The Telegraph wants you to see Waterlooville through a soft-focus lens: bunting in the rain, Union flags draped over shoulders, mums and grannies singing Sweet Caroline outside Boots. But strip away the sentimental framing and what you have is a textbook exercise in divide-and-rule. An ex–Home Secretary turning a small Hampshire town into a stage set for border chauvinism.
Suella Braverman calls it “a victory for ordinary folk.” In reality, it’s a victory for the politics that pits worker against worker, neighbour against neighbour, all to avoid pointing the finger where it belongs—at the landlords, developers, and politicians (which includes Braverman) who have gutted Britain’s housing system.
The town’s “relief” at blocking 35 asylum seekers from flats above a junk shop has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with scarcity, a scarcity manufactured by the state. The decades-long demolition of public housing, the sell-off of council stock, the refusal to build affordable homes: these are not the fault of people arriving on dinghies. But Braverman and her allies have spent years teaching the electorate to look sideways instead of upwards.
The Telegraph makes much of the protest being “peaceful” with no skinheads, and no arrests. But the absence of violence doesn’t make the politics benign. When Braverman says Waterlooville “provides a template” for other towns, she’s talking about normalising everyday racism in a way that’s palatable to the respectable middle. All patriotism as bunting and pub selfies, while migrant families are shunted out of sight.
Her talk of “fear,” “betrayal,” and “powerlessness” is not about solving problems; it’s about stoking them. It’s a script for expanding the repressive state (more police powers, more detention, harsher borders) while leaving the causes of housing shortage untouched. The housing crisis is recast as a border crisis, and migrants become the threat that justifies authoritarianism.
Here’s the quiet trick: the “ordinary” people Braverman claims to champion are workers ( the shop assistants, carers, IT staff, pensioners) whose real enemy is not 35 strangers in a high street flat, but the system that keeps their wages low, rents high, and public services collapsing. Waterlooville’s “victory” won’t get them a single affordable home. It won’t shorten the waiting list for their children. It will, however, make it easier for the state to keep playing this game. Pitting “locals” against migrants while the developers, landlords, and cabinet ministers walk away with the spoils.
This isn’t a victory for ordinary folk. It’s a victory for the border regime. One that thrives on pitting worker against worker, stoking fear while leaving the landlords, developers, and ministers who created the housing crisis untouched. And let’s be honest: the average Telegraph reader or Tory voter is not the demographic queuing at the council housing office or living under threat of eviction.
