The Epping hotel closure is a victory for the protesters

The infamous Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex will no longer be used to house asylum seekers, after the local council obtained an injunction to have them removed.

Thousands have protested outside the Bell since July, when it emerged that one of its residents had been charged with sexually assaulting a teenager, within just days of arriving in Britain on a small boat. Aside from some violent clashes at the edges, the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, dominated by the ‘pink ladies’ – mums, grans and other local women dressed in pink, concerned for their families’ and their community’s safety. As if to prove their point about the risks of the hotel, a second Bell resisent was charged with sexual assault only last week.

With similar protests springing up outside asylum hotels across the country, Epping Forest District Council will certainly not be the last to seek an injunction from the courts. Locals everywhere, from Waterlooville to Diss, are furious at having to bear the brunt of the UK’s broken asylum system.

Many of the hotel protests have been sparked by charges or credible reports of sexual assaults and harassment against locals. Indeed, the list of horror stories grows longer by the week. At least 200 residents of asylum hotels have been charged with a combined 425 offences in the past year, according to analysis by the Telegraph. Over the past month alone, changes have been brought over the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, the rape of an eight-year-old girl in south London, and the attempted kidnapping of a 10-year-old in Stockport, Greater Manchester. All of the suspects in these cases are seeking asylum in the UK. And if recent court decisions are anything to go by, no one would be surprised if they were granted it.

Now, public patience has worn so thin that the first news of an asylum hotel opening is often met with immediate resistance from locals. Crowds started gathering outside the Britannia International Hotel in London’s Canary Wharf before a single asylum seeker had been moved in.

You do not have to believe for a second that every asylum-hotel resident is a sex offender-in-waiting to fear that criminals might well be overrepresented among those who have entered the UK illegally, with the help of organised criminal gangs. Ordinary people recognise these obvious risks, even if they are ignored by the UK government and furiously denied by the liberal elite.

The closure of the Bell Hotel will be a headache for the Home Office, now scrambling to find an alternative site. And with other councils set to follow Epping, the entire policy of dispersing illegal migrants to hotels around the country could prove unsustainable. This may well be the first crack in a system that the public is no longer willing to tolerate.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.