The story’s familiar by now. A hotel on a bypass road in a town most people couldn’t place on a map. A group of asylum seekers housed there while they wait for the Home Office to do its job. Then a headline. An arrest. Cue outrage, a protest, counter-protest, police lines, “shame on you” chanted across a road. One copper gets a knock on the head. Everyone goes home angrier than they arrived.
Epping’s not unique. It’s just next in line. The state starves communities, then wheels in the scapegoats. You don’t get funding, you don’t get housing, you don’t get a future. But you do get a target. A hotel full of brown men. And suddenly all that quiet desperation finds its voice.
This is what austerity looks like after the newspapers have had their go at it.
James Regan, Reform UK councillor, turned up to say “they’re infusing us with illegal migrants.” As though people are toxins. As though we’re lab rats in a grand replacement experiment. The party line practically writes itself: broken Britain, no space, no jobs, no culture left. But it’s a grift. Reform doesn’t want your life better. It wants your fear angrier. Your neighbour more suspicious. Your future outsourced to Nigel Farage in a Union Jack tie.
One woman said, “We just want to be heard.” Fair enough. But heard by who? And about what? The asylum seekers didn’t slash your council budget. They didn’t sell off your NHS. They didn’t turn your town centre into a betting shop graveyard. They’re just the bodies the government parked in your postcode when they ran out of detention centres.
You want someone to blame? Start with the people who told you to blame them.
There was a crime reported. Charges brought. A man denies them. Let the courts do their job. But that’s not what this is about. It never is. The right wing tabloids dangle one case like bloody meat and let the mob fill in the rest. The suspicion becomes collective. Every migrant becomes a predator. Every hotel, a crime scene. And the truth gets buried somewhere under “we’re just asking questions.”
The irony? These protests do nothing to stop the system they are angry at. They strengthen it. Every time the crowd turns on the asylum seekers, the Home Office wins. Serco wins. Reform wins. The landlords charging the state £200 a night for substandard rooms win. The town gets nothing. Except a reputation.
There were counter-protesters too. Local anti-racists, trade unionists, ordinary people with more to lose than gain. They will barely get a mention. This is spectacle. No one clicks a headline that says “some people stood up to racism.” But they were there. They always are. And they matter more than any hairdresser spouting “a market town isn’t the place for asylum seekers.” As if there’s a designated patch of England somewhere for those deemed surplus.
This isn’t about Epping. It’s about power. Who’s got it, and who gets fed the lie that punching down is a kind of resistance.
“We’re fed up,” they said. So are we. Fed up of being played. Fed up of the oldest trick in the book. Fed up of the state setting the fire, blaming the smoke, and charging us for the hose.
