On Sunday night, the protests in Epping continued. “Make Epping safe again,” read one placard. Another bore the message: “I’m not far-Right. I’m worried about my kids.”
It was the third night of protests in a single week. Epping is a quiet market town where Greater London shades into Essex. It is not normally a tinder box. But it is now the most visible site of discontent with Britain’s asylum system, which has deposited thousands of unvetted migrants into smalltown Britain.
The protests began last Sunday, after Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker from Ethiopia, was charged with trying to kiss a schoolgirl on the town’s high street. He had been in Britain for just eight days. Housed inside the Bell Hotel until his arrest, Kebatu had been living alongside an unknown number of other asylum seekers.
Then, on Thursday, the protests increased in pitch. Hundreds gathered outside the Bell Hotel. The protest was initially peaceful, but took a violent turn. Police officers were assaulted and their vehicles damaged. Three people have now been arrested and politicians have condemned the violence.
This means that the country’s eyes remain on Epping. With hundreds of asylum hotels in operation across Britain, can we expect more protests like these? If so — how best to understand the people who attend them?
By the time night fell on Thursday, protesters had charged the anti-racist counter-demonstrators, kicked in a police van and thrown themselves at a wall of riot shields until the front teeth of a man had been smashed from his mouth. Then what? There was nothing left to do but loiter and argue about who was to blame. Their faces glowed with the light from their phones as they streamed their debates for thousands to watch live online.
Rubber-neckers gathered around Ed Matthews, a TikTok star with a wideboy Essex persona. Young men began pushing towards his camera and shouting over each other. “This country is a pressure cooker and you know what happens to pressure cookers — they explode,” one track-suited teenager shouted. “2025, watch out. It’s going to be a civil war.”
For years, the hotel had proved a bone of contention for local residents. Initially requisitioned by the Home Office during the pandemic, it was used to house asylum-seeking families amid a shortage of temporary accommodation. Julian Leppert, then a local councillor representing For Britain, a now-defunct party with BNP links, told The Observer, “We don’t want a Tower Hamlets out in Essex.” Locals insisted petty crime had increased; Essex Police said it had not.
The Government stopped using the site, and then, with no consultation with local authorities, started again earlier this year. This time the inhabitants were entirely male. “The Home Office told us when it reopened. It was like, ‘This is happening’,” said Holly Whitbread, the ward councillor. “Local residents are very frustrated. The vast, vast majority don’t want it.” In March, the Phoenix Hotel, which is located on the other side of Epping and also houses asylum seekers, was burnt down. A week later, the Bell was set on fire. Rawand Abdulrih, 36, a resident, was charged with arson with intent to endanger life.
Holly’s father, Chris Whitbread, the leader of Epping Forest District Council, has since launched a petition calling for both hotels to be closed immediately. “Our community feels ignored and let down,” it claims. “Epping Forest has been forced to carry an unfair burden in the ongoing illegal immigration crisis.”
Massing outside the Bell on Thursday, furious locals echoed his demands. “Protect our women. Protect our children,” read one sign held aloft. “Stop housing illegal un-checked immigrants. Stop the boats, deport sexual predators. Close the borders.” In keeping with the town’s demographics, the crowd was very white, though a few black protesters were present throughout the day. Anger was directed primarily at the asylum hotel in their town, then illegal migrants more broadly, and, when probed, sometimes also Muslims, “lefties”, and immigrants in general.
A former teacher, there with her teenage grandson, told me she was concerned because the hotel was just 10 minutes’ walk from a school. “I’m mainly worried because they’re Islamic. Islam says you have to conquer,” she said. “This is the UN army. Look up Agenda 30. It’s what the 1% elite want to do.” When a man in a passing car lent from his window to shout “burn it down” her grandson displayed his braces in a toothy grin.
One mile away, a counter-demonstration organised by Stand Up To Racism was gathering at Epping train station. A small group from the Left-wing campaign had been outside the hotel on Sunday, when a scuffle had broken out and one of their number received a cut above his eye. Following a national call out, they planned to return in greater numbers.
“I’m here because of racism,” one young black woman with a walking stick and a sunflower lanyard, which indicates a hidden disability, told me as she waited on a bench for her comrades to arrive. “No matter what town or city it happens in, it affects me. All people are welcome in this country.” Others had come in from east London, they said. There were pensioners and young communists brandishing copies of Socialist Appeal. They were wholly unprepared for the serious violence to follow.
By the time they began marching through Epping, a large and volatile crowd had assembled outside the Bell. When the anti-racists came within a few hundred metres, protesters surged forward to confront them. The gathering outside the hotel had been diverse, with many local women and older people among it, but the mob running forward now was made up overwhelmingly of young men. “Paedo protectors,” they shouted. The police, taken aback by the speed of their advance, retreated, before discharging canisters of pepper spray and halting the charge.
Forced back into Epping proper, the counter-protesters found themselves penned into a semi-circle between the police and a brick wall. A strangely English game ensued. Locals hurled eggs at the Left-wingers, who smiled as they batted them out of the air with “Refugees Welcome” signs. “I don’t understand why they’ve come,” a woman standing beside me said. She did not condone the violence, but was glad to see a real protest against the asylum seekers. Her elderly mother had been flashed by one recently, she claimed, and was now too scared to walk the dog.
“The rage pulsating through the country remains amorphous.”
Among those living closest to the Bell, opinion is more conflicted. For Jane Harvey, their presence has left her fearful, anxious and angry. She led me through her grey hallway, past her mother smoking silently by the backdoor, and out onto a patio from which the hotel could be seen just one garden over.
“I probably would not be feeling this way if they were genuine asylum seekers,” she said. “Real asylum seekers are families and women. I would hope the nation would help.” Harvey is not, she was keen to emphasise, a racist. She grew up in inner-city London. She made sure to send her children to a multicultural school, not one in leafy Epping. But at night she now sees strange groups of men and cars loitering outside, she claims. Her son has been pelted with stones while training for a marathon. Standing in her garden, Harvey said that despite the warm weather she will not leave her back door open while home alone anymore.
An elderly couple in a neat yellow house, by contrast, said they had no complaints about their asylum-seeking neighbours. “Up until now there have been no problems,” the husband said. “Me, I let them get on with it. I don’t want to get involved.” When the hotel was still a hotel, he added, drunken guests would stumble out onto the grass at 4am and make a ruckus. The asylum seekers have never done that.
As the day dragged on, with the Left-wing protesters penned in and unable to put up a fight, anger among the crowd began to switch to the police. Men started ramming into their lines and then barracking them furiously once pushed away. “I’m 57 years old,” shouted one at a young and rather timid looking officer. “This used to be a nice country; the police used to be good.”
When several vanloads of reinforcements arrived, the anger went up another gear. Demonstrators surged forward and kicked out at them wildly. As the law retreated, notepads and equipment lay strewn on the ground. A boy wearing a ski mask put on a policeman’s helmet.
The mood was febrile. Following last year’s race riots, this is the scenario that British elites have feared: a spark that could ignite mass ethnic violence. A Whitehall briefing note, revealed last week, shows that ministers feared that disorder might break out should the public discover the secret Afghan resettlement scheme. As the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, recently told The New Statesman, she believes that northern England is so tense it could “go up in flames” at any time.
The rage pulsating through the country remains amorphous, however. In Epping, as throughout the north during last year’s riots, there were no real leaders. The protesters were left to deliberate among themselves, unsure as to whether they should stay in town to hassle the Left-wingers or head back to the hotel and target the asylum seekers.
The radical Right in Britain is meanwhile in a post-organisational phase. There is clearly a social base for a more extreme anti-migrant politics, but no predominant leader or unifying party to build it. Within this void, political entrepreneurs moved throughout the protest trying to win support for their banner.
Jaymey McIvor, a local Reform councillor dressed nattily in pinstriped trousers, loafers and a turquoise “MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN” cap, said he was there to stand up for women. “This is happening across the country,” he said. “We need to stop the wholesale importation of Afghans. The only way to stop this from happening is to vote Reform.” As protesters attacked police lines after dark, others chanted the name of Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League. “Tommy was right,” bellowed one man over and over again.
Another leading chants of “Send them back” was Callum Barker, a clean-cut young local who has attempted to position himself at the front of the protests. “I’d say that there’s no particular kind of leader or anything like this,” he said. “I’m just a bloke who’s picked up a megaphone.”
Barker is also a member of the Homeland Party, which has extensive neo-Nazi ties. Until now, he told me, he has avoided mentioning his allegiance at the demonstrations. He insists he only wants to stand up for Epping residents. When I asked whether he accepted that six million Jews had died in the Holocaust, he refused to answer.
After a final, bruising attempt to rush the line of riot police guarding the Bell, the crowd began to quieten down. Locals insisted they would not give up in the coming weeks, though. “If this was Northern Ireland that hotel would be on fire by now,” shouted one.
Outside a pub on the high street a man with a skull and crossbones tattooed on the back of his head told a small crowd the Government would never listen to them. Instead, action like this would be repeated across the country. As Britain sinks into a long, hot summer, its leaders will be desperately hoping he is not correct.
