Planning law in place of politics
The High Court injunction in Epping was not, despite the Telegraph’s headlines, a judgment about crime, safety or “protecting women.” As Sean O’Grady noted in the Independent, the court granted the council’s application “on planning grounds. Nothing much to do with human rights, community safety, crime levels, public concerns, Reform UK or various politicians, propagandists, troublemakers and digital activists … jumping on the cause.” In other words, it was zoning law. A hotel had been turned into a hostel without permission.
That technicality has now become a precedent. Labour councils in Wirral and Tamworth rush to copy it, promising to “defend communities” by citing planning regulations. Tory-run Hillingdon is reviewing the ruling for the same reason. What was once a far-right slogan “get them out” has been laundered into a planning dispute. Judges and councillors alike can claim neutrality. But the outcome is the same: people moved on, dispersed, expelled. Planning law becomes the border in miniature.
We’ve seen this logic before. During the miners’ strike, health and safety regulations were wielded against the pickets. The National Coal Board declared that mass gatherings outside the pits posed a “safety hazard,” justifying police dispersals and injunctions. Convoys of lorries driven through picket lines were framed not as strike-breaking but as “ensuring road safety.” Rules meant to protect miners underground were twisted into weapons to criminalise them above ground. The language of regulation gave cover for repression.
Now, asylum is smothered beneath the neutral paperwork of “material change of use.” The politics disappears behind zoning law, just as solidarity was buried under “safety.” Racism, like class struggle before it, is policed in the name of regulation.
The jealous politics of scarcity
Michael Deacon in the Telegraph spelled out the mood in Epping: protesters are not reassured by promises to move asylum seekers to other hotels, or worse, to HMOs. They believe their own lives are being made worse while migrants are handed “free accommodation (and much else besides).” In Portsmouth, as he gleefully reported, the Home Office had “sneaked” migrants into shared houses without telling the council. The outrage is not simply fear of strangers but a jealous anger: why should “they” get a room when locals can’t afford one?
The Times and Mail sharpened that jealousy into caricature. The Mail dredged up photographs of MacBooks, Louis Vuitton wallets and Voss water bottles from one asylum seeker’s hotel room, as if luxury shopping bags were proof of systemic fraud. The message is simple: you have nothing, they have something, and that something has been stolen from you.
Yet the scarcity is manufactured. As Daniel Trilling wrote in the Guardian, it was government policy (the banning asylum seekers from working, outsourcing accommodation to profiteering contractors, and sabotaging the asylum process) that left tens of thousands stuck in hotels. The “asylum hotel crisis” is not an accident of migration but the direct result of austerity and privatisation. Still, Labour councils repeat the jealous refrain: “we are protecting communities.” In practice, they are protecting a politics in which scarcity is weaponised against the refugee rather than against those who created it.
The erasure of the refugee
Zoe Williams put it starkly in the Guardian: by reducing the Bell Hotel ruling to a question of planning status, “if you take away the refuge someone is seeking, are they a refugee? If you take away the protection granted to them by the state, there is no asylum to claim. How, then, do we define these people?” The refugee disappears into a technicality. The protest is against a hotel, the council’s case is about zoning, the judgment is about planning permission. What vanishes in this bureaucratic shell game is the human being who sought safety.
This erasure is not incidental, it is structural. Trilling traced how asylum hotels became normal: Tony Blair’s government stripped asylum seekers of the right to work, the coalition outsourced housing to private contractors, and the Conservatives allowed the backlog to balloon while stoking panic about small boats. By the time Labour took office, asylum seekers were no longer political subjects but logistical burdens, reduced to lines in a housing spreadsheet. The Bell Hotel ruling only codifies what was already happening: the refugee is erased and replaced by a “planning violation,” an “unsuitable arrangement,” a “community disruption.”
The comparison with the legal erasure of trans people is not rhetorical flourish. Williams notes how April’s ruling (forcing people to use facilities aligned with “biological sex”) doesn’t say trans people cannot exist, only that their existence is impractical unless confined to the private sphere. The same logic applies here: asylum is not outlawed, merely rendered impossible. Refugees are not denied in principle, only in practice. They are given nowhere to go.
Labour’s complicity and the far-right theatre
Labour’s line is managerial drift dressed as compassion. Yvette Cooper insists hotels will be closed by 2029, as if the promise of an orderly wind-down five years from now were a political answer rather than a bureaucrat’s memo. Dan Jarvis admits the migrants in Epping may simply be moved to another hotel, or into HMOs, but cannot say where. It is displacement as policy: keep the bodies moving, never resolve the question.
Local Labour councils play their part. In Wirral, Paula Basnett says the authority “will not hesitate” to challenge the Home Office, citing community wishes and planning rules. In Tamworth, Carol Dean pledges to “listen to strong feelings” while waiting to see if the Epping ruling can be replicated. These statements do not resist the far-right frame, they inhabit it. The councils posture as defenders of their constituents against an imposition from outside, adopting the very language the far right has spent months rehearsing on GB News and TalkTV.
The right has seized on this vacuum. Richard Tice lauded Epping as “a victory for lawful, peaceful protest” and called for residents to replicate it across the country. Nigel Farage wrote in the Telegraph that “the good people of Epping must inspire similar protests around Britain.” Both know the protests are not really “local”: neo-Nazis and Homeland activists have been bussed in, their presence later scrubbed from coverage or reframed as “authentic community anger.” Andrew Grice, writing in the Independent, warned that “the Conservatives and Reform UK are making mischief, encouraging other local authorities to take legal action,” feeding the far right while feigning respectability.
What is being staged here is a travelling show: a hotel besieged, an injunction won, a new site identified, protests starting again. The migrant body is made endlessly visible, not to resolve any problem but to sustain it. “Victory” in Epping meant nothing more than moving 138 people somewhere else. The point is the theatre, not the outcome. Labour, with its 2029 pledge and its council leaders citing “community wishes,” has become a stagehand in the performance.
The Three Fingers of Fascism
Look at the photographs. Among the Union Jacks and “concerned residents,” another signal keeps appearing: three fingers raised, palm out, snapped for the camera alongside Reform councillors. It looks harmless until you know its lineage. Across Europe, neo-Nazi groups have used the gesture as a surrogate Hitler salute, a way to signal allegiance while dodging prosecution. The three fingers stand for the “third position” the fascist fantasy of a path beyond both capitalism and communism, rebellion repackaged as reaction.
Now it shows up in Epping and Kent, where councillors pose with men draped in flags bearing neo-Nazi symbols while others around them throw up the salute. This isn’t “local anger” or Hunger Games cosplay. It is the laundering of fascist iconography into mainstream English politics, the point where the mob and the council chamber shake hands.
Robert Jenrick, the provincial Mussolini
Robert Jenrick, the Tory’s would-be statesman, could not resist the chance to clamber onto the stage. “What a result for the people of Epping,” he crowed on X. “What now? More peaceful protests. More injunctions. If any council wants legal help, get in touch. Starmer will only respond to pressure.”
What a result for the people of Epping.
— Robert Jenrick (@RobertJenrick) August 20, 2025
What now?
More peaceful protests. More injunctions. If any council wants legal help, get in touch.
Starmer will only respond to pressure. pic.twitter.com/7PEAQBtiiO
This is the pose of a provincial Mussolini: the man who once smoothed planning permission for Tory donors now recasts himself as defender of local planning law, marshalling the mob and the courts in tandem. He peddles legality as cover, protest as pressure, promising councils his services as consigliere in the campaign to drive out refugees.
Jenrick knows exactly who turns up to these demonstrations — C18 veterans, Homeland cadres, opportunistic thugs. His call for “peaceful protest” is a wink and a nod: the street provides the menace, the injunctions provide the respectability. It is the merger of law and disorder, with Jenrick posing as the respectable face of both.
A provincial Mussolini is still Mussolini: all pomp and authority on the balcony, but in practice just another opportunist, feeding off resentment and fear while offering nothing but division.
What must be said
The Epping ruling is already being described as a precedent. But the real precedent was set long ago: austerity governments manufacture scarcity, then invite the public to police it. Planning law now functions as a quiet border regime, councils as auxiliary Home Offices. What the far right chants on the pavement “send them home” it is laundered into the neutral paperwork of “material change of use.” The refugee ceases to exist as a political subject and reappears as a breach of planning control.
This is not the chaos of immigration but the order of neoliberalism. Scarcity is the organising principle, jealousy its political affect, and erasure its result. Councils claim they are “protecting communities.” Ministers promise hotels will close by 2029. Newspapers parade MacBooks and luxury shopping bags as evidence of fraud. All the while, Britain’s asylum seekers are made to vanish into spreadsheets, injunctions, and the logistics of dispersal.
The danger is not only that Farage and Reform UK exploit this spectacle. Of course they will. The danger is that Labour has already agreed to perform in it. By accepting the jealous politics of scarcity and adopting the legalistic language of planning enforcement, it collaborates in the very spectacle that empowers the far right. The refugee is not defended, only managed.
There is only one position worth taking. Asylum is not a planning dispute. Refuge is not a breach of zoning. Migrants are not props in a theatre of displacement. They are human beings fleeing war, persecution, poverty, conditions Britain’s own policies have often helped produce. To defend them is not to ignore “community concerns” but to name them properly: poverty, housing collapse, a state run deliberately into dysfunction. The answer to scarcity is not to erase the refugee but to confront the system that manufactured scarcity in the first place.
