This article, like much of the Telegraph’s recent coverage, reads less like journalism and more like stenography for Farage’s far-right playbook. Its entire frame is skewed, treating anti-migrant protesters as aggrieved locals and counter-protesters as provocateurs, despite the former chanting “send them home” and dressing in St George bucket hats. We are meant to be outraged not by rising hate, but by the police doing their job: protecting people from it.
One Law for Them?
Let’s be clear: escorting anti-racists to a protest site is only controversial if you have already decided which side deserves legitimacy. The language throughout is telling. Locals are “concerned for the safety of women and girls,” as if racism now comes cloaked in feminist concern-trolling. Counter-protesters are “masked,” their signs met with disapproval, their chants seen as a provocation. Yet when far right protesters break police van windows, shout racist abuse, or attempt to storm a site, they are just “angry locals.” This is the quiet normalisation of the far right: presenting the violent as justifiably upset and the peaceful as subversive.
“Mass migration is threatening community cohesion,” Angela Rayner says, parroting a line you’d expect from Reform UK. But where is the mention of the years of underinvestment, deliberate housing shortages, and deliberate scapegoating by the political class?
Manufactured Outrage
The whole piece centres on a faux outrage: that Essex Police facilitated the right to assembly for anti-fascists. That’s not a scandal. That is their job. It’s only a problem if you believe protest rights belong exclusively to the angry mob, not those standing against it.
Where was the Telegraph’s concern when far-right agitators turned up at migrant housing with petrol bombs and threats? Where was the moral panic when white men surrounded hotels, shouting abuse at frightened women and children inside? It’s only now, when their narrative of ‘unopposed dissent’ is challenged, that they cry foul.
The Far Right Gets a Free Run
The truth is simple: the far right feels emboldened, not suppressed. These coordinated protests from Epping to Norfolk to Canary Wharf aren’t spontaneous, they are fuelled by years of media demonisation, from the Telegraph to GB News. The police might occasionally escort a handful of anti-fascists to safety, but it’s the far right that gets the headlines, the numbers, the dog whistles from MPs, and the sympathetic framing in articles like this.
When was the last time you saw a national newspaper run front-page outrage because the police protected anti-fascists?
This isn’t journalism, never has been, it’s alignment. It’s choosing a side. We all know which one the Telegraph has picked.
