Many factions on Britain’s far right are scrambling to claim credit after the temporary High Court injunction ordered the removal of asylum seekers from The Bell Hotel in Epping.
The Refugee Council and many others agree that use of hotels for this purpose should cease. But dog-whistlers on the right ranging from the Conservative Party leader to some of the country’s most dangerous nazis have merely exploited the issue to advance their own agenda.
Hypocritical
Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick for the Tories have been especially hypocritical. While in government their party encouraged the use of hotels as asylum centres and did nothing to establish an efficient and humane asylum system.
Now Badenoch is inciting local councils to seek injunctions similar to that granted in Epping.
Both Reform and the Tories have made common cause at demonstrations in Epping with notorious nazis.
Last week Jenrick posted photos on social media showing himself outside The Bell with Eddy Butler, the man who organised racist BNP campaigns in East London in the 1990s, and Essex in the 2000s. He was also the thug who ran the BNP’s ‘stewarding force’.
Butler was among the first far-right activists to spot a chance to exploit the asylum issue in Epping. He and his wife Sue Clapp, a fellow ex-BNP activist, repeatedly attended demonstrations at The Bell with another ex-BNP councillor, Julian Leppert, now a local councillor for the British Democrats.
Leppert, who appeared on GB News interviewed by Patrick Christys, has just published a history of the BNP in the 2000s, which will be promoted at a nazi conference next month.
Reform activists as well as members of the Homeland Party (a breakaway from Britain’s main nazi organisation Patriotic Alternative) have masqueraded as concerned Epping residents and are competing with the Tories to claim credit for closing down The Bell.
Throwing mud
Reform is behaving with typically opportunism in throwing mud at both the Tories and Labour, while having no alternative asylum policy.
But nor do the Tories promote any alternative policy. Both seek only to exploit the issue to stir up hatred and division.
Homeland’s main activist at the Epping demos, Callum Barker, seems to have proved too extreme even for that party’s portly duce Kenny Smith.
Earlier this month Barker quit Homeland claiming that Smith and others in the party leadership had been running a smear campaign against him, and he now seems to be allied with an even more extreme faction of antisemites and Holocaust deniers led by Steve Laws and Sam Wilkes (aka ‘Zoomer Historian’).
When we recently reported on these splits, we speculated as to where Laws and Wilkes might move next. This week Mark Collett, Smith’s bitter rival who leads Patriotic Alternative, began moves to recruit Laws into PA, when he featured the Folkestone racist on a video stream.
Praising Rupert Lowe
But we think it’s unlikely that Laws’ main supporters in the recent Homeland split, Jerome O’Reilly and Kai Stephens, would be willing to go back to PA, which they quit two years ago to co-found Homeland with Smith.
Both Wilkes and Laws have recently been posting in praise of Rupert Lowe, the far right MP and refugee from Reform, which was not right wing enough for his liking.
Their difficulty is that Lowe has not yet formed a party, only an issue-based campaign group called Advance UK. Some Laws supporters – Callum Barker, for instance – are already signed up but others are waiting got a formal political party to be announced.
So it seems likely that, for the moment at least, a kaleidoscope of racist factions ranging from the Tory right to open and violent nazis will continue their different forms of hatemongering, on the streets and online. Both the Tories and Reform will try to gain electoral benefit.
Some sections of the far right though, including wealthy backers being cultivated by Kenny Smith, can see a particular benefit to such a multipronged approach, where “moderate” spokesmen can disclaim any connection to “extremists”.
Unintended consequences
But there is not complete unanimity within the right about whether Epping was actually the success some are claiming. Others are citing the law of unintended consequences.
David Clewes of Unity News Network apologised for asking:
“Why is this being celebrated as such a huge victory?
“They will still be in the area and costing more in private rentals.”
And the far right’s perennial party pooper, National Rebirth Party leader Alek Yerbury, followed up by accusing the hotel campaigners of “tunnel-vision” adding that:
“When people respond to migrant hotels by shutting them down and calling it a win, the migrants inevitably end up in council housing and HMOs, which makes the problem worse, AND causes additional problems.
“It is only a ‘victory’ in the most shallow, narrow sense”.
