Epping council votes to close controversial migrant hotel
With many perhaps deterred by the bad weather, about 200 protesters gathered at the Bell Hotel in Epping, far fewer than the previous Thursday when there were estimated to be 1,000 people and clashes took place between protesters and police.
They were met by a significant police presence that included dogs, territorial support units, which specialise in policing public order, and scores of officers who formed a human cordon around the hotel. Officers were also stationed all over the town and police vans snaked up the high street.
• Neo-Nazis leading Epping hotel protests call for nationwide action
The Bell has housed migrants since 2020, but protests were sparked after Hadush Kebatu, 38, an Ethiopian migrant and resident of the hotel, was charged with sexually assaulting a schoolgirl.
They soon decided to march along the main road to the Epping Forest district council building, all the while flanked by a cordon of police officers.
Inside the council building, a meeting was in session to vote on closing the Bell for housing asylum seekers.
Shane Yerrell, a Tory councillor, read out a statement from the father of the girl who was allegedly assaulted by Kebatu.
'I do not want or condone any of the violence that has taken place at the protests,' he said. 'That's not what we're about, and that's not what we're trying to achieve.
'It's only going to make things go the other way. I just want the hotel to be moved … away from making any other family feel how we're feeling right now.'
Outside, protesters milled around in the rain, occasionally raising chants of 'save our kids' or 'Starmer is a wanker'. There were scattered confrontations between individual protesters and police officers, including one man with a St George's flag draped over his shoulder, who took issue with an officer who asked him not to walk on the road.
Callum Barker, a member of Homeland, a far-right party that has been helping to organise the protests, made a speech over a megaphone in which he berated police for having 'caged us like animals'.
• Epping protest: Nigel Farage defends asylum hotel demonstrators
When news came through that the council had voted to close the hotel, protesters greeted it with a round of cheers shortly afterwards followed by Winston Churchill's 'We shall fight them on the beaches' speech that was played over a loudspeaker.
Earlier in the day Essex police had issued a dispersal order across Epping from 2pm on Thursday until 8am on Friday, giving officers the power to direct anyone suspected of committing antisocial behaviour, or planning to do so, to leave the area or face arrest.
The decision to deploy large policing numbers comes amid mounting fear that the protests may escalate and spread to other parts of the country as they did during the race riots of last summer.
• Nigel Farage denies whipping up trouble in Southport
Last Thursday, the demonstration descended into violence as protesters brawled with police and smashed up their vehicles. Smaller demonstrations have also taken place in Canary Wharf and Diss over the past week.
Chris Noble, the lead for protests at the NPCC, said all forces were ready and prepared after a detailed review of mistakes made during last summer's riots.
'We have robust and well-tested proactive plans in place, with the ability to mobilise significant and specialist resources, if necessary,' he said.
'Following last summer, we carried out a thorough review of national and regional processes, which has seen us take steps to further enhance our ability to respond in a timely and effective manner.'
Police arrested 16 people involved in protests outside the hotel last week on Thursday and Sunday. Eight officers were injured and a number of police vehicles were damaged as missiles were thrown, Essex police said.
Police released video showing the arrest of a man from Harlow in his living room on suspicion of violent disorder during one of the protests last week.
Speaking to The Times, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, warned violent thugs hijacking protests outside migrant hotels that she will 'always' ensure there is space in jail if they break the law before a series of demonstrations planned for this weekend.
She said there was 'nothing wrong' with those staging peaceful protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, such as the Bell Hotel in Epping. However, she said those who turn to violence during the protests will 'face the full force of the law'.
Located on the boundary between London and Essex, Epping is an affluent market town popular with commuters working in the capital, and is a 40-minute journey on the Central Line of the Tube.
On the high street are shops and cafés, such as Gail's Bakery and the chocolatier Thornton's, as well as two fine art galleries. Large mansions that sell for up to £10 million stand on the edge of town, complete with swimming pools and tennis courts. The average house price is about £620,000, according to the estate agent Elliott James. But there are also pockets of deprivation, and in 2020 parts of the town were rated as being within the top 10 per cent of the most unhealthy areas in the country.
Epping Forest, the constituency in which the town of 12,000 is situated, has returned a Conservative member of parliament at every election since 1974 when the constituency was created. Some 63 per cent of voters opted to leave the EU in 2016.
Immigration in the area has been below average. In 2021, 6.9 per cent of Epping Forest residents said they were not British, compared with 10 per cent across England, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The area has long attracted far-right activity, with the British National Party winning a series of council seats in the 2000s. In 2010 the party won 4.3 per cent of the vote at the general election, compared with 1.9 per cent nationally. After the BNP collapsed, several members switched to For Britain, an anti-Muslim party.
Julian Leppert, a former BNP councillor, won an Epping Forest district council seat for the party in 2019. When asked by a newspaper in 2020 whether he wanted a whites-only enclave in the area, he replied: 'Ideally, yeah.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
36 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Keir Starmer is rudderless in a sea of troubles
So ends Sir Keir Starmer's first parliamentary year; not with a bang but a whimper. As the PM drifts rudderless in a sea of troubles, those happy days of July 2024 must seem like some faraway dream. Days when all he had to do was say ' Tory chaos' to win a general election landslide, and when 'change' still sounded like a promise rather than a threat. When his grateful party hailed him as glorious victor and he looked forward to 'a new era of partnership' with his union comrades. The smuggling gangs would be smashed, growth turbocharged, violent crime halved, confidence in the justice system restored and NHS waiting lists slashed. His stated mission was national renewal. If he has learned anything in the past 12 months, it's that opposition and government are two very different things. We suspected all along there was less to Sir Keir than met the eye. But few predicted he would fall so far so quickly. Growth is flatlining, thanks largely to his Chancellor's £40billion Budget tax raid and crippling green levies on energy bills. Unemployment and inflation are rising and borrowing is at record levels. Is this what Rachel Reeves meant by 'fixing the foundations' of the economy? Her tears in the Commons earlier this month perfectly reflected the angst of Middle Britain, braced for yet more tax rises. Meanwhile, for all the empty rhetoric about tackling the people smugglers, illegal Channel crossings are more frequent than ever, and the public is increasingly angry about the consequences. In Epping, Canary Wharf and elsewhere citizens concerned about the influx of young male asylum seekers are taking to the streets in protest. It is no longer enough to pin this unrest on the 'far-Right'. These are ordinary people worried about their families and their communities, which are undergoing radical change without their consent. Police are gearing up for a summer of discontent, and they are right to do so. Then there is the bitter schism with the unions. Just days after coming to power, Ms Reeves signed off inflation-busting pay hikes for public sector workers, including a whopping 22 per cent rise for junior doctors. If she was expecting gratitude, she has been sorely disappointed. The junior (renamed 'resident') doctors are back on strike in pursuit of another ludicrous 29 per cent claim, while teachers and nurses are also expected to ballot on industrial action. Labour's biggest financial backer, Unite, is threatening to pull funding and has suspended the membership of Deputy PM Angela Rayner over her failure to back the Birmingham bin strikes But perhaps most worrying for Sir Keir is that his MPs are in open revolt. Having forced a U-turn on winter fuel payments and scuppered plans for welfare reform they are intoxicated with their new-found power. Most come from a background of Left-wing activism and favour tax, borrow and spend socialism over economic prudence. It is the economics of the madhouse from which we will all suffer. Add in the Chagos Islands surrender, two-tier justice, soaring crime rates, an Attorney General who appears to despise his country, giving 16-year-olds the vote, and rampant anti-Semitism and it's no wonder the public feel so thoroughly let down.
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Forget the White Van Man stereotype. The truth, finds ROBERT HARDMAN, is that the Epping hotel protests are being led by concerned mothers
Civil disorder – or civil war? It could almost be the film set for a suburban apocalypse drama. There are police vans tailing back down leafy lanes all around Epping. Platoons of coppers in full riot garb have been massing at the station, along the Georgian high street and out in the woods since mid-morning. Units have been bussed in from Hampshire, Staffordshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent, in addition to the Metropolitan Police. It's the sort of presence you might expect for a grudge match between Premier League arch-rivals or a full-fat Hamas solidarity parade through central London. Instead, these reinforcements have swamped Sir Rod Stewart 's pretty former home town in semi-rural Essex to help the local force keep an eye on 150 locals standing across the road from The Bell Hotel. What is immediately apparent is that many of the protesters are women and children. Indeed, this whole protest has been organised by women. Many – if not most – of the passing motorists who honk their horns in support are also women, including one who drives back and forth eagerly beep-beeping away in her claret Land Rover Discovery (you can forget the White Van Man stereotypes in this corner of Essex). What has galvanised these residents is a near-universal demand for the closure of The Bell as an accommodation centre for migrants following a recent attack on a 14-year-old schoolgirl. A hotel guest, a 38-year-old Ethiopian man, who had arrived in Britain eight days earlier, has been charged with three sexual assaults and denies them all. Suddenly the debate on small boat migration has become incendiary. Protests here a week ago turned violent when far-Left activists were escorted in by Essex Police to stage a counter-demo. That, in turn, brought out the usual suspects on the hard-Right and things soon turned ugly. By Thursday, though, there is no prospect of trouble because there are no dissenting voices. The rent-a-mob from Stand Up To Racism – a masked offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party – have not turned up. Nor have any hard-Right saboteurs allied to the toxic Tommy Robinson. It is raining, after all. That has not deterred the true believers who have a fervent desire to see The Bell – now fenced off and looking more like a disused military base – either bulldozed or transformed back into the local wedding venue of yesteryear. And I mean everyone. That not only applies to the drenched posse marching on the local council offices, chanting 'Save Our Kids' and 'Starmer Out', but the councillors gathered in the chamber – including Sir Keir Starmer's own man. Epping Forest council only has one Labour councillor, Martin Morris. Even he joins the Tories, Reform, the Lib Dems, the solitary Green and sundry Independents in a unanimous vote to demand the immediate closure of The Bell. In fact, they all demand a lot more than that in a thumping two-page motion which also calls for the closure of another hotel-turned-migrant centre up the road. All media eyes have been on The Bell of late, but the situation is not much better at The Phoenix Hotel. That mysteriously caught fire four months ago, although asylum seekers still occupy most of it. The man charged with arson has turned out to be a guest at The Phoenix who was then generously rehoused at, you guessed it, The Bell. The same man has been charged with trying to burn that down, too. There is a thunderous standing ovation in both the gallery and the council chamber after Tory councillor Shane Yerrell reads out a message from the father of the girl subjected to the recent assault. 'I do not want or condone any of the violence that has taken place at the protest,' says the message from the unnamed dad. 'I just want the hotel to be moved, not only away from our streets, but away from making any other family feel how we're feeling right now. 'It's not fair that the Government is putting our children and grandchildren at risk. I didn't think my little girl's story would be as big as it was.' His daughter, he adds, has been greatly comforted by messages of support and a JustGiving page which has raised £3,000 for counselling. 'Eventually we will get her confidence back to the point where she is able to go out without feeling scared.' The father, it transpires, is actually in the gallery. We have now, very clearly, got beyond the point where the Government can trot out the usual mantra 'It's all the Tories' fault and we've got this migration thing under control ' and expect things to blow over. The default position of the legal establishment, the police and most of us in the media – namely that the main problem is dark online forces stirring up xenophobia – is manifestly no longer tenable. Having spent the previous week in northern France watching the people smugglers, I have spent this week looking at the other end of the equation. I have seen the protests popping up in Epping and Canary Wharf, east London (where a huge hotel has just been commandeered by the Home Office). And there are two very striking trends to this new wave of popular protest. The first is that the protagonists are being open about it. They tell me their names and stories. There is no sense of shame or fear of being branded a 'racist' any more. The second is that this is very much a unisex campaign, if not an overtly female one. One of the main architects of the peaceful protests in Epping is Orla Minihane, a mother of three teenagers and now a vocal council candidate for the Reform Party. 'I think women are naturally more tolerant – we have got to put up with men after all – but when you start to threaten our children, then we snap,' says Mrs Minihane, who is marching through the rain waving not the Cross of St George, like some of the men, but the green, white and purple flag of the Suffragette movement. She's lived in Epping since childhood, has worked for a City bank for 25 years and is married to Scott who owns a building business ('and can't stand this political stuff'). Mrs Minihane says she was appalled by last week's violence in the town and blames Essex Police for facilitating a Left-wing counter-demo which, she says, triggered all the aggro. It has prompted Reform leader Nigel Farage to call for the resignation of the chief constable. 'There was only trouble when the police caused it,' he says. For the Tories, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp says that Essex Police 'lamentably failed to keep the protesters apart'. Mrs Minihane says: 'The day after that trouble I went on our Facebook group – there's about 700 of us – and said we are never going to win if we have more protests like that. We need to change the narrative. So we ordered a batch of T-shirts saying 'We Are The Children's Voice'. And we are going to show that this problem is much worse than people think it is.' She talks of repeated incidents of women being pestered while jogging or walking their dogs and recounts the story of a friend, a mother of four girls. Her 15-year-old, she said, was chased on the local common by a man who, she says, was living at The Bell. 'She told the police, who did nothing at first,' says Mrs Minihane. 'When she went back again, they told her to be careful. They said: 'Remember what happened to those protesters after Southport.' But we're not putting up with that any more.' I later verify the story with the girl's mother. Mr Farage explains that what Mrs Minihane is doing in Epping reflects a broader trend. 'The boats issue is increasingly becoming a female issue. Mums for Reform, call it what you will, is a real thing,' he says, pointing to this month's Tory-to-Reform defections of Laura Anne Jones, a member of the Welsh Senedd, and Westminster city councillor, Laila Cunningham, along with a marked shift in the party's membership. Having been 58 per cent male and 42 per cent female at the last election, he says, it is now 50:50. It's hard to see what more the Tory-run council can do. All are as one when it comes to the failings of the Home Office, which commandeered the hotel without consulting the locals first. 'We are speaking to the Home Office on a regular basis. I have to say to you, at the present time, they have not been overly co-operative,' council leader Chris Whitbread tells the meeting. Holly Whitbread, his fellow Tory councillor (and daughter), is more forthright: 'It is my firm belief that the Government is now treating our community with contempt. Contempt for local democracy, contempt for public safety, contempt for our town which deserves better than this.' The hotel has been the trigger for plenty of other complaints, too. Hairdresser Barry Seago tells me that today alone he has had five cancellations from customers worried about trouble in the town. Locals point to the trouble they have in finding an NHS dentist – hence their fury when they saw a mobile dental unit turn up at The Bell. This week has also seen protests an hour away at Canary Wharf, where the Home Office has taken over the vast Britannia International Hotel, which has 531 bedrooms, as a new accommodation centre. I remember the days when my old newspaper used to hold (rather dreary) office parties there. It might be more Alan Partridge than The Ritz but it's not cheap. As Whitehall maintains its customary reluctance to discuss these things, rumours are rampant that migrants will be housed three to a room, suggesting a new population of 1,500 predominantly young, undocumented adult men with nothing to do. Here, I meet a small group of protesters in the rain, all native East Enders who live around here. Once again, they are happy to be identified. 'You've got working people round here using food banks – my Mum runs one – and then people are being put up here on three square meals a day and we don't know anything about who they are,' says Ben Cavanagh, 45, a scaffolder and father of three. Fellow scaffolder Matthew John-Lewis, 44, says tensions have gone off the scale. 'I'm busting my arse off to pay taxes for all this. I can barely afford the rent on a two-bedroom flat and this lot get given everything,' argues the father of four children. He adds that he does not want his children to be targeted by gangs of bored young men who 'don't understand' British culture. 'And don't anyone dare call us racist. My family were immigrants and I'm three-quarters black,' he says. The hefty police presence here and the even bigger one in Epping are an acknowledgement that we are at a very ugly tipping point. With another Stand Up To Racism protest against the residents of Epping – or 'organised Nazis' as they call them – planned for Sunday, further outbreaks of violence are no longer a question of if – but when.
Sky News
8 hours ago
- Sky News
Home Office threaten asylum seekers with homelessness if they refuse hotel move
Asylum seekers risk becoming homeless if they refuse accommodation under plans to end the use of expensive hotels. Announcing the policy on Friday, the Home Office said some migrants were "gaming the system" by resisting efforts to move them into alternative housing without a valid reason. Politics Live: Macron lays out plan for France to recognise a Palestinian state. The new Failure to Travel policy means housing support will be removed from those who block transfer requests. The Home Office said this will "ensure individuals who are moved from hotels to suitable alternative accommodation must take it". They added: "Those who refuse to move without a valid reason will now risk losing their housing and support. It is a firm but fair approach, aimed to end abuse of asylum support and contribute towards the closure of costly hotel accommodation. "While the government has a duty to support all asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute in appropriate accommodation, the new policy establishes clear consequences for those who game the system whilst protecting the vulnerable." There would be several steps before stripping someone of accommodation - with it being a last resort, Sky News understands. It follows a week of unrest outside a hotel in Epping used to house asylum seekers. Several demonstrations have been held outside the Bell Hotel since 13 July, after an asylum seeker was charged with allegedly attempting to kiss a 14-year-old girl. Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, 38, from Ethiopia, denied sexually assaulting the 14-year-old girl at Chelmsford Magistrates' Court last week and will stand trial in August. On Thursday Epping council unanimously voted to urge the government to shut the site. Ministers are under pressure to restore order amid fears of further unrest, like that seen in Southport last summer. Labour has pledged to end the use of asylum hotels by the end of this parliament, a move chancellor Rachel Reeves has claimed will save £1bn a year. However there is a question mark as to how this will be achieved as Channel Crossings continue to rise. Nearly 20,000 migrants made the journey to the UK in the first six months of this year, a rise of almost 50% on the number crossing in 2024 and a new record for the first half of a year. Ministers say they inherited a "broken system", with 400 hotels being used to accommodate asylum seekers at the peak of the crisis under the Tories, costing £9 million per day. Minister for Border Security and Asylum, Dame Angela Eagle, said: "We inherited an asylum system on the brink of collapse - mismanaged, under strain, and costing the public a fortune. We are getting a grip. "We are working to close hotels, restore order, and put fairness and value for money at the heart of our asylum system. This government is making those necessary decisions to protect the taxpayer and uphold the integrity of our borders.
