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.