Britain’s Elites Care Much More About Migrant Hotels Than the Public Does

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has hit the headlines for attending one of the now-normalised far-right protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers. This particular protest in Epping was also attended by “known fascists and members of Nazi terror organisations”, according to Stand Up to Racism.

The government has criticised Jenrick because he was the one who procured the services of hotels for housing asylum seekers in the first place, but there appears to be little deviation from the cast-iron received wisdom that people raging and screaming outside hotels are absolutely right to do so. This is, to put it mildly, not normal. What’s going on?

The mainstream right with their writers in the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator would have you believe that the public are fed up with wokeness and uncontrolled migration, and that years of not being listened to has produced a fever pitch of frustration which is boiling over into violence. More liberal analysts would point to material conditions and suggest that public frustration with immigration is, to a greater or lesser extent, displaced anger at the state of public services, not being able to get council housing and rising costs of living.

But the problem with both those analyses is that there is no broad public demand for burning hotels or pogroms. What we are seeing is not a popular uprising, but elite radicalisation. The demand for pogroms is not merely being reported by the press – it is being started there, encouraged by politicians, and then further inflamed in a feedback cycle. To the extent that the public are involved, they are passengers, not drivers.

I do not mean to suggest that nobody at all is out here demanding the government Kick Them All Out. The protesters are real, and there are plenty of simmering resentments in places like Epping about the “unfairness” of asylum seekers “jumping the queue” and the usual litany of grievances. The protests have also achieved their goals. The High Court has ruled that asylum seekers must be moved from the hotel in Epping. I am not here to make one of those tedious arguments that Britain is actually secretly very liberal and anti-racist: that’s not true.

But the race rioters who burned out a car at the end of my street in Middlesbrough last summer were outnumbered the very next day by locals who came out to sweep up the glass. The Epping protests are big and visible, but the government had to arrest over 400 people at the recent Palestine Action demonstration in Parliament Square, and up to half a million people attend demonstrations against the ongoing genocide in Gaza without the press declaring them the voice of a populace demanding satisfaction. 

Whether a particular group gets to be ‘the public’ who have ‘legitimate concerns’ and must be appeased on all matters, or merely ‘protesters’ or ‘activists’ who are to be suppressed, arrested, deported or simply screamed into submission, is not numbers or polling, but agreement with the establishment consensus. And the establishment consensus is, increasingly, fascist as all hell.

The establishment has radicalised not simply on an individual basis, in the sense that there are a lot more rightwing crazies in it now, but on a structural one. In a Bluesky post migrants’ rights activist Zoe Gardiner said: “Call from a producer this morning: Zoe please help – we thought the panel on our show was balanced, but it turns out they’re both pro-mass detention camps for asylum seekers. Would you come on to be the anti-detention camp voice?”

Let us consider for a moment the full weight of what this tells us. For a start, that the establishment, public sector broadcaster considers it part of its job to ‘balance’ a discussion between a pro-migrant detention camps and anti-camps position is, in itself, bad enough. But the systems it has in place to produce such a ‘balance’ are broken and biased towards, not against, the ‘pro-camps’ side. And, to top it all off, there appears to be nobody at the BBC who is capable of taking a step back and saying “lads, what the bloody fuck do we think we are playing at here, precisely?” 

So how did we get here? We have always had an overabundance of absurd, gleefully destructive, thoughtlessly sadistic, half-witted racist bullies in the British press. And part of the game that these people play, from their position of magnificent irresponsibility, is to make increasingly unappeasable reactionary demands, and then constantly shift the goalposts. The point is to be permanently aggrieved, to exist in a state of permanent outrage and wounded victimhood about the very concept of living in a society.

The liberalish, mainstream centre of the political establishment has long believed that it can use this malignant but potent force for its own ends, using it to keep its enemies in check, stomp on those who get out of line, and whip up a helpful mob when required. But over the last few years, thanks to deals done in desperation to stave off threats from the left, the liberal centre has been effectively hollowed out from the inside by the aggressively parasitic right wing, and is now being ridden around like a skin suit by the worst people in the country. 

Any mechanism for the left to exert pressure on the incestuous media-political establishment has been successfully smashed to pieces, but this means that the press and the most reactionary elements of the political parties are now in a freewheeling feedback loop where everyone is competing to be the biggest possible shithead to foreigners, and nobody with any power can understand why they should stop. 

Counterintuitively, the only thing likely to stop this descent is the fact that the elites are more radicalised than the general population. The government are not simply to the right of the Corbynistas or the Greens, but to a pretty substantial section of the British electorate who are far from Leninist but who still think you shouldn’t be arresting hundreds of pensioners for holding up a sign protesting genocide. Democracy is an atrophied and badly bruised mechanism for change in this country, but at some point it will kick in and apply the brakes. The question is, will it be able to do so before we end up with Nigel Farage as prime minister?