The Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, Rotherham, is opposite an RSPB nature reserve. For months, its 130 rooms have been fully booked, rented by the Home Office to house migrants. Last weekend, the hotel was surrounded by a mob who broke in and tried to burn it down. Most of the ground-floor windows are now covered with chipboard. The migrants, I was told, have been moved to another hotel.
‘Violent disorder isn’t right, but people from down south don’t know what it’s like up here’
‘It used to be migrant families that were housed here,’ says a woman in the Aldi carpark next door. ‘Now it’s just young men.’ The only other journalists here are from Chinese state TV, keen to show Britain descending into anarchy.
I knock on some doors to ask what local people think, but no one wants to talk to me. A nurse says she is about to go to work, while an elderly man says he can’t speak to me because his wife has medical issues. The streets around the hotel are well-kept new builds, but quiet. A woman in a 4×4 follows at a distance, taking photos of me on her smartphone.
In online groups, rioters talk about wanting their country back. They also worry they’ll be targeted by police. ‘If you have participated at a protest in England, grind down your electronic devices to dust with a belt sander or grinder immediately,’ one person warns. ‘The British government is about to come crashing down on you. They will empty the prisons of rapists and violent black and brown criminals to make room for thousands of white protestors. They will charge you for insurrection and attempted murder, especially anyone near the migrant hotel lit on fire.’
One Telegram chat, Southport Wake Up, had talk of a demonstration around Alum Rock in Birmingham. It never materialised, but counter-protestors arrived in balaclavas with Palestinian flags. They descended on a pub called the Clumsy Swan, where a man was beaten to the floor and a window was kicked in. When I arrive at the Clumsy Swan the next afternoon, the landlady is playing ‘I Predict a Riot’ on the speakers. ‘They knocked seven shades out of that guy,’ Simon, a regular, tells me. ‘I must confess that one kid who broke the glass with a karate kick, it was an outstanding full circle thing. Very impressive.’ I tell him I’d heard the rioters had attacked the pub because they thought it was connected to the English Defence League. He seems confused. ‘The pub’s owned by Asians.’
I speak to Tariq, a retired policeman who lives in Birmingham. ‘It’s just yobs looking for an excuse – and yobbos come in all sorts of colours. These people give everyone a bad name: the hardworking Asians, all the hardworking ethnics.’ He thinks the problem is that there aren’t enough police, and that the trouble-makers know this. The solution, he tells me, is more bobbies on the beat.
Back in Rotherham, I meet Jack and Brendan in a pub. They are wondering how much they might get for the lead roofing on a nearby building, which had burnt down a few years before. ‘It won’t be much,’ Brendan says with a grin, ‘but it all adds up.’ I ask them what they thought of the attempts to burn down the migrant hotel. ‘It’s not right, that,’ the pair agree, still grinning. ‘We don’t like immigration,’ Jack said, ‘but that’s too far.’ The pair keep laughing and take on an air of faux seriousness, as if they know more than they are letting on. ‘Of course violent disorder isn’t right, but people from down south don’t know what it’s like up here. Every-one knows someone who was groomed by an Asian gang.’
Brendan knows one of the women who was abused. ‘Now she’s unemployed and smokes weed all day,’ he says. ‘She were never the same after.’ I apologise, not really sure what to say, and give him a cigarette. Brendan smokes it faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, then stubs it out in the Fray Bentos ashtray. Jack comes back from the bar and says that we need to leave; some of the locals have overheard me saying I’m a reporter.
After the pub, Jack and Brendan take me through an estate made up of rows of squat red-brick houses. There are abandoned sofas on the street. Men in kurtas and Adidas sandals walk past. ‘Everyone here is Asian,’ Jack says. ‘We don’t have a problem with them as people, but all they do is get benefits and council housing.’ Jack is also on benefits and lives in council housing.
We get a crate of beers and go back to Jack’s house. The pair’s politics are summed up by Brendan: ‘Rotherham is a dump, but it’s our dump.’ Jack offers me his bed to sleep in and takes the sofa. On the windowsill there is a black-and-white photograph of his grandparents’ wedding.
In the car back to the train station the next day, the taxi driver tells me a few of his colleagues had been attacked with bricks. Why are rioters attacking taxis, I ask. ‘Asian, in’t it? For the rioters it’s a bit of fun, but at the end of the day, it’s someone’s livelihood. I’ve been doing taxis for 25 years and honestly, it’s the worst time now, especially the last few days. It’s scary.’
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