The first weekend of September saw two protests that should have us all on very high alert – one in Dover and one in Portsmouth.
I wont belabour the point regarding how this coordinated act of intimidation should be ringing alarm bells in our security services. Rather, I want to pay attention to a particular piece of fallout from these protests that, whilst happening largely online, could result in serious danger to life for a group of people.
This group of people are the volunteers who work with the RNLI, the Royal National Lifeboat Institute.
The RNLI vs the far-right
The RNLI has long been a cause for consternation amongst the far-right, and we’ve seen various campaigns against them many times over the years. There have been calls for the RNLI to abandon boats in trouble and let the occupants drown. There have been aspersions cast that they work on behalf of the Home Office and are now a de facto smuggling ring. George Soros has, apparently, at times also been involved.
My usual tactic when this crops up is simple – I donate to them. Last year, I donated over £100 to the RNLI when they came under criticism. I was very lucky to be able to afford to do so at the time.
This time around, though, there is a new, insidious angle to the online rows.
On X, over the past few weeks, photographs of two volunteers have been circulated, with calls for these two men to “face justice”. It’s claimed that they should be “prosecuted” under a Restore government and the comments contained wished serious harm to them and their families. These men have, apparently, now been identified by name, and their details are currently spreading like wildfire to a group of people who have, just this weekend, shown that they are very willing to take their Twitter fights from the online realm into the real world.
This is, to put it mildly, completely disgusting.
It is dangerous. It is malicious. And there are very, very real risks to these two people now.
In addition to this, there is also the steady hum of blatant misinformation that’s being spread around, all with the intention of making content-consumers tumescent with rage – to make them seethe at the injustice.
I want to take a moment to address some of these misunderstandings.
The RNLI is funded by British Taxpayers
The post above is one of many that have pushed back with the idea that the RNLI, as a taxpayer funded organisation, should be bowing to demands that they stop any sort of rescue operation involving migrant crossings.
The rather large issue, of course, is that the RNLI is not funded by the taxpayer.
In total, about 90% of the total income that the RNLI receives is from donations. About 10% comes from things like trading and investment. Government support? Negligible if at all.
Purveyors of this particular argument seek to personalise, and connect with, readers. They want you to think that at least a portion of the PAYE that gets listed on your payslip each month goes towards ‘aiding and abetting migrants’ – despite the fact that it is patently untrue.
The RNLI is a Taxi Service
This commentator pitches in with another good old trope: the RNLI being a “taxi service for invading migrants.” Except that it’s an utterly absurd stance to take if you had even a vague idea of what the RNLI actually does, and how they operate. Contrary to popular belief, the RNLI crews don’t get to decide who is rescued or where they end up. Every launch by the RNLI is tasked and coordinated by HM Coastguard, and it’s the Border Force and the Home Office that do the processing, once ashore.
Looking at the laws that govern how the RNLI functions, under UNCLOS Article 98 and the SOLAS convention, any vessel or crew that becomes aware of people in distress has a binding legal duty to help them. It starts and ends there.
Any refusal done on the basis of nationality, skin-colour or immigration status would be a direct breach of maritime law.
It’s also worth just touching on the proportion of rescues the RNLI were involved with – a mere 5.7% in 2025. The other 94.3% of rescues were largely done by Border Force and other agencies.
The RNLI is Funded by George Soros
This particular ‘gem’ of a response to Dan Hodges’ post attempts to attack RNLI funding. Now this one is pretty easy to check because, as a UK charity, all of the RNLI’s accounts are public and independently audited, being filed annually with the Charity Commission for England and Wales and the OSCR in Scotland. As already mentioned, over 90% of funding comes from donations with 10% coming from trading and investment. There is no Soros finger in the pie here. There very rarely is.
You are very welcome to review the RNLI’s own published accounts if you are inclined to do so.
The RNLI is a pull factor, encouraging more crossings
This post is one that I was genuinely hoping to find – because it’s been so thoroughly and completely debunked.
Research published by Sanchez et al in Nature in 2023, as well as separate research from the Global Public Policy Institute and the European Council on Refugees and Exile have shown that there is no statistical relationship between the presence (or absence) of rescue services and crossing numbers. What they found to a very large extent is that conditions in origin and transit countries and smuggling-gang logistics and pricing play a far greater role.
It’s also worth adding here that the RNLI has no sort of discretionary choice to ‘discourage’ crossings by declining to rescue boats – that would, as already mentioned, be not only a moral failure, but under international law, a criminal one.
The increasing levels of misinformation we’ve seen online have gone beyond fever pitch and are reaching their tendrils straight into the real world now. Two volunteers, who are doing good, honest work, have been put at risk.
The facts I’ve chosen to discuss here won’t, unfortunately, do very much to lessen that risk to these men – however, I do hope that it provides at least one or two people with the actual information they need to combat the misinformation being spread that leads to incidents like these.
You can also donate to the RNLI to support the amazing work they do in the waters around our country at this link: Donate to the RNLI
This article was first published on 7 September, 2026, in Bearly Politics
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