Yesterday’s injunction granted to Epping Forest council giving the government three weeks to stop using the Bell Hotel for asylum seekers on planning grounds is not quite the slam-dunk that it looks. It is theoretically open to appeal: furthermore, it is only an interim measure pending a full trial later this year. But the affair has seriously spooked the government, and rightly so.
Labour’s present immigration policy is now untenable
What worries the Home Office is that it’s not only Epping. It seems a safe bet that the contagion will spread fast. As soon as the result was announced, Broxbourne, a nearby Tory council with a similar make-up to Epping, announced that it is contemplating following suit. Nigel Farage has now pledged that the dozen or so authorities under Reform control will all be taking legal advice. And given that we have had similar serious asylum protests in numerous other places up and down the kingdom, from Norfolk to Greater Manchester to Scotland, these authorities may well be joined by more.
True, not all such claims will bear fruit. As a matter of boring technical law, the grant of an injunction is a remedy in the discretion of the court. Epping was a strong case. The hotel’s owners had continued to block-book it for asylum seekers even after they knew perfectly well about the planning objections; there was at least some evidence that it was a centre of alleged crime; there was big damage to local amenity and a history of continuous protest. Where such arguments are lacking, injunctions may be harder to come by. Indeed, three years earlier authorities in Ipswich and in Hull’s commuter belt notably failed to get orders in the face of more discreet, and largely unprotested, use of hotels as asylum hostels.
Nevertheless, assuming (as seems likely) that using a hotel as a displaced persons’ camp probably does break planning laws, it seems that a fair number of claims will succeed. Today the cases are likely to be strong. The trickle of irregular migrants has become a gushing flood; protest by the just-about-managing is getting more widespread and more understandable; and there are increasingly alarming accounts of crime surrounding places where these migrants are housed. And it only requires a few Epping-style injunctions to tip into crisis a government with thousands of migrants to deal with and nowhere to put them.
What will now happen is unclear. A nuclear option would be emergency legislation to bulldoze through continued use of hotels for asylum seekers: but this would be a gift to Reform and destroy most of what popularity this administration has left. For the moment, one suspects that, as security minister Dan Jarvis said earlier this morning, the administration will wait and see while weighing its options.
The difficulty is that these options are uncomfortably limited. Whatever happens on the injunction front, whether the government likes it or not, the events at Epping will have long-term and expansive political effects.
For one thing, Labour can no longer plausibly ignore the fact that voters, including those who rather unwillingly voted it in last year, have a right to demand answers about immigration. These electors have strong and probably justified doubts about the bona fides of a good many so-called refugees. They see no reason why their resources should support them and they will in no case back any government seen to be weak on the issue.
Secondly, Labour’s present immigration policy, such as it is, is now untenable. To cut a long story short, Starmer’s approach can best be best summed up as saying a great deal while doing very little. Words about ‘smashing the gangs’ and largely meaningless agreements with the French could be served up to Red Wall voters and White Van Man; private assurances that none of this really meant anything could be invoked to keep Labour left-wingers quiet. But this policy, when looked at closely, actually involved doing little apart from paying more and more public money to put up more and more dubious foreign entrants with neither any limit nor any serious attention to the nation’s interests. Post-Epping, one thing is clear. The government must do something to bring migration under control.
What? The possibilities are endless. Proper facilities for screening would-be asylum seekers – and measures making it less ridiculously easy for doubtful migrants to disappear into the grey economy and never be seen again – would be a start. Serious thought about doing something about the human rights regime and its effects on migration control, and possible offshoring of applications for asylum, would be even better. At least the Tories tried such things, however incompetently. Labour must now follow suit. If not, it risks a precipitate disappearance into unlamented irrelevance.
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