The Bell Hotel ruling will haunt Labour

I’m starting to think Yvette Cooper is a Reform UK plant. What else could explain the debacle that is the Court of Appeal case about the Bell Hotel in Epping?

Last week, a High Court judge granted a temporary injunction, barring the Bell’s use for housing asylum seekers, citing a breach of planning law and the intolerable fear of crime and unrest in the area.

Indeed, the injunction was sought by Epping Forest District Council after weeks of protests from locals, sparked by the arrest of an Ethiopian asylum seeker over the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl.

That another Bell resident was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault, as the application was wending its way to court, only underlined that residents’ fears about the unvetted men in their midst were far from unfounded.

Rather than lump it, the Home Office joined a Court of Appeal challenge to the injunction along with Somani Hotels, owners of the Bell, which has been paid by the government to house migrants, on and off, since 2020.

Now, the injunction has been overturned, with the Court of Appeal citing a ‘number of errors which undermine [the] decision’ – particularly, a failure to appreciate that the injunction could spur on more protests, more legal challenges, and more disruption to the asylum system.

This isn’t the end of the story, legally speaking. The injunction was only temporary and the High Court will hear the case for a permanent injunction in October. But the upshot of today is that migrants will continue to be housed at the Bell despite bitter local opposition.

I’ll leave the legal bods and armchair experts to mull over the Court of Appeal ruling itself. Although what I will say is that if m’luds think imposing that injunction had the potential to spark protest, they might want to consider that reversing it could piss people off even more.

As I type, protesters are already gathering in Epping.

But politically speaking, this isn’t so much a Pyrrhic victory for the government as it is a full-blown faceplant. It leaves the Home Office looking even more deranged and aloof on the asylum issue than it did this morning.

Cooper says she wants to close all migrant hotels by 2029, and yet she has just fought tooth and nail in court to keep one open. In the eyes of the public, she has sided with illegal migrants over law-abiding locals – and with a hotel that admitted in court it has come to rely on state cash to stay afloat following years of bad trade.

Is this really the image Starmer’s Labour wishes to present? The party of illegal migrants and spivs?

Ministers’ arguments in court couldn’t have made them look worse if Nigel Farage KC were representing them. A core part of the Home Office’s case was that the human rights of asylum seekers actually trump the safety concerns of the public. So suck it up, Epping.

Cooper successfully argued she has a statutory duty to protect asylum seekers from the risk of destitution, underpinned by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. As the hotel protesters will often point out, housing Britain’s homeless population isn’t treated with the same urgency. Such two-tier compassion, it turns out, is mandated by our human-rights laws.

So the government has essentially said here that asylum seekers are not only deserving of housing and fair treatment, but that they are to be treated almost as a higher form of human – enjoying rights, care and benefits beyond that of our own most lowly citizens.

You don’t need to be some chinless nativist to see the infuriating, burning, injustice here. Apparently, under human-rights law, the first duty of the state is to the safety and wellbeing of people who entered the country illegally five minutes ago. People who, considering they arrive unchecked and unvetted, a non-negligible proportion of whom will be chancers and / or criminals.

Languishing in a migrant hotel for years on end is hardly a picnic, not least given the threat posed by some of the more deranged roommates. In April, a Bell resident was arrested for allegedly trying to burn the place down.

But if you need any more proof of how our asylum system has warped the relationship between rulers and ruled, has blurred the distinction between citizens and newcomers, has rendered the reasonable concerns of voters totally irrelevant to the administration of migration policy, look no further than this clusterfuck of a case.

Epping Forest District Council is keen to fight on. But the yo-yoing fortunes of the Bell’s residents – expelled one week then told to unpack the next – reminds us that closing the hotels and reforming our broken asylum system is ultimately a job for politics rather than the law.

If commonsense is to prevail on immigration, it will require ordinary people to continue to peacefully make their opposition known, and a government coming to power that is actually willing to listen to them.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater