Protest works. That will be the take-home message to activists across the country, now that Epping Forest District Council has been granted a temporary High Court injunction blocking asylum seekers from being housed at the Bell Hotel in the leafy Essex market town.
Thousands have demonstrated outside the Bell in recent weeks, sparked by the charging last month of an Ethiopian asylum seeker with three counts of sexual assault, one count of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity and one count of harassment without violence. Hadush Kebatu, a resident of the Bell, had arrived in the UK by a small boat just eight days prior.
The hotel has been used to accommodate asylum seekers since 2020, when the doors of Britain’s hotels were flung open to migrants during the pandemic. The Bell was slated for closure – to asylum claimants, at least – in 2024, but this decision was reversed by the new Labour government after it came to power last summer, in the teeth of bitter opposition from residents and councillors.
Overwhelmingly peaceful and local (albeit with some despicable flare-ups of bigotry and violence around the edges), the protests have single-handedly shifted the dial. With demonstrations now kicking off constantly, from Canary Wharf to Diss to Waterlooville, whenever ordinary people get so much as a whiff of a hotel or flat block being handed over to house asylum seekers, the Home Office is now in for one headache after another.
The truth is, this situation was always untenable. It is not to smear all of the people in those hotels to acknowledge that a non-negligible proportion of those who enter the country illegally will not be legitimate asylum seekers and may go on to commit other crimes. Our asylum system is now so dysfunctional it has essentially become a wrong ’uns’ charter. Locals were never going to tolerate this.
With the wind in the protesters’ backs, how will the government respond? The glare of public scrutiny is such that it can no longer get away with simply shuffling the problem around, bussing asylum seekers from one form of accommodation to another. This was never just about hotels anyway. This is about communities being forced to pay the price for successive governments losing control of the borders. Until that fundamental failure is corrected, the unrest is going nowhere.
Comments