BY NIALL McCRAE
‘Do not engage’ instructs a woman wearing a yellow vest. She is talking to two young male counter-protestors outside a hotel accommodating illegal immigrants. The independent journalist’s question ‘what brings you here today?’ goes unanswered, as they dutifully step back and put their masks on.
Why so compliant?
In all likelihood these are students, and they must do what they are told. The counter-protest is not an organic gathering but a well organised activity. Placards bearing messages against fascism are mass-produced by Socialist Worker Party and Stand Up to Racism, in ubiquitous yellow and pink (dubbed ‘Soros signs’ after the tycoon who funds subversive activism).
A professionally-produced banner names the area and claims local opposition to fascism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
Participants arrive and leave together. They parrot the chants of a woman with a megaphone, such as ‘say it loud, say it clear – refugees are welcome here’. Allegedly they receive not only lunch and travel expenses, but £40-£60 each for their time, arranged by student and trade unions.
Over two hundred large hotels around the country are under Home Office use for the mostly young men who cross the English Channel in dinghies. This is not an invasion, as the influx is clearly facilitated by the powers-that-be. A spate of rallies has erupted this summer against the placement of dozens or hundreds of undocumented males in hotels, often near schools or playgrounds.
The spark was at Epping, where a resident of the Bell Hotel was arrested for alleged sexual abuse of a local girl. This was merely the tip of an iceberg, as illegal immigrants in the hotels have committed a litany of crimes in their neighbourhoods. Large protests have occurred at Norwich, Diss, Dudley, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Southampton, Aldershot, Aberdeen and Falkirk.
Counter-protestors always appear, as though acting on information from the authorities. At Epping, police met a counter-protest group at the station and escorted them to the hotel, later transporting them in police vans back to the station. Accusations of two-tier policing are based on blatant evidence of biased tactics.
Until recently, the standard police method was for officers to stand facing the local protestors, in an intimidating manner, while appearing to protect the counter-protestors. When anyone responds to the regular chant of ‘Nazi scum’ by calling the other side ‘paedo protectors’, they are told by officers to desist from escalating the tension. Yet ‘Nazi scum’ is not discouraged.
Livestreamers have exposed the nasty behaviour of the counter-protestors, who often include a few Antifa-style activists with faces hidden by balaclava. Their job is to attack any local person who comes too near, and that includes independent journalists, to whom they are extremely hostile.
Ricky Jones, the Labour councillor who urged a huge anti-racism rally at Walthamstow last summer to ‘slit the throats’ of the enemy, was only in the news because a YouTuber caught him on camera. Jones was found not guilty of inciting violence, despite him clearly inciting violence. The system is against the ordinary people, but we should not despair. The public mood has shifted profoundly against the migrant hotel farce, and as the protests have grown and attract people of all ages, policing strategy has changed.
At one protest in Leeds last weekend, several counter-protestors were arrested, to the shock of their colleagues. ‘You’re supposed to be arresting them over there’, I heard one woman scream at officers.
The chant ‘this is what community looks like’ by people wearing masks and bearing hateful placards is at odds with the real citizenry across the road. Aggressive shouting ‘fascists off our streets’ is ironic, and the puerile ‘there are many, many more of us than you’ is now being sung back at the twisted ‘moralists’.
The counter-protests have become a PR disaster. It is readily apparent that their job is to smear legitimately concerned people as racist and to suppress opposition to what is manifestly a safety risk to women and children.
Trade union banners proliferate at the counter-protests. Unite, Unison and GMB deserve to be punished for paying agitators to attack working-class people, and any reasonable members observing the activities of counter-protestors, paid from union subscription fees, should cancel their membership.
Niall McCrae is an officer of the independent Workers of England Union