Far-right activists are monstering refugee hotels
Plus our Lookout briefing
Happy new year and welcome back to Scout. Some excellent, informative stories are headed your way in the coming months. We’re kicking off with an article about a worrying trend that has seen far-right activists harassing staff at hotels that house refugees. These campaigners will film their encounters and post them on social media, where they are met with praise and tips for other hotels to target next. Also check out our Lookout briefing of must-read stories about the far-right.
‘It’s absolutely full of illegal immigrants’
The video begins in a hotel car park on an overcast day last summer. A woman who blogs under the name Yorkshire Rose is starting a livestream on YouTube. She breezily welcomes her regular viewers – they call her Amanda – and says she is at the Britannia Hotel in Didsbury, a leafy suburb of south Manchester. She comments approvingly about the hotel grounds then walks past the main building. “It’s absolutely full of illegal immigrants,” she snaps.
A hotel receptionist spots Amanda and her male friend, and asks her to leave. “I’m a local journalist,” Amanda says by way of excuse. Then she turns the conversation around and quizzes the hotel worker. “What have you got to hide? Why don’t you want us in your grounds?” Amanda spots a couple of men at a smoking area who she assumes to be refugees. She starts shouting at them. “Hi guys, do you like our country?” They put their heads in their hands. “I'm just a reporter. Are they looking after you well? Nice food? Why are you covering your faces? I'm no harm to you.”
As she leaves, Amanda fumes about the government sheltering the refugees who cross the English Channel. “Why is it all so secretive? How do we know the Taliban, the jihadis are not coming? Anybody could be coming in on those dinghies. We don’t have a clue who these people are. Enough is enough.” As she moves away from the hotel, one of her livestream viewers agrees. “Go back and torch it.”
This is a typical example of how far-right groups and influencers have been monstering hotels that house migrants. Activists are travelling the country to film themselves harassing hotel staff and shouting at refugees, egged on by their followers watching on livestream. Scout has counted 76 instances of hotel monstering in the last 12 months. The popularity of these videos, which are seen by thousands of people, mean that these hotel visits are likely to remain a prominent form of far-right protest this year.
Two groups are mostly responsible. One of them is Britain First, a Manchester-based far-right party whose leader Paul Golding has been sent to prison for anti-Muslim hate crimes. The other is Yorkshire Rose. “Save our Small Island from Invaders,” reads her Twitter bio.
James Goddard, another far-right activist from Manchester, has also started making migrant hotel videos. On January 2nd he visited the same hotel as Yorkshire Rose, saying he had received a “tip-off” about the Britannia (he could have saved himself the trouble and just watched her video). Goddard received a suspended prison sentence for hounding Anna Soubry MP, and a restraining order after harassing a journalist from The Independent. Last year Goddard was appointed a regional organiser of Patriotic Alternative, a white nationalist, Mosley-loving group who we wrote about last month.
These activists and groups think that the sheltering of Afghan migrants in British hotels is worthy material for their propaganda. Just like their videos about the crimes of Asian grooming gangs, the far-right hopes to sway new believers by hammering the hotel issue. That’s why livestreamers will refer to the “injustice” of sheltering Afghans in hotels instead of, for instance, homeless veterans of the armed forces. They will call refugees “economic migrants” to undermine their status as fugitives from the Taliban and portray them as devious foreigners looking for a cushy life in Britain.
They get especially mad if they find out refugees are being sheltered in nice hotels instead of a block of windowless cells. Britain First was fuming after their activists visited the Risley Hall Hotel in Derby, lamenting that this “11th century Saxon country house” is now “being used to house illegal immigrants”. When the group uploaded footage of their visit in late October, their fans said this evidence of the “Kalergi Plan to get rid of the white populations of Earth.”
The Kalergi Plan is named after a 20th century Austrian politician whose work is thoroughly misunderstood. Fans of Britain First believe the Kalergi Plan predicts that miscegenation will one day eradicate racial categories, leaving them susceptible to Jewish rule. It’s part of the wider conspiracy theory that white people are somehow being threatened by genocide.
So what do hotel staff make of these visits? Hotel chains enforce strict rules on speaking to the press, and most workers we talked to did not want to jeopardise their jobs. A worker from Risley Hall brushed off Britain First’s visit, and said it was just a minor distraction. But a receptionist at the Heston Hyde hotel near Heathrow Airport in London said the monstering they received was “such a nasty thing”. “This is not something that needs to be exposed,” they said, referring to the hotel sheltering migrants. “Everybody has the right to stay and be protected, whoever they are.”
Lookout briefing
These are the rest of our stories to help you understand the British far-right this week.
A tale of two white supremacists
Last year, we interviewed Ben John, the white supremacist who was asked by a judge to read the works of Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare, instead of go to prison for a terrorism conviction. In 2021, John was given a suspended sentence and told he would be tested on his knowledge of classic literature in the new year. When we spoke to John, he said he had not yet started reading any of the books demanded of him, saying they were “buried somewhere” in a box in his home. “I don’t know how to put it,” he told us. “I’ve got them. I’ve not got to grips with any of them.”
So it was with some surprise that John appeared at Leicester Crown Court and said he had done his homework. “I enjoyed Shakespeare more than Jane Austen, but I still enjoyed Jane Austen to a degree," he said. The judge replied: “Well I find that encouraging.” After campaign groups protested the leniency of John's sentence, the Attorney General referred his case to the Court of Appeal. A hearing is set for 19 January.
A teenager is arrested on suspicion of a far-right terrorism plot
A 15-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of mounting a far-right act of terrorism. The boy was detained in south London on Friday and has now been bailed, although he is not believed to be an imminent threat to the public. This reflects the younger profile of terrorism arrests in Britain. Last year, 25 children under the age of 18 were arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences, an increase from the 17 arrests the previous year. Police attribute this rise to lockdown tedium, which has provided young people with more time to find extremist material, and being away from school, which represents one of the largest categories of referrals to the government’s anti-terrorism programme, Prevent. Read more about the changing face of Britain’s terror suspects here.
‘The Big Plan’
While we’re on the subject, a 17-year-old who spoke about his desire to “shoot up a mosque” has been sentenced to a two-year youth rehabilitation order. He had a handwritten note at home called “The Big Plan”, which contained details of how to make a bomb, locations and individuals believed to be targets, and the intention to kill more than 10,000 people. The boy, who remains anonymous because of his age, was exposed after a member of the public contacted the authorities for making violent comments on an internet message board. Tell MAMA, the anti-Islamophobia charity, is protesting the leniency of his sentence.