‘We are facing a long, hot summer’, warned a report on social cohesion on Tuesday, ‘with a powder keg of tensions left largely unaddressed from last year that could easily ignite once again’. It only took two days for the first sign of this grim prediction coming true.
This time, though, the expression of public fury at migration failures was not in ‘left-behind’ northern towns like Hull or Hartlepool – or even like last month in Ballymena, where tight-knit loyalist communities have a history of kicking off to defend their interests. Thursday’s protests – and later clashes – at an asylum hotel were in the quiet Essex market town of Epping, population 12,000, mentioned in the Domesday Book and a well-heeled part of the London commuter belt at the terminus of the Central Line.
The trigger was an alleged sexual assault by a migrant.
The trigger was an alleged sexual assault by a migrant. On 7 July, Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian asylum seeker, is alleged to have tried to kiss a schoolgirl as she ate pizza on Epping high street. He had arrived in the UK via a small boat only eight days previously. He has denied three charges of sexual assault across two days, and the protests coincided with his appearance in court for a hearing ahead of a two-day trial next month. He spoke via an interpreter, and according to the prosecution has ‘no ties to anyone or any place in the UK’.
The site of the protests was the Bell Hotel, where Kebatu had been living. Having been used to house male asylum seekers in Epping for several years, and sitting less than 500 yards from a coeducational secondary school, it was already a major local grievance. Following the alleged sexual assault, the leader of Epping Forest District Council called for the Home Office to close the asylum hotel ‘without delay’. He was joined by two local Tory MPs – Epping Forest’s Neil Hudson and Alex Burghart of Brentwood and Ongar.
Commentator Adam Brooks, who was at the protest, reported to GB News that it began entirely peacefully – ‘great-natured’ with grandparents and children. ‘People attended the earlier protest and did so peacefully, lawfully and responsibly’, an Essex Police official said, adding: ‘I’d like to thank them for expressing their views this way given the strength of feeling locally.’
In the view of Brooks, it was only when so-called anti-racism protestors arrived and were allowed to march by the demonstration, flanked by police, that tensions flared, with many local youths coming out to confront them. Some were later escorted away in riot vans.
During the Southport riots last year, it was often claimed that much of the disorder was the result of opportunist ‘thugs’ who had arrived from out of town to stir up trouble. At yesterday’s protest, it seems it was after the arrival of these left-wing protestors, often masked and with ‘Refugees Welcome’ placards, that disorder began.
While Essex Police made a point of describing earlier protestors as ‘legitimately protesting’, there is evidence of apparent harsh police treatment of some involved. In social media footage, one police van appears to hit a man and push him down the street before he gets out the way.
Another clip shows a man confronting police apparently being hit in the face with a riot shield. Essex Police said it believed several suspects were responsible for damaging police vehicles, the hotel, preventing access to Epping High Road, and assaulting officers, with one left with a minor injury to the neck. ‘We know the people who carried out these crimes do not represent Epping or Essex’, it added.
While parts of the press are presenting those involved as ‘far-right supporters’, or an ‘anti-immigrant mob’, in footage of protesters, they seem more to be ordinary locals who are simply fed up with being ignored by the political class. ‘We’re good, local, taxpaying people’ says a smartly dressed mother-of-three in a speech through a megaphone, standing on the back of a van adorned with St. George’s crosses. Why were the police ‘allowing agitators to come and fight against us?’ she asks, eliciting a cheer, before voicing her typical concerns about illegal migration.
Unvetted men are coming across the channel every day who ‘don’t share our values’, she said, who ‘don’t respect women’ and ‘don’t respect children’. The UK, she laments, is ‘a soft touch’ for migrants. Apparently entirely impromptu, her speech is heartfelt, patriotic, and potent: ‘Every child’s right is to walk to school and not fear that they are going to be sexually assaulted or raped. We do not live in a third world country. This is the United Kingdom the last time I looked.’
This fed up, outspoken Essex mum doesn’t care that the ‘anti-racism’ types and left-wing media will try and smear people like her: if she’s ‘far-right’ for standing up for schoolgirls’ safety, she says, ‘then so be it’.
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