When the high court ruled this week that the Bell hotel in Epping could no longer be used to house asylum seekers, the triumph of anti-migrant zealots looked a little unwarranted, or at least premature. Nigel Farage hoped loudly that the ruling would provide “inspiration to others across the country”. Tabloids and GB News called it an all-caps VICTORY, while Epping locals popped champagne on the hotel’s doorstep.
Meanwhile, the ruling itself felt impermanent and technical more than principled. The judge ruled that Somani, the company that owns the Bell, had not notified the council of its intended use; it was hardly an endorsement of the general proposition, memorably spelled out by Robert Jenrick recently, that “men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally” pose an active threat to his daughters. And while the victory calls were resounding, there was no answering message of defeat from those who support asylum seekers – nobody thinks hotels are a sound and humane way to accommodate refugees. Liminal, often squalid, eye-wateringly expensive for the Home Office, they hardly scream “welcome”.
Yet the ruling has been seismic, and the victory cries of the right are logical. Within 24 hours, the Home Office’s plans on migration have been put into disarray. It is obliged to house asylum seekers while their claims are being heard, and at the end of March there were 30,000 people living in about 200 hotels. The plan had been to phase out hotels by 2029, a date that made no sense unless its real aim was to kick the whole issue into the next term. Now, the Bell has to be emptied by 12 September. As other local councils follow Epping’s lead, the government will be left scrambling to disperse people into local authority housing at very short notice, with a duty to keep track of them but no obvious way of doing so.
More than this, the ruling has solidified a sense of legitimate, citizen anger against refugees. Since the Southport riots, there has been a familiar ratchet: hard-right provocateurs generate real life protests, often from great distances, because when you’re organising on Telegram anyone can count as a “local resident”. Demonstrations and rioters themselves are often explicitly Islamophobic – when they don’t muster at an asylum hotel, they gather at a mosque – and are used as proof that this is the natural stance of the average Briton. Commentators parse these explosions as a mixture of hard-right agitating and authentic local feeling – unknowable what the ratio is, they agree sagely – and the anger, being dramatic and observable, grows in stature. It’s now impossible to have a debate about immigration without acknowledging this huge wellspring of fury, and it is simply not the done thing to ask whether the rage is justified. Anger, being authentic, never has to explain itself.
This court ruling is both illustrative of and instrumental in the solidity of fury as a political instrument. The judge granted the injunction after hearing the local council’s complaints that planning law had been breached in changing the site’s use. But underlying this, the council also cited disruption caused by recent protests. The hotel has been at the centre of controversy since an asylum seeker was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and concerns were raised about potential future threats. But the concerns can be self-fulfilling: if your accommodation is regularly surrounded by a small, hostile mob that sometimes wants to set fire to it, it’s probably quite difficult to slot into a normal, law-abiding life, or even know what a law-abiding life looks like, in this country you escaped to, having heard it was civilised.
Completely absent in this debate – which apparently we are all too frightened to have, yet we have constantly – is any sense of a better idea. If the problem with refugees is that they arrive illegally, would it help to have more legal routes? If the hotels are the issue, could we not work towards dispersal in the first instance, and much faster processing of claims? Is there no world in which we could engage imaginatively with the violence and upheaval that people are fleeing, and pull together to support them until they’re legally able to support themselves? That seems to be the reasonable expectation with Ukrainian refugees: if we can’t extend the same empathy to those from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Bangladesh, can anyone at least explain why? Would a refresher in the political context of those countries help? If the problem is the numbers, can anyone explain how many asylum seekers they would like instead? We currently rank fifth when compared to European nations in the absolute number of asylum claims received, and 17th when numbers are adjusted for population – should we be 20th?
Does anyone want to resile from the 1951 UN refugee convention? That would seem to be implicit in Reform UK’s promise to leave the European convention on human rights, but would any party or organisation that doesn’t want that care to explain how it is executing its duty towards refugees, and plans to do so in the future? The problem with anger as a political instrument – well, one of the problems, alongside the violence – is that it’s never called upon to be articulate or constructive. It would undermine its own strength if it were.
There was another element of the campaign that led to this ruling, which is subtle but important: the erasure of the category of refugee and asylum seeker. When you make the focus of your argument a hotel and its planning status, on the surface this is a battle over place. But if you take away the refuge someone is seeking, are they a refugee? If you take away the protection granted to them by the state, there is no asylum to claim. How, then, do we define these people? Without a political definition, do they exist? Even though the issue is very different, it’s not tactically dissimilar to the legal campaign waged against trans people, resulting in April’s ruling that everyone has to use the toilets and other facilities of their biological sex. It doesn’t say you have no right to live as trans; it’s just unfortunately impractical for you to do so unless you stay at home. Do you still exist, do you still have rights?
The problem with anger in politics is that combustion is the only way to expend the built-up energy. It’s much easier to keep things humane and civilised in the first place. But it’s too late to wish we had done that – an injection of humanity is the only way to cool things down.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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