A sleepy Yorkshire village becomes a far-right flashpoint
'There is so much toxicity and splitting and factionalism. And the far-right has caused it'
Dear subscribers — a warm welcome to all our new readers who joined after our article on the Lady of Heaven controversy was published on The Tribune news site. We wrote about how the film’s Shia producers went to the extraordinary lengths of making a $15 million movie in order to trash their Sunni enemies.
The film was little more than an attempt to spark sectarian uproar. As we revealed on The Tribune, the movie’s creators are cynical anti-Sunni propaganda merchants whose agitation has now energised the far-right. Read that piece here.
Today we’ve got an investigation about a tiny village in Yorkshire that has become an important battleground for the far-right. We didn’t find the media reporting on the asylum seeker centre in Linton-on-Ouse very informative, so we drove over there to get to know the residents and find out what happened when extremists came to town.
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Linton-on-Ouse, population 700
It’s a glorious spring day — the birds are singing, the blossom is sparkling — and a woman is livestreaming as she walks down a rural street in north Yorkshire. “I’ve come along to support some terrified local residents,” she says. “The thought of 1,500 migrant men descending on this village... These ladies are really, really frightened.”
Amanda Smith, better known by her YouTube name Yorkshire Rose (early Scout readers will recall her habit of turning up to hotels housing migrants to hassle the staff and guests), is just one of many far-right activists who have become obsessed with Linton-on-Ouse, a village of 700 people outside York.
Life in Linton changed the moment media reports revealed their old RAF base would be repurposed as an asylum centre for 1,500 male refugees aged 18-40. Coming mainly from Iran, Iraq and Eritrea, they will be housed in Linton while their applications to stay in the UK are processed. After delays, they are now expected in the coming weeks.
The far-right has pounced on Linton, exploiting concerns the local residents have about the suitability of their village for such a large centre. White nationalist groups have made Linton a key part of their propaganda in recent weeks, conjuring an image of white pastoral England under invasion by a horde of licentious Muslims.
This tiny village has become a flashpoint for extremist activism: far-right campaigners are trying to enlist residents into their cause, hassling the ones who don’t and — in a few cases — making some of them afraid for their safety. Some villagers have installed or upgraded their security camera systems and installed emergency tags on their phones to contact the police.
I first heard about Linton on Telegram, the social media messaging app used by far-right organisers. For Scout, I keep an eye on extremist channels to get a sense of what they’re talking about. In late April, I began to see posts about Linton being shared by Patriotic Alternative, the white nationalist organisation led by Mark Collett, a self-described “Nazi sympathiser”.
PA is one of Britain’s most prominent far-right groups. It presents a respectable facade by hosting movie nights and paintball trips, masking a sinister agenda. Their leaders talk about “the JQ” and “ZOG”, acronyms for the Jewish Question and the Zionist Occupied Government, which relate to the conspiracy theory that Jews are secretly in control of global affairs. Collett, their founder, has recommended Mein Kampf and invited a Holocaust denier to speak at their most recent conference.
PA leaders say the asylum centre is “demographic replacement in action”, a nod to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that claims shadowy elites are coordinating the migration of Asians and Africans to threaten white Europeans. (The Great Replacement is a central far-right belief, and has been repeatedly cited by terrorists in their pre-attack manifestos, most recently the gunman who murdered ten Black people in Buffalo, New York.)
Over the last two months, all manner of far-right activists have started turning up to Linton. In addition to PA, Alan Leggett, an anti-migrant influencer known as Active Patriot, has shown up; so has James Goddard, who received a suspended prison sentence for hassling an MP; along with Amanda Smith, alias Yorkshire Rose, who has been one of the most frequent visitors.
Threats and exploitation
I wanted to understand what life has been like for the villagers who have found themselves besieged by far-right activists, so I went to Linton on a boiling hot day over the Platinum Jubilee weekend. It was leafy and quiet, with only the zip of passing cyclists to break the silence. But the asylum centre loomed over the village — nearly every house displayed at least one protest sign in their front window emblazoned with the words “wrong plan, wrong place”.
I knocked on doors and spoke to passersby and all but a couple of villagers were concerned about speaking on the record for fear of reprisals from far-right campaigners. “They have been threatening people on social media,” one woman told me, referring to extremist groups. “They’re exploiting the situation for their own propaganda.”
I met a man called Garry who said he received nasty messages after asking extremists to stay away from the village. “I was aware the far right intended protesting,” he said, “and asked on social media that they do not attend as it was not helpful to our cause and received abuse.”
Zander and his partner Alice talk about how the far-right have brought “some really horrible negativity” to their village. “It’s a minefield out here,” said Alice. “We wanted to have a ‘welcome’ sign but were warned about putting it up, saying it would attract nasty people. It has caused fractures. Hatred is not the way forward.”
Several villagers mentioned how activists from Patriotic Alternative — including their regional organiser Sam Melia, a former member of a National Action, a terrorist group banned for plotting to murder an MP — turned up on their doorsteps to conduct a survey. They began by asking about the asylum centre but ended by quizzing residents how they felt about white Britons becoming a minority later this century, a central element of PA’s propaganda.
A war on two fronts
Scout hears that several residents from Linton and the neighbouring village of Newton invited PA to help them organise against the refugee plans. When PA held a protest in May on the village green, three women identified by Yorkshire Rose as locals posed in a photograph with the group. I found out their names and contacted the trio but didn’t hear back.
PA and influencers like Yorkshire Rose have received a boost from this handful of locals. They can claim to have the grateful support of a frightened village. But to what extent does the village really support these activists? And how much do the activists support the village?
A clue lies in a livestream Smith posted two weeks ago. In the video, she shouted at a villager who snapped a photograph of her as she filmed the street. “Have you just taken a photo of me!” she ranted at him. “Good luck when 1,500 migrant men appear and you’ve got no police to help ya. What an absolute arsehole. What horrible people! Shame, shame on the locals.”
Another figure stirring up tensions in the area is Pete North, a former UKIP candidate who lives outside of Linton. North was a prolific pro-Leave blogger who fantasised about lefty QCs “swinging from lampposts”. He also accused the Remain-voting philosopher AC Grayling of paedophilia and was successfully sued for libel, having to pay £20,000 in damages.
In the recent past, North shunned UKIP because they were “too busy grunting about Muslims”. Now it seems he has overcome this aversion by joining the party and grunting that an “epidemic of sexual violence” is linked to “Muslim men of fighting age”.
North has a blog on the UKIP website and posts in a protest group on Facebook. While he claims that he does not believe in the Great Replacement, he has also written: “It is observable that native Brits are being displaced from their own politics as minority ethnic bloc votes turn elections.” He is in communication with Sam Melia of Patriotic Alternative, feeding him blogs about villagers he dislikes. A PA leaflet that circulated this week in Linton contained a QR code that linked to one of North’s websites.
North has laid into the Linton-on-Ouse Action Group, which is also opposed to the asylum centre, believing it is too left-wing. He has called one of their organisers a “toxic blend of virtue signalling narcissism and naivety”. In turn, Laura Tyrie, PA’s deputy (who says her idol is Oswald Mosley), has criticised this organiser in her videos. We have chosen to withhold this person’s identity.
PA’s organising against the villagers is baffling. The Action Group opposes the asylum centre. So does PA. Why would the white nationalists spend any amount of time and money fighting against people who share the same goal?
PA, in its garbled logic, thinks that the Linton Action Group has ulterior motives and somehow, despite its members exhausting every avenue (and exhausting themselves) to stop it from opening, wants the asylum centre here.
No experience required
The Action Group is thoroughly confused about the far-right’s behaviour, and believe they are distracting them from opposing the refugee base. Their arguments against the centre aren’t based on racism but around humanitarian and logistical concerns.
The group’s main reason for opposing the asylum centre is that Linton is the wrong place for it. The phrase “two-horse town” could have been invented to describe it. When I visited, it took me minutes to walk the length of the village, which is mostly built along a single street. There’s a park, a shop and a disused pub. Around four buses a day pass through. That’s pretty much it. The asylum seekers are going to be allowed to leave the base, but there won’t be much for them to do.
A lot of the initial media reports on this issue suggested the village were a bunch of parochial nimbys opposed to foreigners. But it does seem that the government has not properly consulted Linton about the centre — the first the villagers heard about it was from newspapers.
The government doesn’t seem to have adhered to its own guidelines. It recommends that asylum seekers are dispersed into communities at a ratio of one refugee per 200 residents. Reminder: 700 people live in Linton, and the base will hold 1,500 refugees. When authorities place asylum seekers anywhere in this country, they have to think about the capacity of local services. That’s why the Home Office says refugees says should be placed in “major conurbations”. How was Linton seen as a suitable place?
It’s not like anyone in Whitehall could have forgotten that this policy exists. Priti Patel, the home secretary, removed asylum seekers from a hotel in her Essex constituency on the grounds that it was too rural. That hotel is in Witham, a town of 25,000. Linton is around 35 times smaller by population.
It’s hard to escape the feeling, speaking to members of the Linton-on-Ouse Action Group, that this asylum centre — and the far-right activity that comes with it — is a disaster waiting to happen.
Asylum seekers are five times more likely than the national average to suffer from poor mental health after experiencing the trauma of war and the distress of family separation. Despite this, one job advert seeking a minimum-wage housing officer to work at the asylum centre said “no experience required”. The ad, which was posted on Berkeley Scott, a catering recruiter, said recommended applicants who had previously worked in “casino, leisure, bars” would be suitable for the role.
Another Linton ad posted on Serco, the outsourcing company, was looking for a housing officer who could deal with “urgent medical needs, suicide risks, domestic violence situations, violence and anti-social behaviour, death, and child safeguarding needs”. How are inexperienced, low-paid former bar staff going to be able to provide adequate care to some of the most vulnerable people in Britain?
Many of the villagers are concerned that conditions on the base are going to be inadequate. “It’s immoral to rack and stack them like that,” said a resident named Linda. “What can they do except go out of their minds? How are they meant to integrate into society?”
She added:
“We are not a racist village. I come from Leeds, I embrace a multicultural society. I would object to 1,500 people from Cornwall coming to live here. If you were 18-years-old, traumatised and came out of a warzone and you were put in this airbase, you would be terrified.”
“Everybody’s like this,” she added, moving her hand up and down like a rollercoaster. “It’s bonkers for us and it’s going to be awful for them.”
The first flight of deportations to Rwanda this week had no passengers onboard, so who knows what is going to happen to the old RAF base at Linton. This week it was reported that plans for the centre were on hold until the site is deemed safe.
As they wait to hear their fate, the villagers I spoke to are worried that more and more of their neighbours are turning towards the far-right. Some point to individuals who were once concerned about the arrival of PA but have since joined anti-migrant social media groups and are communicating with the likes of Sam Melia. “Sympathy for the migrants is dying fast,” says one woman. “There is so much toxicity and splitting and factionalism. And the far-right has caused it.”
https://www.ukip.org/national-executive-committee-update
Sounds like Patriotic Alternative will soon be merging with Ukip.
Matt
I am not racist and therefore make it a point of principle to immediately stop reading any piece of writing in which I encounter the capitalisation of "black", as in the present instance.