A broad section of Britain’s right has spent the summer behaving as if it would like a repeat of last year’s racist riots. As politicians and commentators cry “tinderbox Britain” – are they warning us, or willing it on? – far-right extremists have been actively trying to stoke violence. This year, they have pinned their hopes on asylum hotels, an issue where public fears over crime, immigration and the welfare state conveniently converge.
In some places, far-right activists have piggybacked on protests prompted by local grievances. The most significant this year was in Epping, Essex, after an alleged sexual assault by an asylum seeker led to demonstrations that turned violent when they were joined by members of various far-right groups. A similar pattern has unfolded in London’s Canary Wharf, after untrue rumours that some of the Epping hotel residents were being moved there. In other cases, far-right activists have themselves organised the protests. A call has gone out among their online networks for gatherings this weekend in several parts of England.
It is unlikely – though not impossible – that the end result will be on the scale of the riots we saw last summer, since that was triggered by a shocking act of murder followed by widespread misinformation and conspiracy theories about the identity of the killer. But anti-fascist campaigners I’ve spoken to believe it may cause lower-level disturbances like those seen in Epping and in Knowsley, Merseyside, in 2023, and it will certainly help ensure that asylum hotels remain a contentious topic for many months to come.
One question, however, often goes unanswered: why are asylum seekers being accommodated in hotels in the first place? Before 2020, the phenomenon hardly existed, yet by its peak in 2023 there were more than 55,000 people in hotels, waiting many months to have their asylum claims processed. (Today the number has dropped to about 30,000.)
For some, the answer will be: “because there are too many people seeking asylum in the UK and we don’t have the resources to support them”. This is misleading. Although Britain has seen higher numbers of asylum applications in recent years, according to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory they are not exceptional when compared with those of other European countries. Yet the UK relies on costly hotel accommodation far more heavily than any of its neighbours.
A series of actions by both Labour and Conservative governments since the turn of the century has brought us to this point. The first was the decision by Tony Blair’s government to make people seeking asylum heavily reliant on state support. Until mid-2002, asylum seekers could take up jobs if they had to wait more than six months for an initial decision on their asylum claim. Much of the press disliked this, saying it allowed asylum seekers to take other people’s jobs. So the government in effect banned them from working. (In many other European countries, people seeking asylum are still allowed to work after a waiting period.)
If a government bans people from working then it needs to provide them with essential support, unless it is happy for them to starve to death on the streets. At first, accommodation was largely provided by local councils’ housing departments. But politicians took a second decision, which was to privatise the accommodation. This began in the late 2000s, but the really important step was taken by David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s coalition government.
In 2012, as part of the coalition’s wider austerity drive, asylum accommodation was outsourced to the same profit-driven contractors that now run many of our public services. The contractors often failed to provide decent housing or value for money and the government had to rewrite the contracts. Even then, problems persisted: by the end of the decade, it was becoming increasingly common to house asylum seekers in “contingency accommodation” such as short-term lets and hotels.
The third decision, taken by the governments of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, was to sabotage the asylum system itself. During the first Covid lockdown in 2020, people seeking asylum were placed in hotels – which, at the time, were largely empty anyway – for public health reasons. This coincided with a rise in the number of people crossing the Channel by small boat, as opposed to stowing away in lorries as they had largely done previously. (Many people who choose such routes do so because they do not have the option of a safe resettlement scheme, such as the one the UK has offered to Ukrainian refugees.)
The Conservative government encouraged hostility towards small boat journeys, describing them as an “invasion”. Instead of moving asylum seekers out of hotels and into more suitable accommodation when the pandemic subsided, it kept them there while it built prison-like encampments as an alternative. (These schemes mostly never got off the ground.) At the same time, it allowed a backlog of asylum applications to grow – and then tried to ban many asylum seekers from claiming asylum at all, saying it would instead deport them permanently to Rwanda. (That scheme never got off the ground either.)
All the above has led to more asylum seekers living in more hotels for longer, in more parts of the country. At its root, it is a story of public penny-pinching and market forces causing a problem that is then made worse by politicians promising a quick fix or finding a convenient scapegoat. If that sounds familiar then perhaps it’s because it’s a story we also find in our hospitals, schools and wider communities.
This could be an occasion to ask what has gone wrong with the state more generally, and to talk about what could be done to make it work better for everyone. Keir Starmer’s government has promised to end the use of hotels by 2029, by investing in the asylum system and reducing small boat journeys. But if it is unwilling to have that wider conversation, then the right is ready with its own seductive, destructive answers.
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