Last Saturday (7 March) the amorphous far-right ecosystem in the south of England pulled off the feat of staging a demonstration in Ramsgate that was so little advertised, so poorly attended and so badly organised that it failed even to qualify as a non-event.
Since late January 2026, the usual reception point for migrants crossing the Channel in small boats, Western Jet Foil at Dover, has been closed for essential maintenance. In the meantime, migrants have been coming ashore at Ramsgate Port.
This arrangement is apparently due to end any day now, as the reopening of Western Jet Foil is imminent.
Impeccable timing
With impeccable timing, far-right “auditor” Anthony Barnes alias “AY Audits” chose this moment to stake out Ramsgate Port and film migrants arriving on boats and then leaving on coaches, headed for the processing centre at nearby Old Manston Camp.
Barnes is a notorious grifter (according to Channel 4 News, his monetisation of online anti-migrant content has been estimated to earn him over £10,000 per month) and a serial nuisance at anti-migrant flashpoints.
His achievements include being banned from the whole county of Surrey – and causing fellow grifter Danny Tommo considerable pain by squirting blackcurrant Lucozade into Danny’s eyes after he was pepper-sprayed by police at an anti-migrant march in Southampton. (Pro tip: you’re actually supposed to use milk.)
Shadowy auditor
Barnes’s appearance at Ramsgate looks rather opportunistic set against the dogged and obsessive daily documenting of migrant crossings that the much more shadowy auditor “Chris Johnson” has been undertaking on the Kent coast since 2020.
Other opportunist auditors, such as “Matty Gee”, have also been putting in an appearance at Ramsgate recently, standing in a huddle at a vantage point on Paragon Promenade, opposite the Churchill Tavern, and training their zoom-lenses onto the port below.
Barnes does, though, have a sizeable audience and some degree of influence. Although his videos of boats and coaches were about as exciting as watching paint dry, his footage proliferated online and proved to be catnip to some of the more easily aroused members of the far-right ecosystem.
With barely a day’s notice, elements among the tangled web of the “Pink Ladies” protest scene announced plans to demonstrate in Ramsgate on Saturday.
Planned protest
Local website The Isle of Thanet News, meanwhile, reported that Kent Police had said they were “aware of a planned protest in Ramsgate on Saturday 7 March” – and, revealed the News, “Anti-migrant demonstrator Harry Hilden, of Faversham, has been using social media to urge people to attend the protest.”
Yes, it’s him yet again …
Lovely day
Having got wind of what was afoot, Kent Anti-Racism Network and Kent Anti-Fascist Solidarity Assembly took their banners to Ramsgate’s yacht marina and to West Cliff Promenade, which overlooks Ramsgate Port. At lunchtime on Saturday, KARN reported:
“So after much posting about coming to Ramsgate to stop the boats the Pink Ladies were a no show. Lost on the M25? Couldn’t find the biggest Spoons in England? Its a mystery. A handful of tired old local fash made a brief appearance. Us on the other hand, we had a lovely day “
So what exactly did happen (or, rather, fail to happen)?
On Friday, the Southampton Pink Ladies TikTok account announced “a last minute gathering at Ramsgate” on Saturday. The location was left vague and prospective attendees were informed that “There’s no set time as we don’t know what time the boats will be coming in so bring a picnic”.
The person behind this was “Debz MW” alias Debbie M Conduct, Restore Britain supporter, friend of Tommy Robinson and founder and leader of the Southampton Pink Ladies.
After trying to remain neutral between the “Pink Ladies UK Official” and “British Women First Pink Ladies”, Conduct recently announced that she had decided to throw her lot in with the Pink Ladies UK Official – although “This does not mean we cannot support British Women First Pink Ladies” (do try to keep up).
Meanwhile, a picnic on Ramsgate beach at midday on Saturday was being advertised on various Pink Ladies Facebook groups by Hayley Cawley Griffin from Stevenage.
Regular readers will recall that she was described by Searchlight after her recent outing to Dover as “an extraordinarily noisy and foul-mouthed gobshite deploying a megaphone that was entirely surplus to requirements”.
Harry Hilden was by now keen to get in on the action and on Friday night he announced a “flash protest” on Facebook: “Get your self’s to Ramsgate harbour tomorrow stop the busses what’s bringing in this invasion of the 3rd world”.
The ensuing non-event was partly captured in excruciating detail by two minor livestreamers, a hapless pair whose online efforts are clearly much less lucrative than those of Anthony Barnes.
While “AY Audits” can presumably afford to travel in style these days, “AllthingsUK” and “Jim Scouse Down South” were reduced to car-pooling to get to the seaside.
Viewers (a few dozen of them) were able to switch between streams and compare their respective coverage. “A lot clearer than Jim’s lol”, one informed “AllthingsUK”, adding “yours is very windy”.
When a non-event is not taking place, it always helps to have it livestreamed from more than one point of view.
Bawling abuse
The main thing they captured, apart from the wind blowing along a largely empty seafront, was Hayley Cawley Griffin at the yacht marina using her superfluous megaphone to bawl abuse at bemused passers-by: “Who’s protecting your children? ‘Cause you’re clearly not!”
Accompanied by just about enough supporters to fill a small hatchback, including a chap on a mobility scooter, Griffin sauntered off for a look at the harbour, finding…nothing much at all.
Beer and socks
“AllthingsUK” found so little in the way of demonstrating to film that he was reduced to padding out his content with some relaxing drone footage of Ramsgate; documentation of his uneventful drives there and back – and himself drinking a beer when he got in.
“Me and Jim done some walking today! Fuck me!”, he reflected, while treating viewers to the unedifying spectacle of his sweaty socks. This is what cutting-edge “citizen journalism” looks like.
At least “Jim Scouse Down South” found his own footage so tedious that he had the decency to delete it from his YouTube account.
This wasn’t the whole non-story, though. Footage posted to Debbie Conduct’s Southampton Pink Ladies TikTok account shows her filming Border Force security guards filming her in Ramsgate.
And further footage taken by her shows yet another auditor – “Mary Jane Audit” (alias “MJ”), who is actually a bloke called Cameron Stevenson – being gently but firmly escorted off Border Force’s property by three security guards, who are then harangued by Conduct as “traitors” to their country.
Stevenson is yet another serial irritant – he is also a deeply troubled and unwell skunkhead (“Mary Jane” is, of course, a well known term for cannabis).
And it turns out that yet another micro-contingent of Pink Ladies was also wandering aimlessly around Ramsgate – without managing to find the others.
Flower arranger
These were from the “Pink Ladies Kent Official” / “Pink Ladies Official Kent” group (part of the Pink Ladies UK Official – or is it Pink Ladies Official UK?), led by Kerrie‑Marie Knight alias Vant (born in 1982 in Maidstone), a flower-arranger and crafter from Snodland.
She and two of her mates turned up to do some “scoping” for a future demonstration in Ramsgate at a date yet to be determined – by which time migrants will no longer be landing there, of course.
And what of Harry Hilden? Still under a driving ban, he took the train to Ramsgate, where he too ended up not demonstrating but “scoping out” the migrant reception area at the port. He claims there were “ten, fifteen of us” and that they encountered “a little bit of brutality” from security guards.
He is, of course, referring to the non-incident in which Cameron (“MJ”) Stevenson was gently ejected from Border Force’s premises.
Staking out the port
Stevenson, meanwhile, appears to have stayed on in Ramsgate with the other auditors staking out the port – one of whom managed to obtain an asylum-seeker’s paperwork, presumably dropped in the street, and posted a photo of it online (without redactions).
And the Pink Ladies are circulating this, along with other auditor content from Ramsgate.
Serious consequences
Comical as this non-occurring non-event was, it’s worth remembering that far-right “auditing” and migrant-baiting can and does have serious consequences – as happened in October 2022, when a disturbed individual, fired up by far-right propaganda, drove from Buckinghamshire to Dover, petrol-bombed Western Jet Foil and then killed himself.
However ludicrous the activities of the Pink Ladies, the auditors and the rest, they still need to be carefully monitored and logged.
