In Epping, it’s the left vs the people

For over a week, protests have rumbled outside a taxpayer-funded refugee hotel in Epping, Essex. Protesters, mostly local, have been angered by allegations an Ethiopian migrant housed at the Bell Hotel sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl. The unrest was further fuelled by the hotel’s proximity to a local school, and the fact that the suspect had arrived on a small boat just eight days prior to being charged.

Public disaffection over asylum hotels is widespread, but has been entirely ignored by the authorities. The protests in Epping are not the first of their kind, and will certainly not be the last. Already, similar protests have erupted outside migrant hotels in Diss, Norfolk and even Canary Wharf in east London, just in the past week. Knowsley, Rotherham, Telford and, of course, Southport have all been the scenes of similar disorder in recent years. The Home Office’s policy of housing migrants predominantly in deprived areas has proven especially inflammatory.

In Epping, it is obvious far-right groups from different parts of the country have joined the protests. Much less commented on, however, has been the presence of groups from the left. Stand Up To Racism has been promoting counter-protests at the hotel, plastering Epping with posters stating ‘Defend Refugees’, ‘Stop the Far Right in Epping’ and ‘March Against Fascism’. They have also been hawking leaflets outside Underground stations in London’s most liberal boroughs.

Stand Up To Racism is a front for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) – a discredited crank group despised by most on the left, and largely irrelevant in today’s politics. To grow its membership, it almost solely targets impressionable undergraduates. At rallies, its few members distribute hundreds of their placards to give the appearance that it is a mass movement.

Unsurprisingly, when Stand Up To Racism first showed up in Epping last week, the activists were not well received. Some locals even referred to them as ‘paedos’. In the eyes of local protesters, Stand Up To Racism isn’t opposing ‘fascists’, but defending alleged sex offenders. Is this what the British left has been reduced to? Dismissing the fears of ordinary, working-class people about hundreds of unknown, unvetted, single men being housed in their communities?

The SWP and its front groups clearly believe that politics is the same today as it was in 1975. Then, there was genuine concern about groups such as the National Front and the British Movement – groups motivated by white nationalism, and which terrorised ethnic-minority communities. Fortunately, today’s politics could not be more different. Indeed, white nationalism has long been pushed to the most extreme fringes of society.

The SWP is now a menace to the cause it claims to represent. There are still those of us trying to build a political movement out of class solidarity, yet by branding people such as those Epping protesters as ‘far right’, the SWP drives well-meaning, working-class people into the arms of Tommy Robinson and his ilk. The SWP is dominated by privileged Londoners, and it shows. It arrives, uninvited, to working-class areas armed with placards declaring ‘Refugees Are Welcome Here’ – ignoring the fact that it is the Home Office that has imposed asylum hotels on these towns. It is neither the choice of residents nor the refugees themselves to live there. The policy of housing migrants in the poorest parts of the country could hardly be more of a two-fingered salute to the working classes – and still the left insists on adding insult to injury.

For the left to sneer at those communities forced to bear the burden of the small-boats crisis is unconscionable. The organised left once championed the interests of working-class people – now it has made them its enemy.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.