When a group of men hanging around outside a 24-hour gym wolf-whistled at Gena Brewer’s 13-year-old granddaughter, she did not bother calling the police. She believed the men were asylum seekers living in a requisitioned hotel, and that to complain about them would only invite accusations of racism.
The law would not deliver her justice, Brewer thought, and the mainstream media would not report the truth. When she did decide to tell her story, she spoke not to the police or the BBC but to Laudits, a sandy-haired YouTuber in his mid-thirties, clutching a GoPro and a mobile phone that livestreamed her words to hundreds of online viewers.
“She had black shorts and a crop top on but she should be allowed to wear what she wants,” said Brewer, standing with her granddaughter at the edge of a protest mustered on Portsmouth’s beachfront. “Without people from a different culture making you feel like that,” said Laudits, finishing her sentence. “What a horrifying story,” he reflected to his viewers after the interview. “But it’s not a surprise to us. It happens too often up and down the country.”
Laudits is one of many YouTubers attempting to make a career out of interviewing asylum seekers and filming migration protests. Clad in designer gear and tall enough to loom above many of his interview subjects, he has become a familiar figure at anti-migrant hotel demonstrations across Britain this summer.
Amateur filmmakers such as Laudits are knitting together anger throughout Britain, agglomerating local grievances into a national crusade — one which scored its first major victory on Tuesday after a High Court judge ruled that asylum seekers could no longer be housed at The Bell Hotel in Epping. On social media, they promote lists of demonstrations; on the ground, they provide outlets for the public’s fury. With trust in mainstream media at an all-time low, people are drawn to the rough authenticity of their videos. Laudits has 29,000 followers on YouTube; some of his peers have hundreds of thousands.
The style of broadcasting these filmmakers have pioneered captures something of the national mood: angry, confrontational and occasionally paranoid. Its growing influence can be glimpsed in the social media clips recorded by shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, in which he chases and berates fare-dodgers on the London Underground or migrants in northern France.
Laudits, who refused to tell me his real name for fear of the consequences his family might suffer, grew up on a council estate in Wales, and later worked in finance and recruitment. He had been publishing videos on a variety of topics for years when he came across the channel of DJ Audits — one of many YouTubers conducting freelance “audits” of businesses around Britain. Their videos follow a set pattern: first, begin filming the exterior of some location with your handheld camera and drone. It could be a chemical plant or a warehouse on an industrial estate — the more sensitive the better. If you’re lucky, this will trigger the emergence of an irate security guard in high-vis clothing to inform you that what you’re doing is illegal and that you can sling your hook. The art of the auditor is to remain just within the bounds of the law, driving your target to apoplexy by calling their bluff and refusing to stop recording. The more heated the confrontation, the more views it will get.
At their best, auditing videos offer their viewers the sweet pleasure of watching the humiliation of petty officials. Much of the time, all they reveal is how easy it is to wind up security guards. The National Police Chiefs’ Council has even issued guidance on how workers might resist “potentially embarrassing reactions” that can be monetised online.
Laudits was soon hooked. In May 2024, he launched his own channel and started travelling around Britain to film the exteriors of businesses and football grounds. Then, he changed track. In the wake of the Southport attack, he filmed the protests that mushroomed in response. This proved hugely popular: before then, not one of his videos had surpassed 11,000 views. Now, he has over nine million views in total. “I think it was a pulse on society at the time really,” he told me. “And as a YouTuber, there’s always the commercial element. I’m not going to shy away from that. I need to pay my bills. So I thought, ‘let’s go and investigate this’.”
It was around this time that the auditors’ slickly produced but largely apolitical videos began to cross-fertilise with a different genre — migrant hunting. From about 2021, activists had been filming the arrival of small boats on the shores of Kent and hassling asylum seekers at accommodation sites around the country. The clips they produced were typically low budget and sometimes rabidly offensive. Many of the hotels they filmed would become targets of demonstrations in the summer of 2024.
Standing outside Epping’s Bell Hotel last month as a protest began to build, Bryan Stovell told me he had lost count of the number of migrant hotels he’s visited across Britain. Wearing a flat cap with a walking stick tucked into his backpack, the pensioner’s shaky videography and strident politics are emblematic of this older school. “Nobody wants to see the Islamification of this country,” he said. “Islam is culturally opposed to Christianity. The majority of Muslims do not assimilate.”
Stovell, who has “WHITE” tattooed across the knuckles of one hand and “BLACK” across the other, is mixed race. He is also a supporter of the British Democrats. Formed in 2013 when a hardcore fringe split from the BNP, the party believes that ethnic minorities should be encouraged to leave Britain en masse. That he might be campaigning for his own deportation does not trouble Stovell. “You can only allow so many people of colour into this country before you get detrimental effects,” he said, pulling a party badge from his pocket to show me proudly.
Auditing videos featuring the Right-wing politics and confrontational style of the migrant hunters has proved hugely popular. For Laudits, who seems a polite and amiable character, this has presented an issue. Due to his more reserved manner, his videos sometimes lack the drama that generates real attention online. To combat this, he has collaborated with Ay Audits, a YouTuber who tends to conceal his face in the pair’s videos and who has the breezy confidence to trespass into hotels and barrack their staff relentlessly. “Everyone calls us the comedy double act, because we’re like chalk and cheese,” said Laudits.
In one typical recent video titled “4 meals a day for the migrants”, Ay walks into a hotel in Peterborough housing asylum seekers and starts to film them eating lunch. When he refuses to leave, an awkward stand-off begins with a security guard and a housing officer. The men are initially confused by his presence and then unsure of how to get rid of him. “Mate I don’t know how you do your job without a conscience to be honest with you if I’m totally real,” Ay tells the officer, who is English, after they walk outside. “When they harm British children and they rape British women that’s on your conscience because you’re facilitating it.”
“Auditing videos featuring the Right-wing politics and confrontational style of the migrant hunters has proved hugely popular.”
According to The Times, Ay is likely to have earned at least £2,000 in the past month from YouTube. His channel, which has over 100,000 subscribers, received 8.7 million views in one month following the resurgence of anti-migrant protests this year — a fourfold increase on the month before.
At any given asylum hotel protest in Britain, Laudits or Ay or one of their peers can now be found streaming live footage to thousands watching online. Some hold only their mobile phone in the air, while others have a professional set-up with lighting equipment and high-definition cameras. Their livestream videos can be monotonous, but they offer a sense of realism: unlike a television broadcast, they have not been edited after the fact.
For Dylan Parry, this movement is the future of media. Standing by Canary Wharf’s Britannia Hotel at a demonstration last month, the Welsh YouTuber broadcast live to 3,500 viewers on his channel Ex British Army Paz49. “Streaming is the way forward now,” he said. “People don’t trust the mainstream media.” As we spoke, a flood of comments picking apart our conversation in real time moved across Parry’s phone screen. “He’s CID [Criminal Investigation Department],” one viewer wrote. “He’s police,” added others in an attempt to stop him from talking to me.
Laudits believes the demand for his work is fuelled by a widespread lack of understanding of why asylum seekers have been allowed to enter Britain and what they might do now they’re here. “We’re curious,” said his friend Helen, who regularly attends hotel protests. “I think the only reason we’re like this as well is because the government aren’t open and honest. So in the end it leads to speculation.”
In this void, darker theories have flourished. Many of Laudits’ viewers are convinced that asylum seekers are soldiers biding their time before they can conquer Britain. Sometimes viewers demand that he look inside containers outside asylum hotels because they believe they contain weapons. “I don’t find any substance to [that idea],” Laudits said. “I’ve met quite a lot of them and they couldn’t fight a cold.”
But he admitted it was a delicate business. “I appreciate how careful I’ve got to be with certain things now as well given how a slip up here could cause a lot of issues,” he said haltingly. “When I release a video I say what’s in it, like fact-based, not try to use inflammatory words.”
The Britain of auditing videos can be a bleak place. It is a country of jobsworths and petty tyrants in which people argue endlessly about who is allowed to enter where and what can be filmed. Their work provides a vision of a nation seemingly dominated by social strife and on the verge of breakdown. Laudits himself has come to believe that the Britain he now spends his time documenting is a bit broken. “I always knew there were problems,” he said, “but I didn’t realise how deep they went until I started doing this.”
