Some thoughts from Arzu on the anti-migrant ‘protests’, court rulings against asylum hotels, narratives around grooming gangs and how they all align post the 2024 summer pogroms in the UK.
Yesterday the High Court granted a temporary injunction against Somani Hotels housing asylum seekers at one of their hotels in Epping. The injunction was sought by the local council (the Conservative led Epping Forest District Council), and means that all 140 refugees housed at The Bell Hotel as part of the UK Home Office’s asylum seeker housings scheme, will need to be removed elsewhere. Why were those events significant?
- The Protests and ‘White’[1] Grievance
Today, various other councils including all ten led by the Reform Party have stated they will be making similar applications. Many hotels, like the Bell Hotel have been the scene of ongoing protests by ‘white’ nationalists, often in their thousands, demanding the expulsion of (in the case of The Bell, all male) asylum seekers. These ‘protests’ follow on from last summer’s pogroms (including extreme mob violence and threat, characterised as ‘riots’ in the media) against Muslims, asylum seekers and anyone perceived to be such. There is a seamless line from those pogroms to the current mob mobilisations outside hotels like The Bell.
Instead of criminalisation of such violence[2] we see the escalation of and instrumentalisation of racist narratives by politicians at local and national levels, here shown in the actions of the council spending money on court actions that pander to such narratives, rather than the still austerity hit members of its district[3]. This is not new, and the direction of travel here is not from the street upwards but cyclical – those outside asylum hotels have been incited by reckless and often deliberately demonised narratives about Muslims and ‘others’.
Today’s events are another shift in the mainstreaming of a particular type of racist narrative – one that justifies racist violence. Many refugees or those perceived to be such have been attacked in the vicinity of these hotels; worse still though is that is all seen to be an expression of justified grievance, part of the politics of councils seeking court injunctions. Neither are being treated in mainstream public debate as physical and structural violence.
It’s worth noting that The Bell Hotel and other protests saw violence levelled at refugees entering and leaving the premises, as well as the display of neo-Nazi and fascistic signs and insignia (see this thread and the thread below for some examples.)[4]
If you hold a placard saying you support Palestine Action, you get nicked.
If you hold a banner saying ‘Kill ‘Em All’ outside a hotel housing asylum seekers, the police look the other way. pic.twitter.com/X43fMAKKjQ
— Taj Ali (@Taj_Ali1) August 16, 2025
I am of a generation taught anti-Nazism and anti-fascism at school. Those of my generation should be screaming, “What is going on?” Instead they appear at best acquiescing, at worst stoking the fires of open fascism (it seems clear that covert fascism was in fact always part of the state).
- The Demonisation and the Facts: Grooming Gangs
The Bell Hotel ‘protestors’ like so many others – parroting lines about Muslim male / refugee / migrant sexual perversion – have taken to the streets under the banner (often literally) of ‘Save our Kids’. It’s a trope as old as they come. I summarised many writers in the Counter-Narratives to Islamophobia Project (2017) thus:
“…the idea of Muslim men as sexual predators and paedophiles and Muslim male perversion – child groomers, predators against vulnerable white women etc. – has been the staple of much media and political representation (Ameli and Merali, 2015). There have been repeated stories about Pakistani and Muslim men grooming children after a series of cases involving all or mainly Muslim and / or Pakistani men. It has been observed that no similar stories highlighting the ethnicity or religion of other perpetrators have been noted. Harker (22 July 2012) reflecting on the conviction of white male perpetrators of child abuse said: “There was no commentary anywhere on how these crimes shine a light on British culture, or how middle-aged white men have to confront the deep flaws in their religious and ethnic identity. Yet that’s exactly what played out following the conviction in May of the “Asian sex gang” in Rochdale, which made the front page of every national newspaper. Though analysis of the case focused on how big a factor was race, religion and culture, the unreported story is of how politicians and the media have created a new racial scapegoat. In fact, if anyone wants to study how racism begins, and creeps into the consciousness of an entire nation, they need look no further.”
This demonisation has increasingly found voice in the idea of grooming gangs. The false and highly racialised narrative that Muslim / migrant / refugee men are out to rape, molest and groom ‘our’ children, has found voice at the highest levels of state. Dame Louise Casey, about whose inquiries I have previously written about here and here, was commissioned by this government to undertake an inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) (including ethnicity and culture of perpetrators). This latest report aligns with governmental agendas[5] on ‘grooming gangs’ in the UK. In the run up to the clamour for government action, alongside the horrific and truly appalling cases in Rotherham of CSE, ran headlines and articles (notably from the late Andrew Norfolk in The Times) claiming the issue is one of Muslim and Pakistani cultural origin. It’s worth noting that the 2022-23 Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse report states that five sixths of perpetrators of CSE are ‘white’, meaning that the ‘white’ population is in fact the one that is overrepresented statistically.
In the latest issue of The Long View, writer and community activist Saqib Deshmukh debunks this idea thoroughly and can be read here. I want to quote however the opener to the piece because it shows how deeply imbedded this idea is. He states:
“I remember a few years ago being in a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) session with a number of professionals in Hackney doing some training on equalities and we did an exercise on how we perceive each other. In my group a female youth worker/manager turned around during this activity and said to me that she saw all Asian men as potential abusers. I have to say I was shocked (it takes a lot to do that at my age) but it was challenged safely by others in the room, and she apologised later.”
The apology and the counter-narrating by the others in the group are heartening, but the initial view – so openly expressed in a professional setting – is deeply disturbing. This was not a proto-fascist ‘protestor’ outside an asylum hotel. It avers to the idea that myself and Professor Saied Ameli have repeatedly pointed out in our research: that the environment of hate against Muslims, those perceived to be Muslim and those actually and or simply perceived to be allied with them, is not a street phenomenon, nor does it originate there. Street thuggery is a symptom of structural hatreds, deeply embedded in cultural and state praxes.
- The Hordes of Asylum Seekers vs the Facts of Asylum Seeking
Social media is awash with echo chambers reinforcing ideas not just of asylum seekers coming to take over. This is part ‘great replacement theory’ where Muslims are set to takeover of Western society; part battle for resources / scarcity fearmongering. If all you do is read the papers in print and online, you too would fear the hordes of boat people, illegally entering the UK and claiming asylum. Being swamped by the ‘other’ again has a pedigree in British politics. With all these ‘illegals’(fn illegal immigrant) ‘swamping’ our shores, no wonder, the argument goes, that our health service is shattered, our schools and other basic services and infrastructure in decline and or collapse.
The response to this post summarises for me the ludicrous nature of the argument.
There are currently 32,000 people housed in hotels awaiting asylum claims. Ideally, there would be none, but for perspective, if you placed these people inside Wembley Stadium it would be two thirds empty. Hardly overrun are we ?
— Ian Bees (@IanBees1) August 20, 2025
One third of Wembley Stadium is not going to bring down the UK or Western Civilisation. Indeed, the cost benefit of those who have been granted asylum has been repeatedly shown to be overwhelmingly to the benefit side for the nation financially. State and its allies in media in particular have distracted the much needed critical gaze form the actual failures of the state and their causes to the bogey men of asylum seeking. As former London Mayor pointed out back in the days (circa the mid 2000s) when the state began turning the screw on asylum seekers coming to the UK, had London’s then population of asylum seekers (prevented from working while their applications were being processed) been allowed to work, the capital’s shortage of key public sector workers, including teachers, nurses, doctors would have been solved. But who needs facts, eh?
- The Facts of Crime
The impugning of those racialised with the idea of inherent or overrepresented criminality is one that wider society has internalised, and which finds realisation in disproportionality in sentencing and in the prison estate. Deshmukh’s piece (link above) on the latest Casey review provides links and statistics. The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) guidelines discussed in ‘Policing: Counting Colour, Not Crimes’ by veteran activist and politician Lee Jasper, add fuel to this fire. These guidelines require forces to disclose the ethnicity and nationality of suspects in “high profile and sensitive” cases. Rather than (as some have argued) the ameliorating negative discourses around ethnicity and crime, as Jasper points out their implementation is subject to the discretion of individual chief constables and thus open to bias. As Jasper points out:
“This is scapegoating, not accountability. The disclosure of a suspect’s ethnicity and migration status is not relevant to the administration of justice, and in most cases adds no evidential value. It serves one purpose only: to feed the public obsession with race.”
He adds further regarding the statistical reality:
“Here lies the most glaring contradiction. The overwhelming majority of serious crimes in Britain — including violent and sexual offences — are committed by white men. That fact is confirmed by the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics.
“Yet selective disclosure will have the opposite effect. By reporting the ethnicity of Black and minority ethnic suspects, while downplaying or ignoring the ethnicity of white suspects, the system creates a false impression that crime is disproportionately “ethnic”. This is distortion, not transparency.”
Meanwhile, with no sense of irony, the ‘white’ grievance of many has been whipped up further by claims from political figures and right-wing media that this is ‘further evidence’ of two tier-policing i.e. policing in their opinion which is biased against ‘white’ people. Statistical realities notwithstanding, it is now being claimed in some parts of these social groupings that the NPCC guidance – made under pressure from the Home Office – has been done to demonise ‘white’ people.
What are facts anyway, eh?
- Who benefits and who looses?
If none of this hysteria and violence is based on fact, and if as many of us have argued, this is not simply the reproduction of bias in institutionally racist ways but also done intentionally by those acting with malice placed within the establishment, how do we counter this?
That is another piece (already written as it happens by myself and colleagues repeatedly[6]), but as Prof. Ameli and I noted ten years ago in the conclusion to Environment of Hate: The New Normal for Muslims in the UK:
“Without partners in the project of social transformation, can Muslims or indeed any out-group effect meaningful social change? In previous sets of recommendations the authors have highlighted the need for institutional partners for any meaningful social change to take place. Effectively the authors have argued that the muted group (Kraemerei, 1998 and Ameli et. al. 2006b) can only gain a voice if those that mute it decide to listen to rather than silence the muted group. This envisioning of the scenario unintentionally reinforces the power dynamic that leaves the muted group powerless, and reliant on the largesse and / or conscience of the powerful that silence it.
“In arguing for new alliances, the authors suggest that new thinking is required to find partners to obviate the need for the powerful to act. In other words, can there be a peaceful mobilisation that can wrest social and political change without relying on, being socialised to, or being involved in institutional structures as they exist currently?”
At the time of writing Jeremy Corbyn had just become leader of the Labour Party and an energised movement has grown around him. Sadly their trust in this leadership was not rewarded. As these words are written now there is a chance for Corbyn and co-leader of the new part currently being formed, Zahra Sultana, to learn from and build on those mistakes. If I am honest, I am not hopeful. I don’t see evidence of lessons learned. I pray I am wrong. I pray I am proved wrong. I pray that all those who loose when we fail in leadership, can find justice. And this includes those incited to violence as well as those who are victims of it, because we are all being played. Those are the facts, if we care to unite around them. Eh?
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. She has been writing and researching the causes of and possible counters to racism, in particular Islamophobia, for almost thirty years.
[1] Discourses around whiteness centre a majoritarian narrative of supremacy. As such I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with using the term, even though it is a self-descriptor of many of the groups and phenomena I write about. What to use instead, is a work in progress.
[2] It is arguable as this excellent article by Godshaw & Singleton (2025) does, that both 2011 and 2024 saw a massive crackdown on those who rioted, there are still distinctions in how the state, media and even the courts express the causes of the riots. In 2011, those rioting were incited by structural injustices, in 2024, the targets were racialised communities and individuals whose lives before and until now are caught up in demonised narrative often associating them with criminality, against which those ‘protesting’ are raising legitimate grievance. We can further compare the court, police, media and state narratives with the policing of and crackdown against pro-Palestinian activism.
[3] Whilst Epping has areas of affluence and overall is not one of the more deprived areas of the UK, tracking things like relative and absolute child poverty reveal that it has not been immune to the impact of the cost of living crises. See this excel sheet of data [downloads from link] from the UK Parliament.
[4] According to The Times (24 July 2025):
“Three members of Homeland are sole administrators of Epping Says No, a Facebook group with more than 1,500 members. The group has been used to advertise and co-ordinate protests that have taken place outside the Bell Hotel in the Essex town over the past 11 days.
“Homeland was founded in 2023 after splintering from Patriotic Alternative, previously Britain’s dominant neo-Nazi organisation.”
[5] Critics have highlighted that Casey’s review of the Metropolitan Police was highly critical of the organisations, calling it inter alia ‘institutionally racist.’ However, it is worth noting that the accusation firstly was made in those terms by Lord McPherson in the McPherson Inquiry following the murder of Stephen Lawrence. This term was faced down by successive governments and their aligned think tanks. For it to suddenly become relevant falls in line with successive governments since circa 2011’s battles with the Metropolitan and attempts to curb its power – struggles which have little to do with whether or not it is a fit for purpose institution.
[6] You can find most of them on various of the projects indexed here.
