Bridget Phillipson has said the quiet part out loud

Does the Labour Party have a death wish? At a time when borders, asylum and migration have become the defining issues of British politics, at a time when protests outside of migrant hotels continue to convulse the country, at a time when an insurgent Reform UK is riding public anger about borderless Britain to a whopping 15-point lead in some polls, Labour seems to be going out of its way to prove it is not on the side of the public.

Yesterday, education secretary Bridget Phillipson was wheeled out to defend the indefensible. After the Court of Appeal struck down a temporary injunction, that had closed the Bell Hotel in Epping to asylum seekers following weeks of protests from residents, Sky News’s Trevor Phillips was given a yawning open goal. In court, the Home Office argued that the human rights of migrants actually trumped the safety concerns of locals. Does she agree with the government’s lawyers, then?, asked Phillips. After some burbling about a ‘balance of rights’, Phillipson conceded that, ‘yes, of course we do’.

This is an argument so obviously toxic that even the Court of Appeal judges cocked an eyebrow at it in their judgement on Friday. ‘Any argument in this particular context about a hierarchy of rights is in our view unattractive’, they wrote. Nevertheless, they essentially agreed with the spirit of it, noting the home secretary’s ‘clear statutory duties towards asylum seekers’ under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, primarily to house them and so prevent them falling into ‘destitution’. The protests and locals’ concerns about crime are a factor, the court ruled, but these are ‘outweighed’ by others, such as the need to avoid disruption to the asylum system and ward off further protests (on that score, with demos continuing across the country on the weekend, lifting the injunction has already backfired spectacularly).

I suppose we should at least credit Phillipson for her honesty. A big part of the reason our asylum system has become so dysfunctional and so infuriating to ordinary people is the way the government’s putative legal obligations towards those who arrived five minutes ago appear to bulldoze all other concerns, particularly those of the citizenry. Hence, a prolific flasher can be granted asylum because his ‘sexually disinhibited behaviour’ might expose him to ‘serious harm’ in his native Afghanistan (yes, that’s a real case). And hence, the Bell must stay open to migrants, even though three of its residents have been brought up on serious charges (including sexual assault of a child, battery and attempted arson) in the past couple of months alone.

Phillipson accused Nigel Farage yesterday of ‘whipping up anger’ on immigration. But there is no better way to describe how successive governments have handled this issue. They lost control of the borders, then they made some of our most impoverished communities bear the brunt of it. They preside over an asylum system so broken it is incapable of turning down known criminals, let alone sorting genuine refugees from economic migrants, then lash out at the public for noticing. They openly say the rights of illegal migrants override those of citizens – which kind of upends the entire point of citizenship – then wonder why people are so angry.

With some despicable exceptions, the protests outside of migrant hotels have remained largely peaceful. Certainly, there has so far been no repeat of the kind of bigoted rioting we saw last summer. If anything, many protesters appear to be going out of their way to distance themselves from the violence and racism we saw explode after the Southport massacre. Yesterday, in Canary Wharf, some local British Bangladeshis joined the so-called Pink Ladies in opposing the Britannia International Hotel being turned over to house asylum seekers. In a viral clip, one British Bangladeshi man can be seen denouncing both the attempts to smear this multiracial Tower Hamlets community as racist and the ‘outside agitators’ trying to hijack their campaign and make it a ‘racist thing’. Whatever else you might say about these protests, they are defying the simplistic caricatures being drawn of them.

Dismissing these demonstrations as entirely heartless, racist and anti-migrant might comfort those unwilling to confront the consequences of their own virtue-signalling. But the reality is very different. A common refrain on the demos we at spiked have reported on is that if these hotels were full of women and children, rather than unvetted men, it would be a very different story. ‘We would have fitted them out, absolutely everything, because that’s what we do as human beings’, one Isle of Dogs protester told us. They drew a bright line between legal immigration and illegal immigration, between controlled immigration and uncontrolled immigration. This is not what fascism looks like.

The anger out there in the country over migration isn’t fuelled by hatred, but by a sense of injustice. Mass immigration and our broken asylum system are the issues through which ordinary people experience their political powerlessness. It doesn’t matter who they vote for, the problem only gets worse. Their own rights as citizens count for naught, because some judges and lawyers have decided as much. They don’t just suspect that a Britain without borders is bad for sovereignty, national cohesion, safety and the economy. Although they certainly do. They also suspect that the state has grown indifferent to them, even contemptuous of them. And I dare say Bridget Phillipson just proved them right.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater