REFLECTED in a warning that tensions over a hotel housing asylum-seekers are a “powder keg”, the fears of many people in Epping are as much about the presence of outsider agitators as about the use of the hotel, the Archdeacon of Chelmsford, the Ven. Jonathan Croucher, said this week.
“We are very conscious of the concerns,” Archdeacon Croucher said. “But there is a fear that this is being latched on to by outside forces that have particular agendas and that, therefore, it’s quite difficult for the community to feel safe now. There is as much, if not more, worry about people coming in and stoking up agitation as there is about the presence of the hotel.”
Protests outside the Bell Hotel began on Thursday. They followed the arrest on 8 July of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, a 41-year-old asylum-seeker from Ethiopia who arrived in the UK last month by boat and had been staying there. He has been charged on three counts of sexual assault, one count of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity, and one count of harassment without violence. He has denied all offences and is on remand. His trial is due to start on 26 August.
The Conservative leader of Epping Forest District Council, Chris Whitbread, said that the Council had “consistently and repeatedly opposed the use of the Bell Hotel to accommodate asylum-seekers. . . Placing vulnerable individuals from a wide range of cultural backgrounds into an unsupervised setting, in the centre of a small town, without the proper infrastructure, support or services, is both reckless and unacceptable.” He has called for the hotel to be “closed without delay” by the Home Office.
The BBC reports that more than 1000 people have been involved in the protests, and the distribution of far-Right literature has been reported. Speaking to Newsnight on Tuesday, Mr Whitbread said: “It’s a powder keg now.” Essex Police have charged four men with violent disorder. Individuals “damaged a number of police vehicles, threw projectiles at officers and injured eight police officers”, their statement said.
“Our hope is that the voices of calm, of wisdom and peace, would prevail in this,” Archdeacon Croucher said. “There is a challenge to allow for a depth of communication and conversation that allows recognition, absolutely, of the fears that a parent of a young girl might properly have when they hear this account of a person arrested. We have to create an opportunity where the community can recognise both the reality of that fear and also the reality that there needs to be sensible dialogue around migration. . .
“We have to draw people back into a place where we can challenge policies on immigration without hating migrants, where we can talk about the desperate plight of people seeking asylum across the world without buying in to the argument they are all economic migrants and should be thrown out. . .
“A parent needs to be able to voice their concern without being labelled as a right-winger. People who want this country to continue to be a safe place for genuine asylum-seekers need to able to assert that without being accused of ignoring the impact on public services or caring about a child in Epping.”
He had spent the previous evening talking to the MP, Dr Neil Hudson, and the Team Rector of Epping District, the Revd John Fry, he said. “For Epping itself, there is a risk that you get drawn into war, and you are on one side or other; and I think John’s sense is that most people don’t want that war.”
St John the Baptist, Epping, is a four-minute drive from the hotel and has a long history of working with local asylum-seekers. A few have begun to attend the church, and some give help with a community-gardening project, allowing conversation in English and a chance to “do something productive” while being prohibited from working. In the past, people had been living for up to two years in hotels, Archdeacon Croucher said. “It’s a long time to be living in a room and not able to work legally. If you haven’t got anything to do, that is not good for anyone.”
A local school had successfully taken children from another hotel in Epping, he said. “People still have concerns. . . Lots of people share them, but, when you live through a realisation of what a value like inclusion can look like, it does change people, and it does break barriers down.”
Before his current appointment, Archdeacon Croucher was for ten years Vicar of Christ Church, Gipsy Hill, a south-London church that has found itself at the forefront of catering for Farsi-speaking worshippers (Features, 6 June).
“Allowing communities to support integration means looking at where you put people, the numbers that are there, what infrastructure is around,” he said. He noted the presence in the diocese of Wethersfield Asylum Centre, a former RAF airfield now used to house large numbers of single men, observing that there was “no real opportunity for integration”.
On Monday, the Minister for Policing, Diana Johnson, told the House of Commons: “Foreign nationals, including asylum-seekers, who abuse our hospitality by breaking our laws should expect to be removed from this country.” The law was being changed to ensure that individuals convicted of any registered sexual offence were not granted asylum, she said.
The Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, said that “many nationalities crossing— for example, Afghans — commit up to 20 times more sex offences than average. . . Violent protest in response to those appalling crimes is never justified. The public, though, are rightly sick of this illegal-immigrant crime wave.”
The Government has set out plans to end the use of hotels to hold asylum-seekers by 2029. They currently house about 32,000 asylum-seekers, at a cost of £1.3 billion over the past year.
