Two years ago, 14-year-old Courtney was walking home along the Southsea promenade when she started being followed. Her pursuer, she claims at a protest outside the Royal Beach Hotel on a balmy mid-August evening, was someone she had come to associate with its residents. Clad in scaffolding and bed-sheeted windows, the property looms over Courtney and her mum Sarah, its dirty white facade gazing indifferently across the Solent towards the Isle of Wight.<\/p>\n
Southsea is where England peters out into a languid seaside boredom. A place once built for convalescing naval officers and Victorian holidaymakers is now home to a churn characteristic of provincial England in the 2020s: pensioners, bored teenagers, the unemployed, and the largely male migrants who have arrived, both legally and illegally, since 2022.<\/p>\n
In July, a man staying at the Royal Beach Hotel was charged with attempted rape and voyeurism in the Portsmouth town centre. Since then, a weekly protest has become a regular Friday night fixture. Yet whether or not Courtney\u2019s pursuer really was staying in the hotel is ultimately beside the point, mum and daughter both insist. In fact, the protests weren\u2019t just about the attempted rape, or Courtney\u2019s stalker, or even the resented owner who had \u201csold his soul\u201d in a deal with Serco and the Home Office to cash in on Britain\u2019s small boats crisis.<\/p>\n
Instead, the protest was about the direction of the town itself. Since the hotel had converted in 2022 to house asylum seekers, something very strange has been happening across Portsmouth. In fact, something very strange has been happening across England.<\/p>\n
At the start of the summer, Westminster feared a repeat of last year\u2019s violence, as the small boats kept coming and Keir Starmer seemed helpless in their wake. What has happened instead is one of the odder turns in the country\u2019s decade-long populist experiment. As the days got warmer, anti-migrant protests involving tens of thousands, at over 70 sites, formalised grassroots and localised opposition into a national movement that, in the words of one Labour MP<\/a>, transformed Britain\u2019s asylum system into \u201cmoral and political matter\u201d.<\/p>\n The sense of forever protest has been further been normalised by \u201cflagging\u201d, the unofficial regalia of Britain\u2019s rising provincial malaise. This has since manifested itself in other ways, from vigilante patrols in parks to community litter picking. To quote the \u201cWeoley Warriors\u201d, the group that kickstarted the flagging trend in Birmingham, the idea is \u201cto show\u2026 local communities that all isn\u2019t lost and they are not alone\u201d. It\u2019s a sentimentality so amorphous that it could be courted by everyone from the Prime Minister to social media influencer Tom Skinner.<\/p>\n Britain\u2019s political establishment, unable to assert any sense of control or direction in this emerging new England, has reacted with a mixture of opportunity and panic. In Epping, for instance, the council leant on the Town and Country Planning Act to close the now-infamous Bell Hotel. That could yet embroil the Home Office in legal disputes with dozens of other councils, notwithstanding yesterday\u2019s judgement that, for the moment, the Epping migrants can stay.<\/p>\n With the Government\u2019s policy now to move Britain\u2019s tens of thousands of small boat migrants into private accommodation the only viable alternative \u2014 and one which has inspired this summer\u2019s most successful protest in Waterlooville \u2014 a once-unthinkable precedent for localised extra-parliamentary action has therefore been established. \u201cThese protests are not interested in conventional party politics,\u201d says 43-year-old Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots, the protestors\u2019 unofficial comp\u00e8re and looking rather like a teacher who\u2019s lost control of a rowdy school trip. \u201cIt\u2019s gathering momentum on its own. It\u2019s doing it all by itself.\u201d<\/p>\n