‘We are legal migrants against illegal immigration’

Watch our video report from the protest here.

‘We are not racist. We welcome anybody. But not these men… Sorry.’

I’m talking to Susan, a lifelong resident of the Isle of Dogs – the East London peninsula, carved out by the meander of the Thames; a working-class community topped by the glass towers of Canary Wharf to its north.

News broke last week that the Britannia International Hotel had been turned over to house asylum seekers. It sparked – what some saw as – unlikely protests, in an area associated with high finance and yuppie opulence.

But the Britannia – not in Canary Wharf proper, but the edge of South Dock, where the skyscrapers give way to council blocks and a few rows of terraced houses that survived Thatcher’s ‘regeneration’ of the docklands – is on the border of two very different sides of The Island.

Susan came to this protest, held last Sunday, with her friend, Jackie. ‘Our grandfathers worked together in the docks’, says Susan. ‘I was born here – my mum and dad, my husband, his mum and dad, their father.’ ‘We just don’t want it here on the Isle of Dogs’, says Jackie.

Following recent protests outside another migrant hotel in the leafy Essex town of Epping – sparked by the arrest of a small-boats migrant, who clocked up three sexual-assault charges after eight days in the country – the Britannia protesters say they fear for their safety.

They’re angry. And not just with the government. They’ve clocked the media portrayals of these demos as ‘racist’ at best, ‘far right’ at worst. ‘Look at all the diversity here. Have you ever seen this type of protest before?’, says Susan, without my prompting.

She’s got a point. Among the 80 or so in the largely white crowd, crammed on to a tiny triangle of pavement across the road from the Britannia, there are mixed-race couples, black people, Asian people. If this was indeed a mini BNP rally, they apparently didn’t get the memo.

Three men, who didn’t want to be interviewed (‘I work for lefties’, one joked), are holding a banner, saying: ‘Stop calling us far right – protect our women and children.’

I speak to Kylie, a mother of five. ‘My kids are half-Moroccan. I’m of Maltese and Italian background as well. It’s not about race, it’s not about colour or anything. It’s about what’s right’, she says. ‘We’ve got immigrants here, but they are here legally… We have no problem. We’re a whole mix of backgrounds – my friends, my family – with black community, Asian, all different.’

But ‘illegal ones… saying they’re coming from war’, she adds, ‘they’re not coming with no children, they’re not coming with no women, they’re only… men. Where’s all the women and the children then, who are fleeing war?’

‘I don’t want it. I want my kids to be safe. And they’re not safe here with this going on.’

‘If the women and children had come over, and not the men’, says Susan, ‘we would have fitted them out with absolutely everything, because that’s what we do as human beings. I’m sure other areas are the same.’ It’s a sentiment that is repeated by several women here.

Another contingent is well represented: legal migrants.

Sam, who says he migrated to Britain from Thailand in 1961, has come up from south London: ‘I’m here to support the good people around here who are protesting about the illegal migrants being housed in this hotel.’

‘I’m very grateful for what this country has given me and my family’, he goes on. ‘I’ve been able to live here, have a family, and I’ve been very, very happy here, and I’m very proud of what Britain has done for the world.’

‘We are legal immigrants against illegal immigration’, says Laszlo, a local resident originally from Hungary. ‘We’ve worked very hard to be here, and I think not having any consent or any sort of discussion about how our community will change – I just don’t think it’s fair.’

I then speak to Yin, a twentysomething, more recent arrival from mainland China. She’s a software engineer, and also lives locally. Her friends are holding up a cardboard banner, saying ‘Legal against illegal migrant’.

‘We want to stand out and show that this is not a far-right activity’, Yin says. ‘We are migrants. We feel everyone here. We feel the pain of the country… If I finish my work late, I wouldn’t be comfortable walking all the way from Canary Wharf station to here.’

What does she think the government should do? ‘I just want this matter to be peacefully handled… It’s time for the government to do something about it’, says Yin.

Sam is a little more blunt: ‘Deport them. Don’t make this country attractive for illegal migrants. It is far too attractive.’ As for Keir Starmer? ‘I think the government should dissolve itself. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

Proceedings remain peaceful. The only bit of friction I witness between police and the crowd is when a man on an e-scooter is asked by a policewoman to empty his lager tin into a bin. He complies, slightly shirtily.

Cars and cabs honk their support, sparking cheers and choruses of ‘In-gur-land, In-gur-land, In-gur-land’. One woman slows down in her car, to give the universal ‘wankers’ gesture, which goes down less well.

Not everyone wants to talk. Relatively few do, in fact. One middle-aged woman, wearing a red Make England Great Again cap, doesn’t want to give her name. I ask about Starmer. She says she has nothing to say to him, as he is just a puppet of the World Economic Forum.

There is no sign of the far-right and racist groups that have been trying to hijack local residents’ concerns about the hotels for their bigoted and violent ends.

But whatever crankiness, or worse, that may well lurk at the edges of this protest, or any other migrant-hotel protest, one thing is clear: there is a lot more going on here than the lazy smears would have you believe.

The anger is real, local, heartfelt, coming from some unexpected quarters. And it’s not going away.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked.

Watch our video report from the protest below: