The Bell hotel in Epping has seen a lot since it was built in the 16th century as a coaching inn, serving travellers passing through the historic Essex market town and on to London, 15 miles to the south-west. This has long been a place that bustled with outsiders, though they have not always been welcome – the small green common opposite was once named after a beacon that local stories say was built to warn of invasion.
Though now wrapped in ugly 1960s extensions that have stripped it of anything approaching charm, the unassuming building – close to agricultural land and a cricket pitch – is an unlikely place to spark a potential political crisis.
That is what the government may be facing, however, after the high court ruled this week that the Home Office’s use of the Bell hotel to house asylum seekers breached planning laws. Epping Forest district council had challenged the government after the hotel became a flashpoint for anti-refugee protests, after a Syrian man who had been placed there was arrested and charged over the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl.
Local protesters and the Conservative-led council are jubilant but the implications of ousting the hotel’s 140 male residents to as yet unknown locations could be far more widespread. Dozens of local authorities, some of which have also been the focus of protests, are considering similar legal challenges, which could throw the government’s entire asylum project into disarray and which one insider admitted this week has left the Home Office “reeling”.
This case may turn on planning law but there are plenty who see this as a much bigger victory, after a febrile summer in which thousands of people again have crossed the Channel in small boats, anti-migrant protests have taken place in more than 40 locations, and nationalistic and anti-refugee rhetoric has been embraced by politicians across the spectrum and amplified by sections of the media.
There has not been widespread rioting of the kind that occurred last summer, sparked by the murder of three girls at a dance class in Southport and false rumours that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker. But as communities braced for further widespread protests this weekend, a campaign to raise the flags of St George and the union jack across the country gathered pace, declaring as patriotism what many others have experienced in their villages or streets as clear intimidation. According to the anti-extremist groups Hope Not Hate and Stand Up to Racism, the apparently spontaneous campaign has in fact been organised by well-known far-right figures.
“We are in a dangerous moment,” says Lewis Nielsen, an anti-fascist officer at Stand Up to Racism. In the context of increased far-right protests and encouraging political rhetoric, he says, “the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ was never about flags, it’s about giving confidence to racists and fascists to target refugees and migrants”.
Saturday’s protests largely passed without incident. While demonstrators and police clashed in places, there were not the scenes of civil unrest from last summer. However, refugee and even minority communities are experiencing real consequences, illustrated by countless small but terrifying incidents. In Redcar, North Yorkshire, a black man filmed playing with his white granddaughters has been racially abused and falsely called a paedophile after the short video clip was amplified online by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson. In east Belfast, a small group of vigilantes have been seeking out dark-skinned men to shout abuse at or demand to see their identity documents.
Writing in the Guardian on Friday, the Refugee Council’s chief executive, Enver Solomon, said some food banks that previously served all in need were now turning away perceived “foreigners”. He also described meeting an African man in his 60s in north-east England who had been attacked by a group of men – his arm was broken – and was terrified of leaving his accommodation.
This was shortly after Keir Starmer said tough curbs on immigration were needed to prevent Britain becoming an “island of strangers”. Solomon wrote: “Those who have worked with refugees for decades tell me they have never known a time when the hostility has been so strong and the environment so toxic.” Other refugee charities have had to install safe rooms or even close their offices in response to death threats and intimidation.
Starmer has since said he “deeply regrets” his “island of strangers” remark, but there has been little sign otherwise of a rollback of the rhetoric. This week his spokesperson offered an apparent endorsement of the flag-raising campaign, describing the prime minister as a “patriot” who believed people should “absolutely” fly flags.
Meanwhile, the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said women are afraid to walk in parks for fear of being harassed by refugee men “lurking in bushes”. The shadow minister Robert Jenrick, seen as a potential successor as party leader, has been pictured at anti-migrant rallies attended by known members of the far right, and attaching a flag to a lamp-post in defiance of “Britain-hating” councils who have asked for them not to be attached to street infrastructure. The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, called for widespread protests outside other hotels housing new arrivals.
Paul Jackson, a professor of history at the University of Northampton whose work includes a focus on far-right extremism, says: “What I find quite concerning is that it’s creating an opportunity for the far right to grow. We’ve seen Labour politicians be supportive in principle of concern around protests at migration hotels, leaning into the populist right. We’ve seen Reform politicians very strongly legitimise these concerns.
“There’s a lot of concern about the emboldenment of the far right, and also the limited voices within the political mainstream calling for a different narrative around issues of migration. It would be good to see a little more moral leadership rather than pandering.”
Jackson identifies a number of factors behind the current situation, including the ascent of Donald Trump in the US. One fundamental factor, he says, is a collapse in trust in government responses to asylum and migration.
“We’ve seen over the last generation a breakdown in trust in government policymaking around migration, and I think that’s partly thanks to mainstream politicians’ failure to speak truthfully on this issue.”
Sunder Katwala, the director of the thinktank British Future, which researches public attitudes on immigration and national identity, points to the lack of government voices pushing back against the protests.
“The Labour government is very quiet about racism this year compared to last, because it doesn’t want to accidentally sound as if it’s criticising people with legitimate concerns and so on,” he says. “The mainstream right and the mainstream centre-left have stopped doing the boundary-calling, and I think Reform, the Conservatives and sometimes the government are now crossing the line, because they’re unwilling to criticise anybody, whatever they’re saying.”
Katwala stresses there has been no repeat of last year’s violence at protests, which for the most part have been numerically small, and points to polling showing that similar proportions of people believe the UK should accept fewer refugees as think it should take more (though the percentage who are welcoming has fallen since 2023, according to YouGov).
Politics may be tilting right and the voices of those opposed to migration may be louder, but Katwala says: “The long-term trends in British society on tolerance of people across ethnic and faith lines are powerfully and strongly in a pro-tolerance, pro-liberal direction” – and markedly stronger in the UK than elsewhere in Europe or the US.
No voice has been more striking on this than the family of Bebe King, one of the girls murdered in Southport, who hit out at the “despicable” actions of the far right who had “tried to make political gain from our tragedy”. Speaking to the Guardian earlier this month, Bebe’s grandfather Michael Weston King urged ministers to reconsider plans to change the law to give the ethnicity of suspects, describing it as “apparent kowtowing to the likes of Farage and Reform, [which] is extremely disappointing, though perhaps not surprising”.
A significant silent majority is tolerant and welcoming of refugees, says Katwala, but ongoing dysfunction in the asylum system does not help. “Chaos isn’t good for advocates of refugee protection. So the left of this debate has definitely got an interest in the government showing it can control asylum while taking refugees,” he says.
“I think the government really does have to get a grip on the visible lack of control in the Channel itself and in hotels in the towns where people live. If we don’t do that, there are political risks to them, but also there are risks to the principle of refugee protection.”
