, deeply uncomfortable for the villagers. But they are now the victims and find themselves the meat in the sandwich of a culture war, don't they?

10:58Yeah. And actually, next time you're kind of wondering whether you can write a letter to your MP about an asylum centre, you might be thinking, oh, shit, you know, does it get even worse? Am I just going to start triggering, you know, the arrival of 5000 vigilantes and black balaclavas? If I do, I don't I don't even want to call attention to this. I think we should hear from Sarah Pochin because she was basically asked whether she was concerned about protesters like Danny Tomo coming into the village. We should explain she's run corn, which is not right next door, but it's not that far. And she has basically sort of taken on the cause.

11:37And this is what she said. how can it be right that we have to put on our streets security to protect indigenous white you know women and girls on our streets because they can't go and walk their dogs they can't the kids can't walk home from school it's indigenous white indigenous white yeah i mean look i think i think you've probably worked out that old dog whistle you know where she's going and it is probably important for us to say at this point that there has been very little recent data on a major scale, but decades, decades of research that shows there was absolutely no correlation between crime and migration.

12:21In fact, the latest stuff, and I'm again going to refer to Fraser Nelson, who's pretty good at some of the data that he pulls in, shows the annual numbers of crimes compared with the immigrant population. And if you look at where we are at the end of 2025, The immigrant population has gone up. We now know, obviously, that a lot of the crossings and the migration numbers have come down. But as the immigrant population has gone up, surveyed crime, and that comes from three sources, reported crime, hospital admissions and police records, has gone down. So you have to work pretty hard to try and manufacture the data to show that immigrants are committing all the crime and that more immigrants are sending up crime because it's just not borne out by any of the numbers that we have before.

13:10I think that's a really important point in all of this, because I think that it's easy to be swept up in a moral panic which says that asylum seekers are overwhelmingly criminal. They are committing a much, much higher proportion of crimes. We don't know. There are no statistics that back that up. Now, of course, I mentioned earlier, because I think it was important to mention it so that we're not trying to brush these things under the carpet. it. There was that sexual assault case outside the Bell Hotel where a young girl was assaulted. And that is awful. I mean, it's awful that grown men assault young women full stop.

13:50We do not know. There is there is moral panic when one of these cases comes to the fore because they're splashed all over certain tabloid newspapers as asylum seeker commits evil crime. And of course, it's grotesque. Of course, it's horrible. But all those crimes are horrible and grotesque. It's just that when someone who is British has carried out that sort of crime, it doesn't get the same degree of attention. So the perception is that asylum seekers are much more dangerous, much more prone to criminality. But all I'm saying is we just do not have the statistics. The Home Office does not compartmentalise the statistics in that way so that you can make a reasonable judgment.

14:33Yeah. I mean, look, there is an argument that obviously, if you want to get to the facts, if you want to understand the data, then you have to work much harder than if you just open Twitter, you know, and just get the splurge of sort of, you know, hateful vomit in your face. if you want to try and work out what is actually happening, you probably have to go behind a paywall. You probably have to read, you know, analysis or you have to go onto a government record or you have to read the FT or you have to start paying for money from journalists who've actually put in the work to try and understand what's going on.

15:03If you just want Rupert Lowe's version or, dare I say, Sarah Poachin's version of events, you can just open their feed and get fed this bile of how much crime comes from the immigrant community towards the, what was it? Indigenous white women who are just walking their dogs. Look, this is not at all to minimise what people in a small village are feeling, because actually on a hundred levels, it would be quite a shock to the system if you suddenly found that you couldn't get on the bus, you can't get the train, yet there is no parking, whatever dock's appointment, whatever it is, you feel that your very small village has grown by, you know, 400%.

15:45But I don't think it's particularly helpful to have Tomo and Pochin arriving. Tomo and Pochin. It sounds like a really dodgy accountancy firm. The crime solvers. Yes, turning up in your Oxfordshire village and saying, don't worry, we will save your pearly white skins. Well, look, we've spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about reform and money. So let's not detain ourselves with Sarah Pochin and what's happening, but let's talk about Tomo and some of the fundraising that has taken place off the back. For Tomo's mum. For Tomo's mum. And this is all as a result of Tomo becoming a much more prominent figure.

16:32And where this all stems from, maybe surprisingly, is the Daily Mail, I think, knocked on the mother's doorstep and said, you know, do you support what your son is doing? And Tomo is incandescent about that and claims that his mother has been forced out of her house. Kind of doxxed. She's been outed. The name of the town or village where she lived became public. And according to Tomo, left-wing activists kind of have driven her from her home. So he started crowdfunding off the back of it. Yeah, there's always either a grandmother or a mother involved. It's almost like these men are craving the legitimacy of a sort of female role model somewhere in their lives to justify whatever weird shit they're yelling at passers-by.

17:21Anyway, this is Danny Tomo, who posted this update on Friday, saying, at my mother's request. She will only use what she needs to safely relocate herself and start again. Once her full relocation has been completed, any remaining funds will be used to instruct a top legal team to deal with what has happened and take the appropriate legal action against the Daily Mail UK News. The media need a wake-up call. What has happened here cannot be brushed under the carpet because it could happen to any of us. In my view, this has been extremely dangerous, sinister and completely unacceptable. It needs to be properly challenged through the legal system.

17:53they didn't just come for me they came for my mother my sister my brother have all been dragged into this i will protect my family with everything i have to every single person who has donated shared or support my mom thank you and we understand that he's raised about 68 000 pounds for his mother's sort of uh fundraiser some 3 000 individual donations listed look okay we don't know the backstory of where his mother needs to go now or what she's doing to protect herself all the rest of it. But I do think it gives you quite a good insight into how easy it is or will be for him to raise these small donations if he needs to from the people who put on the masks and come and run to his aid.

18:36And we were talking yesterday about the reform donations and kind of how weird it looks when you suddenly get, you know,£72 million overnight from two crypto billionaires. This is a different kind of fundraising and I think it's arguably more worrying. I mean, the sums are way, way smaller, but they are coming from lots of individuals who clearly find him, you know, magnetic enough or powerful enough to want to give to his cause. Yes, look, and Danny Tomo, you are perfectly entitled to protest, to organise, to do what you like, but you're not entitled to intimidate and harass people along the way, which is what we kind of seen evidence of over the past few days.

19:20I'm sure there'll be a lot of people who will give money. And I think it is a slightly terrifying prospect because we saw the way the police were outnumbered and overwhelmed in Portsmouth and in Dover. He's obviously got a good organisation that on Telegram or wherever it happens to be communicating, he can suddenly get a huge number of people all tooled up in their balaclavas to appear on the streets and intimidate. And that is something I think the forces of law and order in this country are going to have to deal with now. Yeah. And if you want to understand a little bit more about their organisation, how it originated, we spoke about this with Hope Not Hate last week.

20:00And it can give you a little bit more insight, actually, into, I think, why so many of the political parties, and maybe even the police, are slightly scared from acting in the way that they think they should, and how this whole idea of legitimate concerns has got confused with grown men being vigilantes in balaclavas. And if you want to catch that episode, we talked to Hope Not Hate this time last week, last Monday's episode. You can find a better explanation there. Well, the Daily Mail has seen off Prince Harry, Elton John and others. Now it's got Danny Tomo coming after them. We'll be back in just a moment.

20:51Look, let's be honest, when you've heard all the potential threats that AI poses, that it could end humanity and that there's a 10 percent chance of that happening, you would be mad not to be concerned. And you would also be looking for reassurance that that isn't going to happen. And mercifully, mercifully, yesterday afternoon, we got the reassurance that we all sought. When Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. And the USA has that in spades. Thank the Lord. And just to confirm the picture, in case anyone was in any doubt, he actually called in to an onstage discussion platform with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.

21:49And this is what he said. Well, I know about AI. I also have common sense about AI. The robots will not be taken over. The AI will not be taken over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax. Now, with that, we have to be a little bit careful. We have to do things and we have to do them prudently. But that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry because as we work on the next 10 years about how to destroy it. I love that because every time Trump uses the word hoax, you know from past experience that he's actually trying to conceal that he is really worried about something happening that he can't control.

22:27And he's not worried about AI, which he genuinely can't control. He's worried about something that would stop America being, he thinks, in the lead of whatever is happening that is generating him so much money. And essentially, he has now set up politically this curious kind of loyalty test for his own senators, for his own party on where they stand, whether it's, you know, the presidential election of 2020, the result of which he called a hoax, whether it's climate change, which he also called a hoax. He does this to try and see, to carve out his own side. Who's going to support me? Who's shown their loyalty?

23:12Who will back me on this? And so now you've got this ridiculous spectacle of all the Republicans close to Trump sort of running around going, well, yeah, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. And, you know, it is kind of funny that all the AI chiefs are worried, but, you know, we don't want to we don't want to sort of jump ahead of ourselves. Just have a listen to his own vice president, J.D. Vance. We actually regulate smartly and we're thoughtful about the risk here. So there are obviously risks to AI. There are some benefits to AI. I have to say just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them.

23:57It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. So I think we just have to be careful about this. The other thing the president said pretty consistently is we know that the Chinese are engaged in this long term AI race against the United States. We want to make sure the United States, we do things smartly, but we stay ahead of the curve. So J.D. Vance there saying, isn't it weird? And it is strange that you've got the AI companies themselves saying there needs to be greater regulation because that is so counterintuitive. counterintuitive. If you think of, you know, other companies, the clarion cry is normally, please, we need less regulation.

24:35We need to be able to get on with it. And now you've got these big AI companies saying, no, no, we need more regulation. And I think the cynics about the AI companies would say, oh, this is just you wanting to have regulatory capture so that you can be the only people who are capable of operating AI because you're the only ones big enough to have the AI systems regulated. And so it will shut out. Small thing. The other cynical argument is that Donald Trump is looking at what's happened to the Nasdaq. It has gone up 26 percent in the last 12 months. It is driving people's 401ks, their pensions, ever upwards because of the money that is being piled into tech stocks and into AI.

25:23And he thinks that's good for the American people. And so he doesn't want, he would rather the stock market be flying than worrying too much about whether the whole of humanity gets wiped out. Look, two things there. I think the fact that the calls are coming from the AI chiefs, I hear your cynicism and I just think, actually, just wake the fuck up, actually, because if it's crypto, the crypto guys are all saying, deregulate, it'll be fantastic. We've got the new spinning Jenny. We're going to modernize the world. It's all going to be fine. They're not saying regulate. The fact that the AI guys are saying this, I think, tells you that they are worried enough about what has the potential for kind of ending humanity, that they don't really want to be held responsible.

26:13They want somebody else to come in and stop them doing it, just like geneticists ask for kind of ethical guardrails around what they're doing, right, quite often. And I think that is a good place to be. It is good if people are asking for help. Your point about Trump and the Nasdaq is spot on, because when Trump says the economy is going great guns, it is all powered by AI. And if you take the AI bit of it out, or if you leave people to think that AI maybe is not producing the goods in quite the way that they wanted. If you take AI out, then you suddenly strip away the only thing that is actually working in America right now, the only bit of the economy that is really functioning.

26:57And everyone then remembers the Iran war and the cost of the tariffs and the cost of oil and the fact that they keep seeing their neighbours deported and all the rest of it. So AI is the one functioning bit, in Trump's view that is kind of keeping America bubbling and golden. And so, of course, he doesn't want to step in. Of course, he doesn't want to shut it down. But I just think you're now left. And as ever, I feel like I say this to the point of boring myself, but Trump, we understand. Trump, we know. But it's when you look at those around him, the amoebas, the invertebrates, like Mike Johnson, his speaker, who was asked about the sort of feedback from these people.

27:39And he just goes, well, there's a lot of opinions on this. I mean, there's only one opinion that he has to actually pay attention to. And that's whatever Trump has said. Yeah. Look, I think the whole area of regulation is interesting. I mean, you compare it to sort of medical ethics and what happens. I think this is more like nuclear non-proliferation because, you know, you can't... Well, it's the Manhattan Project if you want to start the beginning, right? If China is continuing to develop AI without these sort of guardrails, America can put in whatever it likes, unless everyone agrees that this is what you need to keep AI safe.

28:16And whether every AI program has a somehow has a kill switch that the AI agents can't overrule. Then you've got one country. It's like saying, you know, we're going to ban Ebola from coming into America. Well, good luck with that if the disease is spreading. And I don't think it's one nation acting alone in a regulatory space that can deal with this stuff when you've got AI in every computer across the world very quickly. But there's something more about this, which I keep going back to, which is why are we so good at diagnosing, you know, world threatening, planet threatening menaces and yet so bad about doing anything about it?