What we are seeing outside Britain’s migrant hotels is not spontaneous protest. It is not the eruption of “understandable community concern.” This is a theatre of rage, rehearsed and incited, with the far right in the pit orchestra and the right-wing press writing the script. Epping, Diss, Canary Wharf, these are not isolated flashpoints. They are staging grounds for a new political consensus: where violence is rebranded as patriotism, and the presence of asylum seekers becomes a provocation in itself.
The right calls it “the people fighting back.” But who told them to be angry? Who amplified the lies? Who handed them the matches?
Dog Whistles and Feedback Loops
You can trace the arc of escalation in the media coverage like a metronome ticking towards conflict. First come the innuendos, the“taxpayer-funded luxury,” “unvetted single men,” “public safety fears.” Then the “legitimate concerns.” Then the soft-laundering of open fascism as “community defence.” Tommy Robinson takes a stroll through Essex and the Express starts publishing riot forecasts like a weather report.
What does it mean when the police are criticised not for letting racists run riot, but for walking alongside anti-racists with placards? When trade unionists and campaigners are described as “agitators” while those waving “Bring Back Hanging” banners are cast as normal residents? It means the terrain of legitimacy is shifting, and the media is helping to bulldoze the old lines.
The Mail screams about Aspen cards used in betting shops 6,000 instances out of tens of thousands of users. A moral panic whipped from one ambiguous data set and zero context. The Times identifies Homeland, a neo-Nazi organisation, as central to these protests. But the political class barely blinks. Because what is useful to power doesn not need to be respectable.
Law, Order, and the Logic of Fascism
Let’s be clear. This is not about hotels. It is not about gambling. It is about using the poor and displaced as scapegoats, so the real authors of misery go unchallenged. The far right doesn’t need to take power to shape the agenda, they just need to make centrist politicians feel scared enough to concede the terrain. And that is exactly what’s happening.
The Labour front bench tiptoes around the protests, parroting phrases about “social cohesion,” nodding to “real concerns.” Reform UK shouts about “two-tier justice.” Tory MPs fume that Canary Wharf should be for financiers, not refugees. Farage bellows “heads must roll.” But who gets hurt? Who gets arrested? Who gets smeared?
This is a test of which protests get defended and which get suppressed. Of whose anger is seen as authentic and whose is criminalised. And the answer, again and again, is: the far right’s fury is real; anti-racist defence is provocation.
Crisis as Opportunity
The right understands something the left too often forgets: chaos is productive. It moves the centre of gravity. It makes people nostalgic for order, even if that order is brutal and unjust. Every hotel protest, every media panic, every Farage soundbite serves the same purpose. To break the public’s ability to distinguish between the cause of the crisis and its manufactured consequences.
And the Labour government (spineless, technocratic, paralysed) offers no resistance. Angela Rayner warns of riots, as if naming the danger is enough to dispel it. Starmer mouths platitudes while Labour mayors scramble to clean up the mess. In the vacuum, fascism doesn’t need jackboots. It just needs a flag, a headline, and a lie repeated enough times that even the police start believing it.
This Is the Strategy: Escalation and Impunity
Neo-Nazis organise online. Reform MPs amplify their talking points. The Mail and the Express write the headlines. And when the violence comes (as it has) they blame the counter-protesters, the police, the migrants themselves.
This is not a backlash. This is strategy, and it is working.
Hold the Line
If you believe in a multi-ethnic, democratic society, now is not the time to retreat. The right wants a summer of riots, not to “protect communities,” but to radicalise them. To harden the sense that Britain belongs only to the angry and the white. To make fascism feel normal and opposition feel dangerous.
We should not oblige them. But we also should not delude ourselves. This will get worse before it gets better. Unless the left finds its courage, and fast.
