‘It’s got nothing to do with racism. My daughter is black. She’s half-Ghanian,’ says one Isle of Dogs resident, watching the stand-off outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf. She’s come with a friend who’s worried for her young child. ‘I’ve got a seven-year-old and I don’t want her to play downstairs. You’re scared for them, really scared.’
‘My grandad fought for this country and then you’ve got people like that – Daddy’s money,’ one man says, gesturing towards the counter protestors
Since Lutfur Rahman’s Tower Hamlets council announced that the hotel would be used to house asylum seekers, protesters gather daily. Steel fencing has been erected to guard the entrance. Police officers line up on the edge of the pavement. Protesters attend regularly. They wear British flags, Nike Tech tracksuits, with many in face masks and balaclavas to hide their identities. Some protestors are very glamorous, knowing they might be on TV. Others are in sliders.
On Friday, counter-protesters affiliated with Stand Up to Racism arrive. They line up on the other side of the road, holding yellow and pink placards, shipped in by the organisers. Many are young women. Some have colourful hair and septum piercings, others wear Birkenstocks and keffiyehs. Even local resident Gary Stevenson, trader turned left-wing YouTuber, turns up to gawk at the protesters. I ask him what he thinks of the protest, he says I’ll have to speak to his agent. The police presence is heavy.
Class, not race, is the driving force of division here. Working-class rage is boiling up in the UK. Canary Wharf is in the borough of Tower Hamlets, which has the highest rate of child poverty in the UK. The overall poverty rate is nearly double the average for London. Research shows that social cohesion breaks down in deprived areas. Here, it’s not just breaking down; it’s shattering. The protesters aren’t angry about ethnicity, but economics.
Locals resent the government funding full-board accommodation for asylum seekers while they struggle. As an asylum seeker in Britain, the government covers your basic needs: accommodation, financial support that can add up to nearly £50 a week, healthcare and education. Councils such as Wandsworth have even launched a scheme where asylum seekers can get a 50 per cent discount on Lime and Forest bikes. To add insult to injury, the protestors hear a prime minister repeatedly telling them that things will get worse before they get better. One cleaner who spoke to the Sun said staff at the hotel had been given redundancy letters when it became asylum accommodation. ‘There’s people here that work hard, day in and day out,’ one woman outside the hotel tells me: ‘They can’t afford a place like this. Why are they [asylum seekers] getting it?’
Opportunities for the protester’s children are bleak. The Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has admitted that white working-class children are being ‘written off’ by society, calling it a ‘national disgrace.’ Nationally, fewer than half of all pupils on free school meals achieve a pass in English or Maths GCSE – compared with 68 per cent of their better-off peers. Among them, white children are among the lowest achieving groups in the country: not even 20 per cent reach that benchmark, and they are the least likely of any major ethnic group to go to university. White kids have it worst of all – thanks to successive governments prioritising skin colour over deprivation. A problem rooted in class has become exacerbated by race.
It’s no wonder then that tensions have flared up across the country. Protests have occurred in Epping outside the Bell Hotel, where Hadush Kebatu was staying along with 140 other men. He has appeared in court after allegedly trying to kiss a 14-year-old girl and a woman in the town (he denies the allegations). Pollsters at More in Common found that core to the Epping residents’ opposition was a sense that the views of local people have been overlooked. The majority of the public oppose the asylum hotel policy, their polling found, and locals are angry the government can’t stop the small boat crossings. Other polling finds that social cohesion is breaking down in the most deprived areas, just like in Canary Wharf.
The resentment among work-class protesters towards the counter-demonstrators, the main political parties and the country’s senior politicians is on display. ‘My grandad fought for this country and then you’ve got people like that – Daddy’s money,’ one man says, gesturing towards the counter protestors.
Research from Public First finds that a third of working-class voters hold an unfavourable view of the Conservatives and Labour, compared with just a quarter of professional-class voters. Nearly half say Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t represent them ‘at all’, versus 35 per cent of professionals. Successive governments, they feel, have prioritised race over class, leaving poor people economically squeezed and politically ignored. The left fear racialising the issue of class, and the right’s promise of ‘Levelling Up’ has given way to the politics of triage. The people at the bottom of the list are now making themselves heard.
Ministers plan to empty the hotels through ‘Operation Scatter’, moving asylum seekers into houses of multiple occupancy (HMOs) across the country. The strain will fall first, and hardest, on poorer communities. The protesters argue it is their neighbourhoods that bear the brunt, while the effects of immigration are never properly addressed by politicians. One told me, ‘these people haven’t even lived their lives. They’ve had money from their mums and dads – they don’t know what immigration is.’
At the Britannia protests, there’s a rare political unity: the shared hatred of Keir Starmer. He’s variously called a ‘traitor’ and an ‘enemy’ who will cause civil war. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gets cautious approval from the protesters – though one notes: ‘He doesn’t have a magic wand. He’s not going to wave it and return the UK to its former glory that we all fell in love with.’
At about 9 p.m., both sides begin to head home. Tomorrow, the original protesters will be back. One woman tells me she’s been attending every single day since they began. She won’t leave until the council shuts the hotel asylum scheme down.