These migrant-hotel protests are just the beginning

In Britain, protest has long felt pointless, performative, the preserve of the perma-smug middle classes. What was once the means through which the (quite literally) disenfranchised would seek to impose themselves on politics has, over decades, become little more than a form of self-aggrandising self-expression, and for very influential sections of society. An opportunity for the great and good to get their steps in and show off their puntastic placards before catching the train back to Tunbridge. That all those anti-Brexit marches ultimately achieved nothing didn’t matter. They had their day out.

Now, for the first time in a long time, Britain is being rocked by protests of a very different kind. Protests manned by those more condescended-to sections of society. The working class, the lower-middle class, the working-class-done-good. Those who are patriotic. The other difference? These protests are actually working.

The people of Epping in Essex have done in six weeks what successive governments have struggled to do for five years. They have closed a migrant hotel. In 2020, the Bell – along with hundreds of other hotels across the country – had its doors flung open to asylum seekers, as the pandemic hit, the small boats began to arrive in their droves, and hoteliers were all too keen to make up for their cratering trade during lockdown by coining it in from the government. This week, a High Court injunction ordered its 140-odd, all-male residents to leave, citing a breach of planning laws and the intolerable fear of crime and discord that the situation had inflicted on residents. While the injunction was formally won by Epping Forest District Council, it was only sought after thousands took to the streets of the town, demanding the Bell’s closure.

Those keen to dismiss the Epping protests as reflexive xenophobia, outbursts of tabloid-fed fear of the Other, would do well to read the judgement. The protests began in early July, a few days after an Ethiopian asylum seeker and resident of the Bell had been arrested over the alleged sexual assault of a young girl, and a full five years after the hotel opened to migrants. The people of Epping, as in so many places across the country, clearly aren’t all racists or xenophobes. They simply noticed something that the government would rather they hadn’t. That our asylum system is now so dysfunctional it has become, in no small part, a funnel for illegal migration that is incapable of weeding out dangerous criminals, let alone sorting out the genuine refugees from the chancers. When another Bell asylum seeker, this time from Syria, was also charged with sexual assault just 10 days ago, it only underlined how thoroughly legitimate – to use that irksome, patronising phrase – the concerns of the people of Epping are.

And it’s not just in Epping. The protests soon spread, from Norfolk to Tower Hamlets. Over this long weekend, they are being organised outside 30 migrant hotels, the ruling having put the wind at the protesters’ backs.

There have been some despicable flare-ups of violence against police, hotel workers and migrants themselves at some demos. Pathetic far-rightists – desperate to exaggerate their (non-)importance – have naturally tried to muscle their way in. All of this was probably inevitable given the social-media-driven, organic, leaderless nature of these protests, in which it is – ironically – somewhat difficult to police the borders of your movement.

And yet things have remained overwhelmingly peaceful and self-disciplined – with calls to action often accompanied by the insistence there be ‘no masks, no violence, no alcohol’. Mothers and grandmothers have come to the fore, and hard-right bandwagoners have been told to stay away. Protesters – whenever an unjaundiced hack bothers to talk to them – are often quick to decry the far right and mock the smears being flung at them, not least given some of these demonstrations have been markedly multiracial. After some initial efforts to present the protests as sinister and fascistic, even mainstream-media outlets have had to concede that they are largely local and family friendly.

The Union flag, the Saint George’s Cross, these have become the symbols of this movement. Which suggests this is about something bigger than opposition to illegal migration in general, or the use of hotels to house illegal migrants in particular. Sovereignty, patriotism, nation, is also being asserted. It puts one in mind of other movements that have come from nowhere in recent years, propelled through social media and chat groups rather than the organised left or right. The trucker convoy against vaccine mandates in Canada. The farmers’ revolts against EU diktats. The gilets jaunes amassing at roundabouts to oppose fuel taxes in France. All came draped in their national flags, regardless of the specific cause, opposing deranged policies imposed by distant, anti-democratic elites.

These protesters may be technically enfranchised, but in a very real sense political choice has been taken away from them. Not only about what happens to their communities, but also their nation. The brunt of the illegal-migration crisis has been borne by some of the most impoverished places in Britain (leafy, prosperous Epping is by no means typical), purely because the hotel rooms are cheaper. Whitehall loftily decrees who will be sent where, with residents left to find out later. Voters can elect successive Tory governments, on a platform of getting a grip on the border, and end up with both legal and illegal immigration spiralling out of all control.

Now, in just a few short weeks, these protests haven’t so much moved the Overton window on immigration as kicked it in. Even Labour councils are mulling over their own legal challenges. Senior Labour MPs are calling for a Rwanda-style deportation plan, which Labour junked on its first day in office. And the government, at least one would hope, is beginning to clock that this is not just about the hotels – that locals are not merely furious that their town’s beloved wedding venue has been denied to them for a few years. The protests in Waterlooville, which stopped a block of flats being turned into asylum accommodation, make clear the Home Office will not be able to get away with just moving the problem around.

Keir Starmer’s Labour government, run top to bottom by human-rights lawyers, seems unlikely to grasp the nettle – to look afresh at the European Convention on Human Rights or the UN Refugee Convention. But he is going to have to do something, or make way for someone who will. The message of these protests couldn’t be clearer. The public has been paying the price for the delusions and fecklessness of the elites, and it isn’t going to put up with it anymore. Epping is just the beginning.

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