Yet an unusual amount of building activity is underway here — years before the development reaches the end of its natural lifespan. Outside three of the largest homes squat three commercial-sized skips. They are filled with builders’ waste and discarded furniture. Insulation boards and other building materials are stacked up next to them. Workers move in and out of various rooms, the windows open against the stifling heat, the sounds of drilling and banging echoing around the estate. The homes are being gutted. 

I stop and chat to a group of residents. Most have lived on the estate for decades, first renting privately from a local housing charity, then from Nationwide bank, and then from the commercial arm of the charitable housing association Notting Hill Genesis (NHG). 

But in October 2025, NHG — under financial pressure — sold the £58 million estate to a company called BMR Group. BMR specializes in office-to-residential conversions: buying up offices and flipping them into homes. It then lets the rooms, mostly to people who have applied to the council as homeless and need a temporary roof over their head. 

Residents at St James’ say that their new managing agent has told them that the company borrowed a large sum to fund the purchase. BMR is a small firm, with only two employees and £1.7 million in assets, according to its most recent accounts. It is eyeing significant changes to the estate. 

Fifty residents were served with “no fault” evictions before the law was changed to ban them in April. Dozens more were notified of hefty rent hikes: one was told their monthly bills would increase from £1,185 to £1,900, and others were quoted similar amounts. 

The existing residents feel certain that the new landlord wants them out and plans to convert their homes once empty into “‘houses in multiple occupancy”’ (HMOs). This way, the landlord could take placements from the local council, the Home Office and various other government bodies, making substantially more than they would renting to families. The residents say some homes have already been converted in this way, and that the skips and building work in the vacant ones represent further conversions.

Neither BMR or its managing agent, Freshview, responded to a request for comment by UnHerd. But Freshview has since told the BBC that it is “no proposal to convert the estate as a whole into HMOs”, and that it reviewed rent levels after finding those previously charged were “substantially below” market rates.   

More from this author

Can Britain escape its housing trap?

By Peter Apps

“I just don’t like to think about what will happen — if I do I get too upset,” says Mary, a 55-year-old mother of two. “I am sticking up for my neighbors, but I am afraid. I don’t know where I will live.” 

This estate is an extreme example of something that is happening throughout lower income urban areas across the UK. At its most basic, an “HMO”, or “house in multiple occupation”, is any property rented to two or more separate households who share facilities like bathrooms and kitchens. But in 2026, it can also represent what one councilor covering the St James Estate describes as a “state-backed cash machine”. 

This is because several government agencies — primarily local authorities and the Home Office — owe statutory housing duties to various people in need, which they need to discharge quickly and cheaply. To do so, they rely on a network of private sector middlemen who strike “guaranteed rent” deals with local landlords, who then take on the governments’ tenants. 

As traditional private renting becomes more tightly regulated and less profitable, more and more landlords are moving to this model. But as they do, decent housing  is cannibalized to make way, and family neighborhoods slowly transform into more transient, more atomized places. 

“You’ve got to think about what it does to the community,” says Danny Turner, who works for the housing charity Keep It Moving, which works with young people who live in HMOs in south London. “I don’t want to vilify the people who have complex support needs, but they have no space inside and often just end up sat out in the street. It contributes to a decline in the community, to people not feeling safe in the area.”

All told, there were an estimated 360,000 such properties in England and Wales in 2025 — although this only includes those large enough to be registered with a local council.  

And what is most staggering is the rate of growth. In the absence of official statistics, UnHerd sent Freedom of Information requests to 50 of the largest urban areas. Among the 32 which responded, there were a combined 21,888 registered HMOs in 2020-1. By 2025-6, there were 32,099 — a 50% rise in just five years.

In some inner London areas the rise was sharper still. Haringey, for instance, had just 396 registered HMOs five years ago. Half a decade on, that figure had jumped to 1,871.

How, then, to explain the HMO boom? In terms of demand, the years since Covid-19 and the cost-of-living crisis have seen more people seeking out the cheapest possible accommodation they can find. In most instances, this will be a room in a HMO. The same pressures have sharply increased rates of homelessness — especially in London. When a homeless household is in priority need (due to poor health, fleeing domestic violence or having children), its local council is obliged to find them temporary housing. Again, this is often in a HMO. The Home Office also secures thousands of properties around the country to use as dispersal accommodation for asylum seekers awaiting decisions; meanwhile prison leavers, recovering addicts, people with complex mental health needs and even looked-after children can all find themselves in state-funded HMO housing. 

And then there is supply. The new legislation protecting tenants from, say, no-fault evictions will mostly not apply when a resident is housed under one of these government schemes. Certain taxes can be skirted too. And in some instances, especially where public bodies are desperate or residents have additional needs, huge sums of money can be charged. This makes it good business for landlords.   

The sums of public money on offer here are not small. Councils in England spent £2.8 billion on temporary housing for the homeless in 2024-5. The Home Office spent £2.7 billion on asylum seeker accommodation in the same year. Up to £130 million in housing benefit goes to landlords providing so-called “exempt accommodation” for people in particular need. Convert a street property into a HMO and you can get your hands on a big chunk of cash. 

“There seems to be two things going on,” explains Susie Dye, who leads policy work on housing at the charity Trust for London. “One is about landlord business models. Some landlords are concluding that being a private landlord is too risky and they want to avoid the regulations. And the other is straight up tooth-and-claw capitalism — they are hearing about the money being spent on temporary accommodation and they are trying to increase their return.”

For private landlords, the most common model is some form of “guaranteed-rent” arrangement, with an estate agency acting as middleman and broker between the landlord and the state. The landlord will take a home off the regular private rented market, before leasing it to an estate agency. UnHerd phoned one such agency — Theori Housing Management Services — and posed as the owner of a newly-inherited three-bedroom home in east London. We were offered a guaranteed £2,000 a month for three years. This is less than might be made on the open private market in this particular area, but the guaranteed cash and removal of responsibility make it an attractive proposition nonetheless. 

The private landlord receives this “guaranteed rent” from the agency, and effectively sees their involvement end. It is the agency that then finds a resident, charges the state-body rent above that which it is paying the landlord, and makes a tidy profit on the margin. 

Steadily, these agencies — often backstreet affairs with a small number of directors, limited public accounts, and no real regulation — have become the major beneficiaries of state spending on housing.  

One analysis of transparency data showed that the estate agent Stef and Philips, headquartered in an office near the northern end of the Piccadilly Line, was paid £3.49 million by London boroughs in a single month last year. In London, where there are an extraordinary number of homeless households seeking temporary accommodation, councils spend £5 million a day on this accommodation: equivalent to £200 a year out of the council tax bill of every single Londoner.

There is an argument that these landlords and agents are simply reacting to societal demands. “They are meeting a legitimate demand in what is a really problematic housing market,” says Dan Hawthorn, co-chair of the London Housing Directors’ Group. But London boroughs also struggle to find housing that is both affordable and good quality. As Hawthorn adds: “Never has so much public money been spent on such terrible outcomes”.

That’s clear enough across London. England’s Lane, in Camden, is a former interwar nurses accommodation with 162 rooms. Now it’s used by Southwark Council to house vulnerable families — including mothers with children, some of them very young. 

A report by a tenant’s union that represents residents at the block raised issues with very high electricity costs. Tenants have to top up a cash meter every day, with most saying they had to pay between £40 and £60 a week to keep the lights on, including a daily charge. More than 60% said they go without power because it costs too much and skipped meals to pay for it. Many of them reported rooms getting too hot, with indoor temperatures reaching 40 degrees. “My child gets a recurring nosebleed due to excessive heat,” said one. Almost half told the survey there were problems with mold and pests. They said staff bullied them and were “rude beyond words” when they raised concerns. Property Playbook* — which manages the block — has taken £7.5m in rental payments from Southwark for it since 2020, according to a Freedom of Information request made by UnHerd.

I also visit Kap House**, a converted office property on a back street in the North London suburb of Harrow. There are 73 flats in the block, with each tenant paying around £600 a month in rent. That means the property pays out more than £40,000 a month to the landlord. Several of the doors I knock on have residents placed there by local authorities, meaning much of this money comes from the public purse. Others are renting privately — it is the best they can afford. 

When UnHerd visited in June, in the hallway, a stack of residents’ letter lockers were battered, their doors hanging loose as if someone had raided them. A sign warned there was now CCTV coverage in the building due to “serious criminal activity”. I entered flats which had stains on the walls and stank of raw sewage. “I have had [serious health issues],” one resident explained. “I had to leave my old home because the landlord put the rent up. But I shouldn’t have to live like this, it’s inhuman.” One vacant flat — which a resident had recently been moved out of due to the conditions — had walls covered in mold and holes in the ceiling. 

Not that these problems discourage agencies from being hard-elbowed about extracting even more money from local authorities. When, for instance, a council is desperate to find a home for a tenant in need at short notice, an agency will sometimes ask for “incentive” payments to secure a room fast. These can run to thousands of pounds. UnHerd has seen an email from letting agent K7 Residential asking Croydon Council to pay “an incentive requirement of £2,500” before allowing a resident have a viewing. A source familiar with the model says that desperate local authorities have at times been billed as much as £7,000 to secure a room. 

All the while, agents have increasingly moved from agreeing long-term lease arrangements to demanding “nightly rates”, which are unsurprisingly much higher. In some cases, this has involved a peculiar legal fiction, where they effectively evict themselves from the property and re-let it.

Luke Sheldon, a solicitor who works with the community group Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth, says he attended a court hearing in April 2024 where ZFA — an agency which works across many London boroughs and receives millions in rental payments — was having possession proceedings brought against them and “persons unknown” by another company with which it shares directors. 

“From seeing a number of similar cases,” Sheldon explains, “I believe the intention was often to end the current leases they’d agreed with the councils so they could be re-let at a higher nightly rate.” Though Sheldon and his colleagues normally can’t see how much an agency wants to increase the rent by, he says that in one case it surged by 40%. “I’ve got a client [in temporary accommodation] who’s been on a nightly rate for 10 years now, despite having been in the same property for that whole time.”

Bigger money has taken note. Large investment funds operate a “leaseback” model with local authorities. They purchase housing for use as temporary accommodation and then sign a long-term, inflation-linked lease deal with a council, which is able to use the bedspace for households in need. 

“The investors that are coming into this space do seem to be getting bigger in terms of their backing,” says Samantha Grix, a partner at Devonshires Solicitors, which works on deals of this kind. “Enquiries are regularly coming from people looking to get into this area. Some are institutionally backed whereas others are existing property investors or family offices who have seen the opportunity. They see this as a potential investment portfolio where they can buy properties and use them for a good cause.”

Grix adds that securing longer-term deals could help councils move away from reliance on nightly paid accommodation to more strategic agreements. All the same, this may not make commercial sense; councils with huge waiting lists could easily be tempted into long-term deals that burden taxpayers for years to come. 

In the meantime, so desperate are local authorities for accommodation that they will seemingly broker deals with anyone who can offer a room. Freedom of Information requests sent to a range of local authorities in 2024 showed a range of private individuals with no registered businesses receiving tens of thousands of pounds from various London boroughs. Several pubs received regular payments; Eastleigh Council had even spent money on “Bell Tent Glamping”, which provides yurts on a campsite outside Southampton. 

As well as local authorities, there is the Home Office, which rents large numbers of rooms in HMOs as it seeks to move people awaiting asylum decisions out of hotels. The Home Office primarily uses three large contractors, Serco, Mears and Clearsprings Ready Homes, to source the rooms. These large contractors then work in the same way as the councils do when they are housing homeless families. They find an agency offering a bedspace, which is likely to have secured it from a private landlord with a guaranteed rent deal. This means three layers of business make a profit from the state: the landlord who owns the property, the middleman who signed them up to the guaranteed rent deal, and the large contractor who arranged it for the Home Office. 

The homes can be miserable. A report by Refugee Action found whole families living in single rooms with no lockable front door for years. The report also referred to pest infestations, mold, flooding, overcrowding, infectious disease outbreaks, children going without education and families going without food.

Andy Burnham’s recent statement that all parts of the UK must “do their part” in housing asylum seekers signals that Home Office will find placements across a wider swathe of the country. Currently, most Home Office HMOs are located in the North West and North East, with 11% of local authority areas not having taken any placements at all.  

HMOs are hard to escape. Residents who succeed in their application are given 42 days to leave Home Office accommodation and find somewhere else to live. Once they leave, often this means moving directly into another HMO. Croydon recently signed a £1 million contract with a firm called Reloc8 — which styles itself as a “London Relocation Expert”. The firm, this time based in a small industrial estate in a village in Derbyshire, finds rooms in towns around the country, which local authorities can offer to individuals and families in need of housing, including homeless households and those leaving asylum accommodation. Again, this sort of deal provides the demand which drives landlords in the receiving towns to set up HMO housing.

There are various other drivers of demand for HMO housing. People with complex support needs can claim higher rates of housing benefit to cover enhanced housing costs, but this so-called “exempt accommodation” has been seized on by some unscrupulous landlords who are simply warehousing recovering addicts and people with serious mental health problems in HMOs and cashing the check. Worse still are unregistered children’s homes, subject of a recent investigation by the BBC. These properties can become enormous money-spinners for those running them. After all, agencies can bill the council for the cost of staff to care for the children. 

Danny Turner, from the charity Keep It Moving, supports young people in this position, some of whom have been freshly discharged from custody or prison hospitals. “They [the landlords] basically say, ‘Oh, we need more staff to take on this young person,’” Turner explains. “In extreme cases, this can end up with eight staff for one child.” These staff may have limited qualifications, and do little real work, but the council will pay for the lot. “These guys are printing money,” says Turner. 

There are many other uses for HMOs — often the only option for those who cannot afford to rent elsewhere. HMOs originally grew throughout the 2000s in university towns where whole enclaves were taken over by students. Students still make up a big proportion of the HMO population in these towns. Moves towards purpose-built student accommodation have stalled recently thanks to higher building costs, and the market is reverting back to investment in HMOs. In November last year, Brookfield Asset Management, one of the largest owners of real estate in the world, spent £100m on a portfolio of 1,300 HMO rooms aimed at students. 

All of this causes real problems. On the one hand, HMOs are simply a way of making housing cheaper — you rent a room in a house rather than a house. But they also come with problems. Individuals are more atomized. They tend to move rapidly. Bonds between neighbors fray. The homes are often overcrowded. There are longstanding concerns about sanitation and fire safety.

The growth of HMOs in coastal towns — where former B&Bs were converted in the 2000s and often used for homelessness placements — has been viewed as a major factor in their decline. A study of these places in 2012 found “high population transience and density; downgraded residential environments; and fragile community cohesion”. As HMOs march forward into a wider swathe of urban environments, such issues are likely to follow. 

What are the solutions? A kneejerk response would be to insist that the state should not provide this kind of housing so widely. But where would that leave those in need? Grim as an HMO might be for a homeless family or a recovering addict, it beats sleeping under a bridge. And a room in a house with — at least — cooking facilities is better and cheaper than an indefinite stint in a hotel.

The rising demand for emergency HMO housing is the result of policy failures elsewhere. People are falling through the cracks in the support system, and this is the very bottom layer of the safety net left after much else has been stripped away. 

Suggested reading

The scandal of Portsmouth's broken homes

By Greg Noone

Some hope that better protection for tenants in private rented housing will help many people avoid becoming homeless, and Burnham’s renewed push to build more council housing will provide better options for the homeless families who need a more secure home. But these hopes must be tempered by realism: there is a risk that enhanced renters’ rights will push more private landlords to move into the HMO space instead, where the profits are much greater; and council housing targets are a long way from being delivered. Recent funding of £39bn to build new social housing is impressive in recent terms, but will be spent across a 10-year period. 

Perhaps the state needs to become smarter: it needs to procure better, know who it is getting housing from, ensure it is decent quality and pay more competitive prices rather than simply throwing money at the issue. Local authorities could surely deliver more of this housing directly rather than rely on multi-layered private lease deals that turn it into a cash machine. 

More radical solutions involve the construction of quick, temporary factory-built structures — which, when done well, can be comfortable and secure. These are being piloted in some areas, but bump into issues with planning and cost. 

Back on the St James’ estate in Bermondsey, residents fear they will find themselves homeless and then placed in the sort of HMOs which have forced them out of their permanent homes. As an encapsulation of where we’ve been going wrong in housing policy, the residents’ story is hard to beat. 

“There are six primary schools in this area,” says Abigail, who lives on the estate and is campaigning against the eviction. “This is a community with a lot of families, and they are trying to get rid of us all. Everyone will be scattered out of London and beyond, and the schools will eventually close down.”

The yellow skips behind her as she talks are being filled with the remnants of a family home. It will soon be driven to an industrial tip and landfilled or incinerated. Without a fight, the community it was once a part of will be consigned to the scrapheap too. 

* In a letter to UnHerd, Property Playbook said its records show residents pay around £35 a week for utilities (including gas, electric and water) and disputed the claims of higher payments made in the survey. It added that England’s Lane accommodates many residents who are satisfied with their accommodation, the management of the building and the support they receive. It listed various support services – including stay and play and family support services – which residents receive.

** On its website, a company named Kingsbridge Capital claims to have developed Kap House into residential in 2016, having acquired the freehold in 2017. When UnHerd contacted Kingsbridge for comment, it said it was not a freeholder and was not in any way a connected party to the property. It went on to say that the allegations about the property were “inaccurate, wholly unsubstantiated and rejected in their entirety”. It said none of the flats in Kap House were impacted by damp or mold, and added that it rejected that there was a sewage smell or water staining. 

Another would-be migrant claimed Moroccan police encouraged him, crying “come to Spain!”

It sounds like a tourist board slogan, and it turned out to be misleading. By Friday afternoon, these men, along with most of the illegal arrivals, were already trudging home, baffled by Ceuta’s lack of suitable accommodation, food or drink. Europe’s famed hospitality had let them down.

The stories of illegal migrants who made the journey there and back again contrast markedly with official Moroccan reports. Moroccan rights groups claim police used water cannons and fired warning shots to prevent crossings (clearly with little success). Morocco’s ambassador to Spain said events unfolded against Morocco’s wishes and that “we have always prioritized legal, orderly and safe migration for all” — a Freudian slip for the ages.

The days since have seen a rash of speculation over Morocco’s motivations for encouraging — or at least facilitating — the crisis. Commentators and experts point out Spanish ties to Western Sahara separatists and the reopening of lucrative economic ties with Morocco’s regional rivals Algeria, as well as Moroccan resentment over the perceived colonial nature of Spanish rule in Ceuta. Other analysts argue that a nexus of Moroccan, Israeli and American interests has combined in order to undermine the Spanish government led by socialist Pedro Sánchez, whom Donald Trump appears to see as the embodiment of Europe’s ills.

Suggested reading

Did MAGA create the Ceuta crisis?

By Juan David Rojas

Did Morocco facilitate the crisis? Were the young men’s claims of police encouragement true? This would help explain the scale of the migrant surge, but it cuts against Sánchez’s public response. Rather than rebuking Morocco for its egregious lapse in border enforcement, the Spanish leader thanked Rabat for its “cooperation” in defusing the situation.

Sánchez saved his ire, instead, for the 22 EU leaders who signed an open letter criticizing his pro-migration policies, in particular Spain’s recent mass regularization of illegal immigrants. Sánchez condemned the “selfish, polarizing and unlawful reaction” of his EU peers, saying countries that backed Spain’s temporary suspension from the Schengen Zone were “driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest.”

In short, Sánchez appeared happier with Morocco — the state accused by many of facilitating the crisis — than with fellow Europeans seeking to enforce stronger migration controls.

Granted, Sánchez is typically a defender of migration. But his refusal to cast blame on Morocco illuminates a shift in relations between the EU and north Africa, driven by migration dynamics. This shift puts European leaders of all stripes in the same boat.

The EU has made the externalization of migration controls a crucial factor in relations with countries around its external borders. A cornerstone of the bloc’s rightward shift on migration — often labeled “Fortress Europe” — is a focus on bilateral agreements with third countries, particularly in north Africa, which act as gateway states for those seeking to attempt the perilous voyage across the Mediterranean.

These agreements tie EU financial aid to efforts from countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to contain illegal migration flows. European nations equip and train local maritime police while disbursing hefty financial aid to sweeten the deal. The EU’s controversial 2023 deal with Tunisia on migration proposed over €1 billion in aid, while Morocco, another key gateway state, has received hundreds of millions of euros, most of it earmarked for “integrated border management and the fight against smuggling and trafficking in human beings.”

EU leaders thought that by externalizing migration controls — and washing their hands of the dirty work involved — they had found the perfect solution. Stopping illegal migrants from ever reaching EU soil would, it was reasoned, save the bloc from ever having to confront the thorniest problem relating to illegal migration: the knot of human rights legislation that protects migrants once they arrive. For that reason, leaders hoped that partnership agreements would neutralize public concerns over illegal immigration.

But the Ceuta crisis suggests that “Fortress Europe” is a castle built on sand, one that is perennially vulnerable to the caprice of Europe’s partners. Incentivizing non-EU states to manage migration flows creates a mutual dependency: the gatekeeper states depend on EU financial aid, while the EU depends on their efforts to keep migrants off European soil. The seismic implication of Ceuta is that, amid growing Western panic over migration levels, that mutual dependency is no longer balanced — and the West’s partners are learning the art of blackmail.

Are Sànchez’s words, then, those of an out-of-touch, anti-European traitor, as many onlookers caricature him? Or are they, instead, the supplication of a man with a figurative gun to his head? It should, again, be emphasized that there is no hard evidence to prove that Moroccan authorities were complicit in the Ceuta crisis. But the EU’s externalized migration controls have handed its leaders significant power to disrupt Spain and the bloc as a whole, whether they choose to use it or not.

In that sense, the Ceuta incident shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The EU doesn’t have to look far for a precedent when it comes to hostile weaponization of illegal migration flows. For years, Poland has accused Belarus of sponsoring illegal migration, luring migrants from across the Middle East and Africa on tourist visas with the promise of an easy jaunt into the Schengen area. Successive Polish governments have undertaken heavy militarization of the country’s eastern border, and the route has become deadly. 

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk justified this uncompromising response by saying: “We are not dealing with just any asylum seekers, we are dealing with a coordinated, very efficient operation to break the Polish border and attempts to destabilize the country.”

The Polish response has been harshly condemned by human rights groups, which, given the severity of Warsaw’s measures, is unsurprising. Measures at the border with Belarus include a 5.5-meter-high steel fence with electronic monitoring systems to detect attempted crossings. Poland has also loosened rules around the use of firearms — introduced after a soldier was murdered at the border — that NGOs say give officers a “license to kill”. And since 2025, Poland has suspended the right of all arrivals from Belarus to claim asylum. The latter move was lambasted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as Poland’s commissioner for human rights, an internal ombudsman, as a violation of European law.

From the perspective of stopping illegal migration at the Belarusian border, though, Warsaw’s harsh measures have been a resounding success. While 40,000 attempted crossings were reported in 2021, and 15,500 in the first half of 2025, the official figure for the first half of 2026 was just 235. Belarus’s focus for illegal migration flows has now shifted to the Baltic states, forcing Latvia to seal its southeastern border at the end of July.

Suggested reading

America's diversity stress

By Sohrab Ahmari

Given openly hostile relations between Belarus and the EU, Minsk’s actions are understood as a form of hybrid warfare and punished as such through sanctions. The EU has no similarly clear-cut way of understanding the new power wielded by its partner states in north Africa. European leaders must, in this context, ask themselves two questions: how can they be sure that gatekeeper states are on their side, and, if there are concerns over these partners’ good intentions, what options does that leave?

One potential path is appeasement. Sánchez’s thanks for Morocco’s cooperation — in defusing a crisis which it stands accused of having created — can be understood in this light. The more money Europe pumps into external migration partnerships, the more dependent it becomes on those partner states, and the greater their strength — and Europe’s concurrent temptation towards appeasement — becomes.

A second option, in which Europe accepts that externalization agreements pose risks, would be to take back responsibility by significantly strengthening EU states’ own illegal migration controls and enforcement capabilities. This won’t happen, though, until leaders tackle the legal protections that migrants gain once they reach EU soil. There is a tight connection between changes in international human rights law and resultant migration: hence the apparent link between the Ceuta crisis and a Spanish Supreme Court ruling blocking deportations without due process for sea arrivals. It is the opposite effect to the plummeting rate of arrivals to Poland from Belarus since all asylum applications from that country were banned.

Thirdly, Europe could consider applying the playbook which it already uses against Belarus and Russia to any state which it suspects of weaponizing migration with hostile intent — even gatekeeper countries. Hostile exploitation of migration by Russia and Belarus is met with punishment in the form of sanctions and the severing of diplomatic relations. These tools, or at least the threat of them, could be applied more broadly. Facilitating mass illegal migration is not, after all, the act of a friendly nation.

The EU is the largest trading partner for all the key migrant gatekeeper nations in north Africa. It has the economic clout to deter potential hostile exploitation of migration by those states, and while not every lapse in migration controls is an act of hybrid warfare, a carrot-and-stick approach — the “stick” being the credible threat of sanctions — may restore balance to the increasingly lopsided nature of these relationships.

It is disturbing to think that exploitative illegal migration flows may be motivated by geopolitical power games. But Europe should be more disturbed by its powerlessness in the Ceuta affair; a powerlessness created by counterproductive elements of human rights legislation, formalized in externalization agreements with third countries, and exemplified by Sánchez’s thanks to a state which dramatically failed to uphold its end of the bargain in protecting Europe from illegal immigration. 

The EU must also face up to the fact that in the event of instability elsewhere in the region — renewed conflict in major migrant transit nation Libya, for example, or a breakdown in the EU’s fraught relationship with Tunisia — potentially hostile regimes may similarly wield migration as a weapon. This risk is only heightened by the ongoing surge of refugees north from war-torn African states; an estimated two million Sudanese refugees have fled to key EU partners Egypt and Libya alone since the nation’s civil war began in April 2023. 

One thing has become alarmingly clear: the ability of non-European states, who may not have our best interests at heart, to dictate migration flows, in so doing undermining societies and sowing panic. Europe gifted them this ability. Whatever conclusions it draws from the Ceuta crisis, it must now learn to stand up for itself.

Having accepted a council house where few others were willing to move, the newlyweds discovered a friendly working-class community living on estates built following the Second World War. When Margaret Thatcher kickstarted the peninsula’s redevelopment in 1988, Bob found work as a builder. Standing at the base of a 39-story tower on Wednesday afternoon, he points to the roads and drains which mark out his contribution to the global financial center now stretching out around his home.

Then, the area began to decline. “It used to be lovely,” says Nina. “It’s been going downhill for 10 years. The police never come. If we owned our house, we’d move. There is no community here anymore.”

Instead, at night, they see young men inhaling nitrous oxide balloons behind the wheels of their cars. A local gang recently attacked the house next door to them, smashing in its windows and setting fire to a vehicle outside. The police took an hour to arrive. If they were quoted in the press, they tell me, they would face “reprisals”. Bob and Nina are not their real names.

On Wednesday, however, the police did come to the Isle of Dogs. They lined up on either side of the street outside the Britannia Hotel. The Home Office were requisitioning the building to house asylum seekers, and the previous day a group of protesters had gathered. Many believed the immigrants would be moved in from Epping, where the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by a man at the Bell Hotel has sparked weeks of protest.

Suggested reading

Reform is coming for Dagenham

By Fred Sculthorp

For Bob and Nina, this marked a final betrayal. Their son had been forced to move away from the Island, as locals still refer to it, by soaring property prices. If he were to request a council house as his parents once had, there would be 1,500 people ahead of him in the queue. For now, he lives in a one-bedroom flat in Bow with six-month-old twins and a five-year-old. “They’re unvetted,” says Bob, “…and they get houses straight away.”

While the Government’s use of three-star hotels to house asylum seekers has proved controversial for years, recent protests in Epping, whipped up by various actors, have galvanized a wider movement. In Diss, Norfolk, a demonstration was held outside the Park Hotel following news this week that it would no longer house families but single men. Further rallies are planned there, as well as at the Brook Hotel in Bowthorpe, near Norwich, and in Waterlooville, Hampshire, where asylum seekers will be housed in a vacant high street shop.

Peter Golds, a Conservative councillor who represents the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, fears the requisitioning of the Britannia Hotel will spark community tensions. He maintains the Island is diverse and happy — he lives there himself — but worries about the increasingly feverish anger of locals. He shows me messages on his phone from constituents which display a raw fury.

“It’s a government catastrophe,” Golds claims. “Would the French put them in a hotel with a sauna, chandeliers and a swimming pool? Would Meloni put them in central Rome? We’re mad.” On the nearby Barkentine Estate, he says, homes are desperately overcrowded; teens are sharing bunkbeds and “suddenly they’re seeing people getting off a boat and going into a hotel”.

Others are angrier still. Alf, a young man in an England shirt with a patchy beard, butts in to tell us that small boat migrants should be shot on sight. You would end up with small children drowning in the Channel if you did that, pleads the councillor. He can see his happy community slipping away in front of him.

For Alf, only a government led by Nigel Farage can fix Britain now. He lives just a few streets away from the Britannia, and can remember when the area was alive with dozens of pubs and local businesses. A perfume salesman by training, he used to work in Harrods until he squeezed a female colleague’s bicep (at, he insists, her instigation) and was fired for sexual harassment. For the past 15 years he tells me he has been warning his friends about Muslims, who he insists are taught to rape and kill Christians and Jews. “I’m not Tommy Robinson,” he says. “I’m quite a shy person. I don’t like trouble, but when I see something not right I have to stand up.”

Like him, most of the protesters are locals. “The Isle of Dogs is a tight-knit community,” says Mary, as she hands out homemade signs that read, “Stop calling us far right. Protect our women and children.” Over the school summer holidays, kids will be out playing in the streets, says a man standing next to her. He believes they will not be safe if asylum seekers are moved into the hotel.

More from this author

Will the Epping protests spread?

By Felix Pope

While many here are working class, others come from a very different world. One Polish man gestures to the flat he plans to buy in Wardian London, an ultra-luxury development next door to the hotel where 70% of the properties are priced at over $1.5 million. If asylum seekers are moved in, he says, he will have to reconsider.

There’s a Bangladeshi community too. They moved to the Island after the Second World War to work on its docks and fill its cheap housing. A group loiters nearby. Rocky, who grew up here, remembers the Eighties as a dangerous time. “This area used to be a no-go zone for us, we got chased out of here,” he says. When he was around seven, he wandered into the wrong neighborhood and a group of white men in their 20s stabbed his football with a knife before holding its blade to his face.

Now, he says, different communities get along. He worries that the arrival of asylum seekers might change that. “It can cause a division and more racism.” The younger men in his group agree. “Thousands of them are arriving every day,” Rocky says of the small boat migrants. “They’re not educated, they don’t know the law. If you’re going to stick them here, it will cause an uproar. You’ll have single men harassing young girls. I can foresee migrants hanging around outside causing no good.” All of the British-born Muslims in his neighborhood are opposed to the hotel being requisitioned, he claims. “We may be bilingual but we’re British in here,” he adds, pointing at his temple.

A few miles from Pearse’s cottage in Ros Muc, in what is now the Connemara Gaeltacht — one of the few and dwindling Irish-speaking regions of the country — the small village of Carna is experiencing its own quiet rebellion against a distant and hostile Dublin administration. With fewer than 180 inhabitants, this isolated village is internationally renowned for the vibrancy of its Irish-speaking vernacular culture, and its tradition of sean-nós singing and elaborate storytelling. Served by a single daily bus from the nearest city of Galway, which takes an hour and a half to wend its way through a dramatic, if desolate landscape of sheer rock jutting from brown bogs and gray Atlantic inlets, Carna’s only hotel has been chosen by the Irish state as a suitable location for an International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) center for 87 asylum seekers, to local fear and disapproval.

When I arrive in Carna, on a dark and blustery evening, I meet local men and women in hi-vis vests gathered outside the Carna Bay hotel, sharing tea from flasks and sheltering against the bitter, horizontal rain. Since the news was announced last week, locals have monitored incoming traffic for the arrival of their new neighbors, and are mounting a 24-hour vigil in shifts outside the hotel to prevent their arrival. “Who are these people?” asks one elderly woman, back again after mounting guard until 4am that morning. “They’re just unvetted. I just worry because I live alone. They [the Dublin political class] don’t care about us back here, they love to buy their little holiday homes here but that’s it.”

In recent years, and especially following the advent of coalition government rule, to prevent Sinn Féin from entering power in 2020, the Irish state has embarked upon the most dramatic and transformative experiment with demographic change in all Europe. That comes at precisely the same time that the rest of the continent’s political stability is being overturned by popular hostility to mass immigration. Around a fifth of Ireland’s population is now made up of first-generation migrants, an existential change for the country’s identity, undertaken by Dublin with a crusading zeal that seems to defy rational explanation.

At the westernmost edge of Europe, Ireland’s asylum application figures per capita nevertheless outpace “frontline states” such as Italy, while the state grants asylum applications from countries like Nigeria, Pakistan and Algeria routinely rejected by the rest of the EU. While Ireland’s new Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently admitted that 80% of asylum applicants are, in fact, purely economic migrants, the accelerating inward flow and the resulting, sometimes violent protests, have seen the Irish state disperse migrants from Dublin, a now palpably changed city, to towns and villages across the countryside, despite the opposition of the residents. In Lisdoonvarna, in neighboring County Clare, 93% of residents expressed opposition to an asylum center in their small town’s single hotel. They were overruled: overnight, the locals became a minority in their own town. Villagers in Carna now fear Dublin has the same in store for them. “The government could be paid off already and that’s why they’re doing it,” one young lad warming himself against a brazier mutters darkly. “There’s not enough here for us as it is.”

Suggested reading

Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland

By Darran Anderson

Sheltering from the Atlantic rain in a livestock trailer, I speak to Noel Thomas, a rural Galway councilor for Ireland’s anti-immigration Independent Ireland coalition. As we chat, local lads listen, their cigarettes glowing in the dark. “There’s a lot of them coming here that are very different to what we are here in Ireland,” he says. “It’s going to end the same way it has ended in other parts of Europe that we can see. And I mean, why, in the name of God, do we think that we can bring in all these people into this country, and that’s going to work out different? It just doesn’t make sense. And these elected representatives we have like, they’re smart people, so no point saying they’re stupid. They know this themselves, but yet they continue to do it. So what is the agenda at the end of the day? I can’t figure it out, to be honest with you.”

Thomas was active in 2023 protests against an IPAS center in the nearby village of Rosscahill. When the hotel planned for the site burned down — part of a nationwide wave of arson attacks against proposed asylum centers which the Irish state is struggling to suppress — Garda Special Branch raided his house at night, suspecting him of involvement. “There’s no way they came to my house thinking that I was actually involved in an arson, like,” Thomas tells me. “But at the same time, they’ve been given orders from the top, and they had to go and show their heads, and you can see very clearly that none of them wanted to be there, they looked actually kind of embarrassed to be there. But they just had to carry out their duty there, the commands they were given, but this is the kind of levels that this government is willing to stoop to in this country here.” The youths around murmur their assent. “It’ll end up getting burned down here too, but it won’t be ones from here that’ll have done it,” one lad says. “It’ll be outsiders.”

According to a Garda report recently leaked to the Irish Times, 33 arson attacks took place against planned or rumored IPAS centers in the year up to August 2024. That’s “significantly more than previously publicly reported”, forcing the government to abandon housing migrants in North Dublin and across swathes of the Western counties of Clare, Kerry, Mayo and Donegal. Protesters against planned or completed IPAS sites in Coolock and Newtownmountkennedy have been active in protests across the Republic, and, more controversially, alongside Loyalists in Northern Ireland. It’s all part of a wave of social media-led anti-immigration activism that has so far failed to leave much of an electoral mark. While Carna, along with the nearby village of Kinvara, has become the latest cause célèbre of Irish anti-immigration activists, the local protesters would prefer their cause to remain peaceable and local-led.

“We’re not shouting, we’re not marching, we don’t have signs, we don’t have any of that,” Meadhbh Ní Ghaora, the 28-year-old organizer of the vigil tells me. “It’s just a local presence, to maybe show the government that we’re not just going to sit here quietly and not do nothing.” In other protest locations, Ní Ghaora observes, outside activists have confronted the police or taken violent action and then returned to their homes, but “it’s those villages then that’s wrecked. We want this hotel to open up again for tourism, and this is why we want to keep it as a local thing. We do not want to be wrecked, and we want people to visit when this hotel is hopefully up and running again as a functioning hotel. We’re a welcoming village, and we want it to stay like that.”

Inside Tig Morain, one of Carna’s two pubs, local men in hi-vis vests nurse their pints, chatting quietly in Irish, as a tabby cat slumbers in the corner. And like Ní Ghaora, they’re keen to keep things peaceful. “We don’t want people stirring shit here, there’s only one road in and out and we’d have the guards [Gardaí] all over us,” the landlord Peter Fitzpatrick tells me. “We have such a small population, and you mix in 80 migrants or 85 migrants, there’s certainly a huge imbalance. So, yeah, people are frightened People are scared.”

“I spoke to three people, and genuinely they’re thinking about selling up, you know, that’s for people that have been born and reared here. There’s huge anger, I mean, you’ve seen the weather we’ve had in the last couple of days, pouring rain, storm, cold, and there’s people out standing on the side of the road, getting wet, with no facilities whatsoever, doing a 24-hour watch, not alone on the hotel but on roads leading into the village, and these are people that are 50s, 60s, 70s, up.”

More from this author

The war for the Irish language

By Aris Roussinos

Carna was a thriving fishing village until EU regulations made the old way of life financially unviable. “​​I was born and raised five yards from the sea,” Fitzpatrick says, “now that’s all died out.” Instead, Carna increasingly makes its living from tourism, with Irish students and international visitors coming to experience the village’s Irish-language folk culture and distinctive dialect: “There are people in their 70s and 80s here that have no English.”

But increasingly restrictive planning regulations mean that young Irish-speaking locals are unable to build homes to stay in the area, throttling the language’s survival at the roots, with the arrival of the migrants threatening both the tourism on which the village economy depends and the age-old way of life. “I suppose the Irish language is on the decline as it is,” Ní Ghaora tells me. “And, you know, bringing people like this in, it doesn’t help it in any way to stay alive. And, like, maybe place names or maybe local words and stuff that would be different in this area, that’s all going to go when people aren’t speaking the Irish you know… you’re asking for the language to almost fade, there.” Again, questions of identity mix with more quotidian concerns. Like others I speak to, Ní Ghaora emphasizes she isn’t racist. But with the hotel such an important part of the community, losing it would be a hammerblow to local livelihoods.

“If this goes through, Carna’s finished,” Ann Dowd, owner of Carna’s only bed and breakfast tells me. Until 2022, when it was converted to house Ukrainian refugees for what was initially believed to be a short time, the Carna Bay Hotel was the venue for the rituals of village life, keeping Carna alive as a thriving, tight-knit Irish-language community. While the Ukrainians are well-liked, villagers now want their community center back, and life to return to its old familiar texture. “You have christenings, you have funerals, everything afterwards happens in the hotel, and we haven’t had that now for three years.”

“I just wonder, what are the government, our Irish government, getting out of all this?” Dowd asks me. “And I just feel they have to be getting something because they’re just putting them anywhere. Because, I mean, the government seems to be just, oh, bring everybody into this country, give them everything. But our young people, they find it impossible to get planning. The government doesn’t seem to want to help them at all, and the rents are so expensive, and the young ones that want to build, they won’t help them at all. It’s the younger people that are really watching now what’s happening. They have young kids, and they’re just thinking and wonder, because when this starts, if this happens, this is going to be it, it’ll forever be like other countries, you know.”

Walking to the hotel, I overhear a local woman say “We should come up with a plan for if the Guards are escorting the bus.” Seeing me approach, the women switched to Irish, turning their backs to me, refusing to talk to me or let me photograph their vigil. The mood seemed sullen, suspicious.

In his lonely cottage near Carna, a year before the Easter Rising that gave birth to the modern Irish state, Pearse wrote his famous funeral oration for the Fenian revolutionary Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, in which he railed against the British administration in Dublin who “think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half” and pledged his love for “all that was olden and beautiful and Gaelic in Ireland”, in the service of a nation that would be “not free merely, but Gaelic as well”. Yet a century after independence, it is the Dublin government that now seems increasingly distant and hostile to Connemara’s Irish-speaking culture and way of life. “They’re oblivious to the area, or they don’t give a damn, or they’re just saying ‘To hell with the West,’ you know?” Fitzpatrick tells me. “To hell with the West.”

When I arrive for my night at the Grand, my first impression is of the screeching seagulls and weeds that have been allowed to colonise the elegant roof with its four domed towers. Broken eggshells and droppings now pepper the walkways surrounding this once opulent building. A sign on a railing commands passers-by to “stop attacks” by not feeding the birds. Nearby, a dozen refuse bins and a cluster of tradesmen’s vans obscure the still striking entrance.

I’m not here for a holiday. This landmark on North Yorkshire’s coastline is my first stop on a tour of the extraordinary and fraying empire of one of Britain’s most secretive and intriguing property tycoons: Alex Langsam. The 86-year-old hotelier, worth at least £300 million, is spoken of as an enigma within the British property world; rivals who have spent decades in the hotel industry say they have never met him and don’t know anyone else who has.

How, then, has he made his fortune? His Britannia Hotels prides itself on offering “the best prices in the best locations”. A night in one of his 63 establishments can cost as little as £27. Yet this is far from a British holiday miracle: for the past 11 years, the Cheshire-based group has been named as Britain’s worst hotel chain by the consumer research group Which?.

Even if you haven’t endured a night at a Britannia hotel yourself, you have indirectly contributed to Langsam’s riches if you are a British taxpayer. For many years his chain has earned well from Home Office contracts to house and feed asylum seekers. For which reason, the British tabloids have christened him the “Asylum King”.

Since 2011, this low-profile hotelier has also owned the Pontins holiday parks. After a flurry of closures late last year, only two resorts remain open of a group of five that has for decades held a special place in the hearts of many Brits. Famous for its “Bluecoat” entertainers, a cluster of stars have cut their comedic teeth at Pontins parks, including Shane Richie, Bradley Walsh and Lee Mack.

Those recent closures aren’t the only reason to wonder exactly what is going on inside the Langsam empire. Last summer the Royal Albion, a Britannia hotel on Brighton’s seafront, went up in flames. This was the latest in a series of fires at the group’s premises. A Britannia hotel in Aberdeen burnt down in 2016. Six years later, there were fires at other sites in Torquay and Manchester. There is no suggestion that these blazes were deliberate, but Which? has raised the quality of extinguishers, fire doors and other safety procedures on the Britannia estate.

Then there are concerns about the future of those lucrative Home Office contracts. Last year, the cost to the taxpayer of putting up asylum seekers in hotels was revealed to be £8.3 million a day. Though there may be no end to Britain’s migrant crisis, the Labour Party has pledged to end the use of asylum hotels. That can hardly be good news for Britannia’s finances. Might the state of Britannia’s buildings suggest Langsam’s group is already struggling?

***

When I step inside the Scarborough Grand, I am confronted by a sad jarring of the majestic and the kitsch. In honour of the European Football Championships, flag-themed bunting has been hung above the gold leaf central staircase. Beneath the central lobby’s classical arches and framed sepia photographs from the hotel’s golden age, I find a wall of fruit machines and a pool table. There’s the clatter of an air hockey table and vending machines dispensing Coke. Younger guests can plug pound coins into “Toy Tower” to get their hands on fluorescent cuddly toys. Yes, this Grade II*-listed building now has everything I would want from an amusement arcade.

The Adelphi is next on my list of Britannia’s tarnished gems. Built from Portland Stone and graced with recessed Ionic columns, this imposing pile in Liverpool’s city centre has been in Langsam’s hands for more than 40 years. Here is another building awash with history: guests over the decades have included Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan and David Bowie. Liverpool-born songstress Cilla Black held her wedding reception here.

When I reach the Adelphi’s entrance, I am confronted by a large panel of MDF covering up the art deco revolving door. “Please take care, essential maintenance ongoing,” a sign explains.

A stroll around the hotel’s ground floor feels like stepping into the Thirties: there are marble floors, palm trees, chandeliers and a lead-lined glass ceiling. It’s not surprising that scenes from the BBC’s inter-war gangster saga Peaky Blinders were filmed here. Yet evidence of pinch-tight purse strings is all around. A swimming pool and gym in the basement has been out of bounds for more than five years. At times, there is no one behind the reception desk; it seems that anyone can come and go as they please.

Upstairs in my room, a 10-inch crack around the handle suggests my bathroom door has been forced. Perhaps maintenance is “ongoing” here, too. Though nobody has bothered to fix the broken shower.

Suggested reading

How vice consumed Blackpool

By Jacob Furedi

“Did you get any sleep?” a weary young mum from Gloucestershire asks me at breakfast as we try to make sense of the toasters. During the night she, her husband and their two daughters were repeatedly woken by fellow guests returning from a rigorous night out in Liverpool’s city centre. “I’m on my knees today — so, so tired,” she says with a grimace.

Her experience sounds tame compared to the furious white-haired man I overhear at the reception desk. He and his wife are adamant there must be something wrong with the hotel’s key cards. Shortly after 2am, he says, another guest was able to barge into their room and relieve himself in their ensuite. “I snored all the way through it but he woke up my wife,” the man blusters. “The lad was all over the place. I don’t think he knew where he was.”

***

When I began my Britannia Hotels odyssey, I was initially surprised by how few of the company’s establishments I would actually be able to visit. The company’s online booking form showed that no rooms were currently available at 18 of its 63 premises. I later find out that these unavailable hotels are often those that have been used to accommodate asylum seekers. But the Home Office’s press team could not say exactly how many of Britannia’s hotels are currently block-booked on this basis.

The Britannia Hotel Hampstead is the first of these out-of-action hotels I visit. With its thin curtains and greying window frames, this seven-floor block near Chalk Farm’s tube station has the feel of a tired, Seventies student accommodation block. I spot a large rat trap around the lowest floor.

The sounds of workmen inside confirms what a caretaker behind the reception desk soon tells me: “The hotel is closed for refurbishment.” Yet a local estate agent says that at one point asylum seekers were certainly housed there. The hotel also acted as a shelter for homeless people during the pandemic, he adds.

The next day, I park outside the Airport Inn near Gatwick, another Langsam hotel that has also been used to accommodate asylum applicants. I have been there for just a few seconds before a security guard strolls across the car park and tells me that the hotel is now “private”.

Is anyone staying there at the moment, I ask? Neither the first guard nor a colleague who soon joins us will initially answer. After repeating the question, I am told the building is closed for a “refit”. As far as I can see there are no workmen or tradesmen’s vans in the car park. During the two-minute conversation before I am firmly asked to leave, I see a couple of young men smoking outside the hotel. Dressed in hoodies and jeans, they don’t look like plumbers, electricians or decorators.

A few days later I meet Ahmed Sami, a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Jordan, outside the Britannia Hotel Bournemouth. Sami is standing on the pavement while his room receives its weekly clean. He tells me he has been waiting three years for his asylum claim to be processed.

For the last three months, his home has been this scaffolding-clad hotel. When I suggest this sounds like a long time, Sami seems surprised. “Many people are here for two years, more even,” he says.

Suggested reading

Inside Tony Blair Inc.

By Tom McTague

How is he finding Britannia’s accommodation? “It’s fine — we have TVs, every room has a bathroom,” he says. “There are three meals a day. Some people say the food is bad. So they have to go out to eat.

“The worst thing is there is nothing to do — it’s boring. We cannot work. Sometimes all we can do is sleep.”

Sami’s parents are still in Jordan and have been transferring money to him while he waits to hear if he will be granted indefinite leave to remain. “There are times when I have £60 to last the month.”

There are thought to be around 700 asylum applicants living in Bournemouth’s hotels. Most of them are men aged between 18 and their late twenties, many having made their way to the UK from Iran, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Afghanistan or Yemen.

Last November, the charity Refugee Support opened up a centre in Bournemouth providing clothing and other services to these asylum applicants. “We know of young men who have been in hotels here for up to three years,” says Zoe Keeping, the centre’s co-ordinator. “Often these are people who are suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] already.

“I wouldn’t say life in any of these hotels is good for your mental or physical health in the long-term. The men cannot work and so their lives lack routine. They have little money. Depression is common and there is an increased risk of suicide.” And yet, Keeping says, the hotels are arguably better than the alternatives: a detention centre or the Bibby Stockholm, the barge moored a few miles away in Portland Harbour used to accommodate asylum seekers. Last month, Labour announced that the barge will be closed in January 2025.

***

Alex Langsam knows what it is to be a refugee. In 1938, the year he was born, his Austrian homeland was annexed by Nazi Germany. He and his Jewish parents fled, taking the last train out of Vienna and leaving behind sizeable property and business interests.

On arriving in Britain, the young family was taken to an Isle of Man camp where hundreds of other Austrian and German Jews would spend much of the war. The Langsams would later begin to rebuild their lives from rented rooms in Hove on the Sussex coast.

Some 60 years later, in the only major newspaper interview Langsam appears to have ever given, the hotelier said that his mother and father would “probably have gone to the gas chambers” had they not been welcomed by Britain. “My father was the most nationalistic person I have ever come across,” the hotelier told The Guardian in that 2011 interview. “Britain saved his life and gave him a living and he instilled that in me. I am grateful for what this country has given me.”

Although Langsam failed his maths O-level, he was determined to study economics. Without that qualification, only Aberystwyth University was prepared to accept him. After graduating, Langsam started working as an estate agent. Before long he took up property development, launching a string of successful projects in Manchester.

He bought his first hotel, the Country House Hotel in South Manchester, in 1976 when he was in his late thirties. He spent the next two decades on a buying spree, building a portfolio that soon spanned the UK. Today, there are six Britannia hotels in and around Manchester, five in Bournemouth, four in Blackpool and three in Leeds. Langsam has buildings everywhere from London to Llandudno and Aberdeen to Torquay.

The scarcity of staff and ropey maintenance I witnessed at the Grand and the Adelphi might have suggested Britannia’s finances are struggling. In fact, Langsam simply loves to run the tightest of ships. Annual profits at the group’s largest company have climbed by 18% to £39.4 million over the past year.

Three separate companies in the Britannia group now show net assets of more than £400 million. But a group structure involving a Jersey-based parent company and a trust ensures it is not possible for outsiders to see the full value of Langsam’s holdings.

His legitimate use of the soon-to-be wound down non-dom tax status has allowed him to pay less UK tax. But it has also provided a glimpse at the publicity-shy hotelier’s character.

Some years ago, Langsam launched a professional negligence campaign against the accountancy firm Hacker Young for not realising more swiftly that he could become a non-dom. Three days before the dispute was due to head to court, Hacker Young made a £1 million settlement to Langsam.

But that wasn’t the end of the matter. The property mogul later launched proceedings against the solicitors at Beachcroft who had represented him during the claim against Hacker Young. Why? Well, Langsam argued he should actually have received a £3 million settlement from Hacker Young — not a mere £1 million.

His claim against Beachcroft was lost but the judgement gives a feel for the way Langsam operates, describing him as a “large personality” who is “clearly used to getting his way and dominating those around him”.

The High Court judge who penned that judgement, Mr Justice Roth, watched the hotelier give evidence from the witness box for two days. During that time, the judge came to the view that Langsam had “now persuaded himself of a version of events” and convinced himself that his Beachcroft solicitor “was at fault on almost every occasion”.

“Either that has distorted his [Langsam’s] recollection or he deliberately embellished his account at various points to advance his case, or, as I consider more likely, there is some combination of the two,” Roth wrote.

***

A few days after my stay in the Adelphi, I drive to the East Sussex coast to see another bleak part of the Britannia empire: Pontins. When Langsam bought Pontins 13 years ago, he pledged to inject £25 million and some “razzamatazz” into the holiday park chain. “If you satisfy the kiddies, you satisfy the adults,” he said at the time, drawing parallels with the magic of Florida’s Disney World. “We believe there is a growing demand for traditional seaside holidays.”

As I arrive outside the Camber Sands park, a sign near the entrance lists pirate-themed crazy golf, go-karting and other amusements with “non-stop fun for all ages”. But the fun in fact stopped before Christmas last year when the resort was hastily closed. Dozens of staff lost their jobs; some said they were fired by text message. Two more Pontins sites at Prestatyn in North Wales and Southport on the Lancashire coast closed at the same time. A few hundred people were made redundant across the three sites.

When I stroll around the perimeter of the Camber Sands resort, I find there’s an eerie chill to the shuttered skatepark and holiday accommodation that once welcomed 3,000 visitors. The vast, lilac Pontins building looks weary and desolate.

A two-minute walk away I find what remains of Dunes, a restaurant and bar that did well from serving Pontins guests for nearly 20 years. Jimmy Hyatt, the owner, said the resort’s closure proved a “devastating loss”. In April he wound up Dunes. Sugar Rush Treats, a confectionary and ice-cream store nearby, also shut up shop at the same time.

“It’s sad, it really is,” says Paul Osbourne, a Conservative councillor for Camber. “Pontins used to provide a very cheap holiday for those who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford it. I’m sure it was heaven for people escaping cities… But it hasn’t been great for some years.”

What now for Camber’s Pontins? There was a short-lived plan to convert it into a centre to house asylum seekers. However, the land is owned by Rother District Council, and a legally-binding clause in the lease ensures it can only be used as a holiday park. Several buyers have offered to take on the site and it is understood that the council is examining the lease to see if Britannia has breached its terms.

***

What would Langsam think of all this? We don’t know. As is its custom when dealing with the media, Britannia declined to respond to repeated enquiries for this article. I’m told by someone familiar with Britannia that criticism from journalists is “water off a duck’s back” for Langsam.

That said, it seems naive to point the finger at Langsam for Britain’s shattered seaside economies or for earning well from asylum contracts. It was the advent of budget airlines in the Eighties and Nineties that really made vast luxury hotels in Britain’s coastal resorts financially unsustainable. Why play roulette with the English weather when an easyJet flight from London to Mallorca can cost less than £15? What’s more, it was the Government that approached Britannia asking the group to accommodate hundreds of migrants. Surely, then, Westminster is to blame, rather than a businessman ultimately trying to address the shortage of adequate refugee accommodation?

There is also no doubt that the cost of maintaining historic buildings has ballooned in recent years. Listing regulations often place an obligation on owners to preserve great buildings as they were many lifetimes ago. Such rules can be expensive, obstructive and impractical for a hotelier trying to keep these buildings alive in the 21st century.

Suggested reading

The Luton estate that made Andrew Tate

By Jacob Furedi

Keeping investment low also makes it easier for Britannia to ensure their room rates can be kept at bargain prices, thereby allowing those with stretched budgets to enjoy a holiday. And it’s true that the chain’s premises often work out at between half and two thirds of the cost of rival budget hotels in the same cities. Indeed, Langsam has claimed that his “extraordinary buildings” are “enjoyed by ordinary people”.

Then again, thousands of Britannia guests don’t feel they “enjoyed” their time in his hotels. More than 4,350 of almost 9,000 Tripadvisor reviews of the Adelphi judged their visits as either “poor” or “terrible”. On the same platform, the Scarborough Grand fares even worse, with more than half of the 10,171 reviews rated in those bottom two categories.

And yet, as consumers, don’t we accept that often in life we get what we pay for? If we are stumping up just £27 for a night at a Langsam hotel — as one can at the Cavendish in Eastbourne — can we really be astonished if it doesn’t turn out to be the Ritz?

That argument doesn’t wash with Christine Bayliss. A former civil servant now responsible for economic development in the vicinity of the Camber Sands Pontins, Bayliss says: “Just because something is cheap, doesn’t mean it’s good value.

“We had complaints about the quality of the Pontins for years before it closed. I stayed in a Britannia hotel in Manchester — it was awful. You’ve seen the same for yourself. I hate the sweating of assets like this. Honestly, this is the sort of capitalism that gives capitalism a bad name.”

But perhaps the problem is not too much capitalism — but too little. Over the course of this investigation, I have spoken to numerous frustrated property developers, politicians and other local community leaders who have found dealing with Britannia utterly maddening. Those who would like to take on Langsam’s tired sites and breathe new life into the surrounding communities are ignored. Britannia has a reputation for not engaging with emails and letters from outsiders seeking to buy its premises.

Suggested reading

In defence of Brits Abroad

By Poppy Sowerby

So incensed by this aspect of Langsam’s business, Keane Duncan, the Conservative candidate in this year’s election for a new mayor of North Yorkshire, even spoke of using public funds to acquire the Scarborough Grand — though his party hardly has a history of state appropriation of privately-held assets.

“I admit this is a radical plan,” said Duncan, who ultimately failed to win the election. “But tackling the problem of the Grand is absolutely essential for Scarborough’s future fortunes.”

Now in his mid-eighties, Langsam remains at Britannia’s helm. He lives alone and quietly in a 10-bedroom former hotel in Cheshire. Unmarried and without children, work continues to dominate his life as it always has.

A few days after my return from Camber Sands, my phone rings. At long last it seems I have found someone who knows Langsam and is prepared to offer the hotelier’s side of the Britannia story.

“I like and admire Alex Langsam very much,” this person says, speaking on the grounds of strict anonymity. “He is entirely self-made, incredibly hardworking. Our country needs more people like him — not less. It’s amazing what he’s achieved during his life.

“Yes, he has been criticised for providing accommodation for migrants but this was after all at the specific request of our government. They have to live somewhere.”

This person reminds me that Langsam and his parents were once refugees. “He continues to be very grateful to the UK for saving their lives and is well placed to sympathise with the position of migrants today,” he adds.

“I suspect the fact that so many of his family were murdered in the Holocaust continues to motivate him to this day. I couldn’t say what will happen to his fortune when he dies but I suspect it will all go to charities that help others who have suffered from tragedy in their lives.”

That would be quite a legacy. It’s perhaps a better one to dwell on than the sad decay of what were once some of Britain’s most glamorous hotels. Or, for that matter, the discomforting thought that buildings little different to those besieged during this summer’s wave of protests and riots have for many years proved a pretty damn fine investment.

Six years ago, few would have cast the presence of illegal migrants as a crisis. Illegal immigrants came to New York to work; their workforce participation rate was nearly 78%, compared to 63% for legal migrants, and 65% for natural-born citizens. Immigrants made up more than one-third of New York’s construction workers and a quarter of dishwashers, cooks, maids, and housekeepers. The fact that illegal migrants weren’t allowed to work wasn’t an impediment: domestic workers and gardeners could ask the families who hired them to pay in cash, and large parts of the construction and restaurant industry weren’t too troubled about paying workers under the table. For this reason, while all immigrant children could go to school and get healthcare, adult illegal immigrants weren’t a drain on the social safety net: federal law made them ineligible for food stamps, public housing, and non-emergency healthcare.

Between 1980 and 2019, newcomers were fully aware of this, and quickly learned that, to blend in, they had to obey the law. The city wouldn’t ask anyone for their immigration status — but it would arrest and charge people for small crimes, from petty theft to dealing drugs. Nor would New York much put up with lower-level disorder, from smoking marijuana in parks to camping out in a subway station. This crackdown, which began in the early Nineties, resulted in a fall in major crimes from more than half a million incidents annually to fewer than 100,000 by 2019. Immigrants came to a safe city, and they understood their role in abiding by its laws.

Theoretically, newly arrived migrants were eligible for one city-funded benefit: the city’s unique “right to shelter”. In 1979, a lawsuit was brought against the city by advocates for homeless people, who charged that the state constitution, under a provision requiring care for the “needy”, guaranteed a right to adequate housing. The state’s high court never ruled on this “right”; instead, Mayor Edward I. Koch decided to settle it, agreeing that the city would shelter all adult men who were homeless by reason of “physical, mental or social dysfunction”.

Over the decades, further advocacy litigation spurred new city agreements that expanded the right to shelter. Yet no one in city government, the advocacy world, or the media can recall large numbers of newly arrived migrants showing up looking for city shelter. (Until last year, the city didn’t record the immigration status of homeless shelter residents.) Just as immigrants, whether legal or illegal, didn’t come to New York unless they had a job lined up, or the possibility of finding one, nor did they come unless they had housing lined up — usually a room or part of a room in a cut-up apartment building in the Bronx, Queens, or Brooklyn.

Suggested reading

The fall of Seattle

By T.A. Frank

Today, this is no longer the case. The right-to-shelter safety net is now drawing hundreds of thousands of people to the city — many of whom have little chance of finding a job. New York is treating this new surge of migrants as a crisis, with Mayor Eric Adams repeatedly saying that uncontrolled migration will “destroy New York City”. But is this a fair analysis?

Let’s start with the numbers. It took New York nearly 40 years to absorb 500,000 unauthorised migrants into its private-sector economy. The city estimates that over the past year, 122,700 people, or a quarter of that previous total, have visited a city “intake centre”. (The city government calls these newcomers “asylum seekers”, but most have not applied for asylum, and most will not be eligible.)

And even this figure is likely an undercount. With more than six million “border encounters” between migrants and federal officials during the Biden administration, and with most people “encountered” immediately released into the country, it is highly likely that additional tens of thousands of newcomers have made their way to New York and simply disappeared somewhere.

The crisis began last spring when Texas Governor Greg Abbott, responding to the Biden administration’s open-border policy, bussed recent border-crossers north to highlight his own state’s woes; the aim was to build greater political support for a return to Trump-era restrictions. Adams, instead, tried to prove wrong Abbott’s insistence that the higher numbers were a problem. He began by setting up 17 “welcome centres” near key transit hubs, including the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Grand Central Terminal, to purposely invite new migrants to take advantage of New York’s on-demand shelter. The city also started to convert dozens of hotels, including prime Manhattan properties, into shelters.

Within a few months, a wave of new migrants had doubled the city’s shelter population. As of mid-October 2023, its taxpayers were housing more than 64,000 “asylum seekers”, in City Hall’s terminology, within a total shelter population of 116,700; in just one week in late September, 3,700 “asylum seekers” were registered. The Adams administration expects that sheltering these migrants will cost $12 billion over three years, more than the city spends on fire and sanitation services combined.

Suggested reading

Washington DC is a failed city

By John Masko

Yet it will be hard for many of these newcomers to find jobs. For the first time in four decades, New York City’s economy is not growing quickly. The city had a bad pandemic, and it is having a bad post-pandemic. New York has less than 1% more jobs than it had in 2019, compared to the nation’s overall 4% growth, the first time since the early Nineties that the city has lagged behind the nation.

There is no evidence that New York is in desperate need of tens of thousands of entry-level workers — despite the fact that certain industries prefer to keep wages as low as possible, so continue to complain about a labour shortage. The city is still missing 4%, or nearly 14,000, of its pre-Covid accommodation and food-service jobs. One sign of the shortage of jobs for new migrants is the huge number of people delivering food — historically a miserable, dangerous job, with pay less than minimum wage. (Higher pay standards only just took effect this month). If better under-the-table jobs in domestic work or restaurants were available, immigrants would not be doing deliveries.

For other reasons, too, New York is a very different city to the one it was before the pandemic. Migrants with no family or friends to help them settle in New York are landing in a city where crime and disorder are the norm, with rates of non-felony larceny already more than a quarter above 2019 figures. Illegal street vending goes unenforced, high-powered mopeds with no licence plates or insurance are driven on the sidewalk, and spending a night sitting on a curb in front of a Times Square migrant shelter blasting music and smoking pot is perfectly acceptable. You can’t blame migrants for noticing that they can get away with a lot of anti-social behaviour here; nobody is telling them to knock it off.

Suggested reading

Tech bros are destroying weird Austin

By Daniel Kalder

The result is that, despite the influx of migrants, New York has reversed its decades-long population increase, as its former residents decide to flee. Since 2020, the city has lost close to half a million people, rivalling only San Francisco in percentage loss. And what’s left behind? A city that is unable to absorb hundreds of thousands of ambitious immigrants into a growing economy, as it did between 1980 and 2019. Faced with this crisis, Adams maintains that the city’s “official position” is that “the borders should remain open”. The only thing he wants from Washington, it seems, is more money to fund the city’s shelters. But as residents start to protest, as crime rates continue to soar, Adams may find that, rather than empowering the strong city he is supposed to represent, immigration is only fuelling resentment.

How easy my journey was compared to the challenges facing asylum seekers today. In a generation, I don’t recognise the nation we have become.

Last Tuesday, the British government failed to deport some 130 asylum seekers to Rwanda after a late intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. But it’s determined to try again. This week, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab plans to unveil a new Bill of Rights that could give ministers powers to ignore injunctions from the ECHR and speed up the removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Home Secretary Priti Patel insists the Rwanda plan is a “world-first” international partnership between “two outward-looking countries”. Except it is not a world first: it has been tried before and it failed.

The Rwanda plan is in fact a carbon copy of Israel’s “Voluntary Departure” programme that ran between 2014 and 2017. Its aim was to remove Eritrean and Sudanese refugees, all of them young men, to Rwanda and Uganda. These refugees, some of whom had lived more than five years in Israel, were given the choice between a life of misery in an Israeli jail, often somewhere in the desert, or to be given around $3,500 to be “voluntarily” deported to Rwanda or Uganda.

Yet Rwanda never fulfilled its side of the bargain. A harrowing report by Israeli researchers published in 2018 found that deportees from Israel had their travel documents confiscated on arrival in Rwanda, and were denied access to an asylum seeking process. Many were robbed of their money or incarcerated in a “hotel” on arrival. Just seven out of Israel’s thousands of deportees remained in Rwanda: the rest continued their life-threatening search for asylum elsewhere.

One Eritrean refugee, Isayas, described his experience: “I landed in Rwanda. We got off the plane… someone who works at the airport took all of our documents. We asked him why? They responded that they’ll give us something else instead… but they never gave us any documents… Once you leave Israel, no one knows who you are… They put us in a prison they called a hotel, a guard kept watch over us so we don’t leave… But the State of Israel says that you can get documents and receive asylum and that you’ll have a good life, like a dream.”

Suggested reading

Will bishops stop the Rwanda plan?

By Giles Fraser

For a recent Tortoise podcast, I spoke to an early victim of the Israeli policy. Saimon Fsaha fled Eritrea aged 17 and worked in Israel for six years as a street cleaner before being deported. He told me, through a translator, that the Israeli government had promised there would be a refugee camp in Rwanda where he could apply for asylum — but on arrival there was no such thing.

Unable to find work, Fsaha was forced to undertake a horrific journey through South Sudan, Sudan, Libya and eventually to Germany where he was granted asylum. He endured war in South Sudan, eluded Eritrean spies in Sudan and was imprisoned in Libya. At one point, he fell out of a truck and was beaten by the drivers until he could no longer move his legs. His injuries were so severe he had to be carried onto the small boat taking him and 280 others to Europe in October 2015 — which had to be rescued in the Mediterranean.

Despite his traumatic experience, Fsaha is exactly the kind of person who would be marked for deportation to Rwanda under the government’s new scheme. Yet not only is the Rwanda policy shockingly inhumane: it also won’t solve the problem of migration to the UK. In fact, Fsaha explained that the Rwandan authorities were actually very helpful in facilitating the onward movement of refugees to Europe. They had no obligation to detain or process people, nor to help them find work or opportunities. So why would anyone stay?

It is absolutely remarkable that Priti Patel, having visited Rwanda, seemed to have no knowledge of Israel’s former policy. And it’s equally ludicrous to think the Rwanda policy will act as a deterrent, forcing asylum seekers to reflect more carefully before getting in boats across the channel. This fundamentally misunderstands the precise purpose and determination of these people.

Suggested reading

The dictator who fooled us

By Ian Birrell

You will often hear the proponent supporters of this policy say, well, what is the alternative solution? Because the reality is that immigration is a hard issue to resolve for any nation, whether on the Mexican border, in Israel or in Australia. In my eyes, there are at least four possible strategic approaches, but they require a serious government focusing on the issue in a practical and sensible way, not sticking its neck in the sand and hoping that the trend of people seeking a better and safer life will just go away.

The first is to understand the route of travel and the way failed states are facilitating migration along it. Libya, for example, effectively trades in slaves and boats across the Mediterranean. There are plenty of people willing to prey on the desperate along these migration routes, so having a European-led presence along the coast at all times would be a step in the right direction to stem the flow.

The second is to have a coordinated European quota system which would allow for different nations to accept a certain number of asylum seekers every year. The smugglers will understand their business model no longer works if there is a viable route for people, with established processes, a clear criteria, and some assistance from UN refugee agencies. Germany and France already take more refugees than we do, it is time to step up and meet our international obligations.

Suggested reading

Boris can't keep a story straight

By Kathleen Stock

Thirdly, we need to establish bilateral agreements with nations whose citizens have no right to seek asylum, so that they can be returned safely. This will allow for more effective and fair removal once appeal processes have been exhausted. On top of that, we need to invest heavily in border force staff, processing centres abroad, and administrative infrastructure so that better decisions can be made in a timely fashion. We saw just how far Britain fell short in this regard when we struggled to process Ukrainian refugees. And finally, it’s time to replace tough, empty rhetoric with competent leadership.

As someone who has lived through the asylum process, I would not wish it on anyone: the insecurity, the instability, the lack of certainty, the life of precariousness and lack of hope. There is absolutely no evidence that the Rwanda policy will be a deterrent: it is simply pure cruelty dressed up as the only viable option.

This is a country which I call home, but I am ashamed to see what is happening. That so many yearn to come here is the highest compliment to pay a nation, not a sign of weakness or ineffectual state. I’m ashamed that a government would think that this is a way to treat human beings, knowing and fully understanding that it will in all likelihood fail.

A few days earlier, my wife and I had met her Ukrainian family at 4am, 24 hours after they fled their home in Kyiv. We had flown out to meet her mother, two brothers (aged 8 and 15), and female cousin (16). Just like thousands of other refugees, we were crammed into a small, rented flat on the border of the old town.

We had little idea how the UK government would handle their visa applications, but I feared the process would be like everything else involving the Home Office: slow, inflexible, and infused with suspicion. My wife and I experienced this first-hand when applying for her own visa. Compared to the digitised registry office in Kyiv where we had married two years ago, the Home Office proved incapable of executing its most basic functions, hamstrung by a combination of bureaucracy and xenophobia.

Back then, none of her family could have imagined that they would be forced to flee their homes amid artillery strikes and rumours that Putin’s mercenaries were roaming the streets. But after enduring a day of bombings, they had little choice. Their initial plan was to drive to the city of Lutsk near the Polish border, where they had family. But Lutsk had also been bombed, the roads heading West were blocked, and there were reports that Belarusian forces were poised to sweep in from the North.

So they drove south, leaving behind everything they couldn’t carry. Trying to avoid the main roads, they travelled for 16 hours, stopping finally at Khmelnytskyi. The following morning, as the situation became clearer — and as the scale of Ukraine’s heroic military resistance became obvious — they eventually decided to risk heading to Lutsk. After much agonising, the family collected a cousin, said goodbye to their father (who, like all men aged between 18 and 60, had to remain behind and be ready to be called up to fight).

Suggested reading

How Vladimir Putin weaponises refugees

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Back at the visa centre, Home Office staff — some of whom had been flown in overnight — rushed from one group to the next, trying to explain what little information they knew to those who spoke little or no English. They were dealing with a WiFi network that kept crashing, laptops that had no chargers, and IT systems that stubbornly refused to accept their login details. At one point, someone copied my family’s passport numbers onto a piece of paper and handed it to someone else, who immediately copied the numbers onto another piece of paper, which was passed to a third person — who promptly put the slip of paper in the bin.

It took about a week for their visas to be issued, even though it was clear that many at the Home Office and visa centres were working throughout the night. The government has now announced a 48-hour target for processing applications, but it remains to be seen whether this is anything other than wishful thinking: I suspect my family won’t be the last to flee Ukraine with little more than the clothes on their back, only to shell out for a hotel while they wait for the wheels of Britain’s Rolls-Royce bureaucracy to turn.

The government insists that detailed security checks are vital to stop spies and people traffickers, while ignoring the lumbering clunkiness that defines its system as a whole. First, the Home Office in London sets the rules, and applications are conducted on the GOV.UK website. Then, an outsourced company called TLS Connect collects documents and biometrics at visa centres across the world (the one in Warsaw uses temporary offices inside a hotel). Applications are then sent back to Home Office centres across the UK. Here, staff reportedly use three completely different and incompatible systems, some of which are 20 years old, to check documents and run background checks. The applications, if successful, are then sent back to TLS Connect to distribute the visas and stamped passports. Once in the UK, this paper visa is then used to collect an ID permit.

Of course, my Ukrainian family are grateful for the sanctuary they can find in the UK: their visas grant them rights to work, study, and claim state support. The alternative — remaining in Kyiv — doesn’t bear thinking about.

Suggested reading

How the Ukraine war saved Orbán

By Aris Roussinos

But the uncomfortable truth is that no visa can solve the more serious problems they face. While Kyiv is neither Mariupol nor Kharkiv, it is hard to predict what, if anything, my family will have to return to. The small restaurant they own lies in a village on the city’s outskirts that has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the area. Tales from their employees of looting Russian soldiers using the business as a base provide some warning of what to expect, but the revelations at Bucha still leave us numb. Yet still they remain certain they want to go back.

What will they do in the meantime? Well, it all depends on whether they manage to escape the complex web of Britain’s bureaucratic state. For instance, everyone in the UK knows the reams of paperwork involved in registering for a GP. Yet even I couldn’t help but laugh when my eight-year-old brother-in-law was told to fill out three forms about his alcohol consumption. Meanwhile, in an effort to register them for under-16 Oyster cards, I have become trapped between several different Transport for London systems, none of which will read their passports to verify their ages. At one point, I was invited to go to a TfL office which had been closed for several years.

Contrast this with the response of friends, neighbours and strangers, and it’s hard not to feel anything but exasperation. Since returning, we have been overwhelmed by spontaneous acts of generosity: donations of clothes, toys, and electronics; invitations to join sports clubs and visit museums; offers of after-school lessons from teachers who are happy to put in a word to get the kids registered at schools. One neighbour, out of the blue, announced he had tickets for a Spurs game, collected the elder brother, and handed him a white replica shirt (the boy, at least until now, preferred Manchester City, home of the Ukrainian defender Oleksandr Zinchenko — but we don’t tell our neighbour).

Suggested reading

Inside the Battle of Bucha

By David Patrikarakos

And this spirit is being channelled across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for the government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme. There is a widespread, almost populist, demand that Britain do more to help. Yet at every turn, the Home Office seems intent on making the system for registering for the scheme impossible to negotiate.

It is hard to imagine those fleeing the Blitz being found homes in the countryside under today’s conditions. Only yesterday, for example, it was reported that councils have denied applications from volunteers whose houses have plug sockets “that endangered children because they were placed too low in the walls”. Elsewhere, hosts have been rejected “because ponds in gardens needed to be drained before child refugees could move in”.

This, then, is my overwhelming impression of these strange few weeks: the enormous, perhaps unexpected, generosity of the British people, contrasted with the suffocating bureaucracy of the British state. It is only through the fresh eyes of my family that I realise how resigned to this shameful state we have become. We, not to mention those fleeing war, deserve better.

Today marks three weeks since Putin launched his invasion and already thousands have been killed — perhaps significantly more, if the latest estimates from Mariupol are to be believed. There are mass graves, bodies strewn in the streets, desperate attempts to survive by melting snow for drinking water.

We have all marvelled at the Ukrainians’ bravery as they fight to defend their country and people. But the price of their heroism has been terrible suffering. Right now, the United States and its Nato allies are focused on targeting the Russian economy with sanctions, as well as sending weapons and other forms of military aid into Ukraine. Both efforts must continue. But there is also a dire need to help civilians no longer in the country — those who have decided to flee the daily barrage of missiles, bombs and bullets.

This week, the UN estimated that more than 2.8 million people have now escaped. With Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 required to remain and help with the war effort, most leaving are women, children, and the frail, running from the relentless shelling of their cities and villages. More are expected to leave in the coming weeks: the UN’s High Commission for Refugees has estimated that 12 million people still inside Ukraine will need help.

European countries have already taken moderate steps to accept refugees. The Schengen zone has dropped visa requirements, requiring only a biometric passport to enter. The EU has granted the right to stay and work in the EU for up to three years. But more needs to be done.

First, the West can prove its continued support of Ukraine by conducting a large-scale humanitarian airlift to save those trapped in encircled cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, or captured ones such as Kherson. Getting them out and to a safe country should be the top priority. We attempted this in Afghanistan last year; there’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same now.

Suggested article

Inflation is never coming down

By Aris Roussinos

Once these people have left, we need to ensure they can reach host countries across Europe, especially the wealthier northern European countries. For years, the European Union has constantly spoken of the importance of “burden sharing”. Now is the time for it to demonstrate it knows what the term means. As things stand, the burden on Poland — there are 1.8 million refugees there — is too great. This is a crisis for all Europe, and should be treated as such.

In 1992, after fleeing a forced marriage in Somalia, I spent 11 months living in an asylum-seeker centre in Lunteren, the Netherlands, with individuals from around the world. One group in particular stood out: those from the former Yugoslavia. Given the proximity of the conflict to the European Union, those running from the Balkan states were bussed into the centre from the border. I cannot recall another refugee group being treated this way, but it sets a clear precedent that asylum seekers escaping a European conflict should be provided with transport to reach safety.

Once there, Ukrainians deserve protection and accommodation. Those who fled in the first weeks of the conflict often had friends in foreign countries who provided them with housing. But as the scale of evacuees continue to rise, that is no longer the case. People today are desperate: a family may have a suitcase between them, but no plan for what comes next. This is where European governments need to step in.

And so far, they are failing. This week, the British government announced its Homes for Ukraine scheme, which will pay volunteers £350 a month tax-free for opening their homes to those fleeing the conflict. The response was undeniably heartening: more than 100,000 people signed up in the first day. But even with the best of intentions, such enthusiasm can’t hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than a gimmick, designed to fill headlines rather than remedy the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Ukrainians don’t need shelter, safety and accommodation next week, or the week after. They need it today. Every European country should be expediting this process. With the recent passage of the European Commission’s “Cohesion Action for Refugees in Europe” proposal, which allocates €10 billion humanitarian aid for Ukrainians, there is no reason we can’t immediately guarantee accommodation for those fleeing.

Suggested article

America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

If we don’t, in the coming weeks they could be forced to substitute one type of inhumane barbarity for another. Already there are reports of trafficking gangs waiting near the border for young women and children. One man has been detained in Poland, suspected of raping a 19-year-old refugee he had ensnared with an offer of shelter. Another was heard attempting to lure in a 16-year-old girl before authorities intervened. In the UK, meanwhile, the National Crime Agency estimates that there are at least 6,000 modern slavery offenders in the country. “We can be certain that some of this number will be seeing the Homes for Ukraine scheme as an opportunity to turn a profit,” one expert has warned.

This must not be allowed to happen. Young Ukrainian women must not end up in red-light districts across Europe because they fled their homes and fell into the wrong hands. Nato and the EU may not deem it appropriate to support the Ukrainians with a no-fly zone — but surely we can protect them from being further dehumanised by opportunistic criminal syndicates. It is the least we owe them.

And then there is the need for a long-term plan. It is all very well offering citizens a wad of cash to take in refugees, but what comes next? For those entering Europe, the sooner we reintroduce them to a normal life the better. Asylum-seeker centres are often like human holding pens — they provide food, shelter and basic healthcare. But, as I discovered in the Netherlands, life as a refugee is a waiting game. Typically, refugees spend their days waiting for paperwork to be approved, waiting to be allowed to go to school, or waiting to be allowed to work.

It is cruel and dispiriting to keep any human in this condition of uncertainty — and especially so with the people fleeing Putin’s bombs. Once the Ukrainians arrive, we need to rush them into language and skill-building classes immediately. We need to help them find jobs and put their children in schools. This is the only way they will be able cope with the mental and emotional trauma that is the aftermath of the war.

Suggested article

How Ukrainian women will suffer

By Julie Bindel

But we must also start planning for their repatriation, closely tied to the swift rebuilding of Ukraine. After all, most of the refugees will want to return to their homes, if they can, as soon as possible. With the mass destruction of cities and towns, significant investments — nothing less than a new Marshall Plan — will be needed to rebuild the country.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has failed Ukraine time and again. They were persuaded, in 1994, to give up their nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. They’ve been strung along for years with the promise of joining Nato and the EU. And they were left to fend for themselves when Putin started to amass tanks on their doorstep.

The only moral course for the West now is to stop making hollow promises — and to start supporting the refugees. Perhaps it is too late to save their country, but it is not too late to save them. Every day the invasion continues, Ukraine shows the West the cost of freedom and the courage needed to take on tyrants. It’s now our turn to step up and start bearing some of that cost.

Soft-power tools are honourable and often pragmatic methods of conflict prevention and, at times, resolution. Just look at America’s Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, or the foreign aid provided today by the wealthy West to smaller and poorer nations.

However, as we are now seeing, it is deluded to conclude that evil men can be stopped by soft power alone. In the days since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been reminded of the necessity of having a well-funded and well-trained military. It has also become clear that we need to abandon our irrational energy policy, which imagines meeting Europe’s energy needs exclusively from ‘renewable’ sources.

Nevertheless, a key battlefield in the conflict playing out in Ukraine continues to be overlooked — and that is immigration policy. This is, of course, nothing new: just as soft power has been divorced from hard power, so immigration policy has been divorced from national security, even though it has been a destabilising factor in Europe for at least a decade.

Both sides of the immigration equation — the push and pull factors — dramatically affect Europe’s national security. The unyielding flow of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia remains a source of civil unease. Social cohesion and national identity have become incendiary issues in polling stations across Europe. Intolerance towards immigrants is high and extremist parties remain popular. At the same time, radical Islamist extremism and the constant threat of terrorism still linger.

Add to this the burden on local resources — on housing, healthcare, education and policing — and it’s hardly surprising that the status quo exacerbates resentment towards immigrants, while undermining trust in the political class. It is no accident that Putin and other adversaries have been using misinformation and disinformation to support anti-immigrant parties and other groups on the far-Right.

More from this author

We deserve better than these weaklings

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

What is less well-known, however, is how immigrants have become a tool of war — one that is increasingly deployed by cruel, inhumane autocrats such as Putin.

Since the start of this conflict, at least half a million Ukrainians have crossed into neighbouring countries; according to the EU’s latest warnings, that figure could rise to seven million. To put that in perspective, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, roughly 1.5 million Ukrainians were displaced. But even then, there was no exodus to the EU; the refugees simply relocated to other regions within the country.

This time, however, it’s unclear if Putin will leave any Ukrainian territory for them to flee to. And make no mistake: this is all part his plan. Indeed, Putin has become the world’s leading advocate of hybrid warfare. In 2016, US General Philip Breedlove, Head of Nato forces in Europe, recognised this, warning that “Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponising migration from Syria”.

Yet in recent years, it’s been in Libya that Putin has pursued his most fierce — and secret — weaponisation of migrants. There, Russia exploits its increased presence by collaborating with militias to foster and facilitate crippling migrant flows into Europe. By deploying Russia’s ‘private’ military companies in the region, Putin all but controls the most significant routes for mass migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe — and therefore has the power to cripple economies and sow societal division.

Take Khalifa Hafar, the commander of the Libyan National Army — a nominal national force that is really an amalgamation of local militias. Hafar is currently trying to rebrand himself as Libya’s next President, but in reality is nothing more than a Russian-speaking warlord who benefits from the support of at least 1,500 Russian mercenaries associated with the Wagner Group.

More from this author

Ukraine is winning the online war

By David Patrikarakos

What would drive Putin to dirty his hands in the chaotic, tribal world of North African politics? As Mark Grey, Adjunct Professor at the U.S. Army War College, has observed: “Large tribes control vast territories in the region, operate beyond the control of nation states and ignore borders. Just as Italy pays militias to curtail migration from western Libya, Russia can pay tribes and militias to just as easily encourage and facilitate migration as control it.”

The impact this has on the West must not be ignored; and neither must the failure of our leaders to recognise it. Europe needs immigrants and immigrants need Europe. Years ago, as this mutual need became apparent, European leaders could have developed a rational system to manage the issue. Instead, they found themselves unable to escape an ideological impasse: one moment, they issued virtue-signalling declarations of solidarity and compassion for immigrants; the next, they made panic-stricken concessions to populist parties. How else should we characterise Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 wild reception of Syrian refugees, followed just a year later by her €6 billion EU deal with the President of Turkey after he threatened to open the floodgates?

For too long, Europe has maintained a contradictory stance towards mass migration from poor countries, lurching from compassionate rhetoric about asylum seekers to the development of an elaborate and ineffective system of migration management. But as the recent days — indeed, the recent years — have shown, with the advent of hybrid warfare and the abuse of migrant flows as a weapon to blackmail Europe, it is time not only to review minor features of the existing system but to overhaul the entire framework.

What needs to happen is not easy, but it is clear. Some of the measures we should take have dominated discussion for years, but are yet to garner widespread political support. For instance, for all the outcry they inspire in Western countries, border walls and fences do have their uses. When used appropriately, they not only deter crime syndicates and people traffickers, but also aggressive autocrats such as Putin. If EU countries had a functioning immigration system, the Kremlin’s use of hybrid warfare would be rendered ineffective.

More crucially, we need to simplify the international and European treaties that govern migration flows and those seeking asylum. And as the current crisis demonstrates, this requires the West to integrate immigration policy into the broader national security agenda. It should be an issue for the defence departments, rather than interior and justice civil servants. Whether we like it or not, mass immigration is now a military weapon. And it should be treated as such.

Suggested reading

Inflation is never coming down

By John Lichfield

Obviously, this won’t be remedied overnight. But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has created a unique opportunity to question all the sacred cows of European policy. Four short months ago, it was unthinkable to have a serious conversation in Germany about the retention of nuclear energy. Now, faced with the stark reality that energy is inseparable from national security and the foolishness of having to depend on Putin, we are witnessing a welcome change in attitude.

The same must happen with immigration policy. Yes, there must always be a place for compassion — and it’s encouraging to see the EU and UK welcome Ukrainian refugees where they can. But if we really want to incapacitate Putin, that won’t be enough.

Immigration is now one of his most effective weapons. It may once have been unthinkable to overhaul international and European treaties to address this. But a new and harsh reality dictates otherwise.

Life in Calais is an endless cycle of displacement, followed by disappointment. I arrived here in July 2016. I didn’t have much choice: back in Afghanistan, the insurgent Taliban had put out a warrant for my capture, incensed that I had supported the US military. So I left my family and friends. I fled.

Shortly before I arrived, the notorious ‘Jungle’ had been evacuated following clashes with riot police: thousands of displaced migrants were displaced once again. They have been trying to find shelter in several places in and around the city ever since.

Often they seek refuge in abandoned barracks or wooded areas, finding shelter in makeshift tents covered with tarpaulins. There isn’t much point in building anything sturdier, since the police launch eviction raids every 48 hours. The camps aren’t hard to find: they constantly smell of burning wood, mixed with the odour of waste that the local authorities refuse to collect. When the evictions take place, people do not always have time to collect their personal belongings, leaving the ground littered with blankets, wet clothes, and children’s toys.

Following several large-scale evictions in the past year, the authorities have destroyed the bushes and forests where the displaced were sheltering. Huddled people have been replaced by fences, concrete walls, and surveillance cameras that carry a simple message: you must not return. Much of Calais is like a war zone, with people surviving under the fear of the police, the evictions, and the violence that can arise between the different communities. It is difficult to access food, water, and medical services. And then winter sets in; every day, rain and wind flood and destroy makeshift shelters and lives.

Most of the people waiting here have fled countries scarred by war. Among the 1,500 people here are Afghans, Sudanese, Iranians, Eritreans, and Kuwaitis. Most of them are single men, but there are also families with children and single women. All of them see at the 30km expanse that separates Calais from England as a source of hope.

They all have different reasons for wanting to get across. Some have family waiting over there; some are left with little choice by the Dublin Regulation system, which could send them back the way they came. Given that the UK is no longer bound by the regulation, the beaches of Kent seem an enticing prospect.

For those wary of crossing in the winter months, there are some accommodation options in Calais — the Centres d’Accueil et d’Examen des Situations (CAES) are partly financed by the British authorities. But they are not particularly suitable for those people who only intend to pass through. They are in towns far from Calais without public transport — not ideal if you want to try a boat-crossing and need to be available immediately if the weather is good.

When I arrived in Calais, I didn’t know where I wanted to go: perhaps to the UK, or even Germany. The decision was made for me. Within a few months, I met an Afghan friend in exile who invited me to stay with him in his flat in Toulouse, while a friend of a friend helped me negotiate the asylum process and secure accommodation in Paris. Within two years, I had refugee status, and frequently returned to Calais to document the migrant crisis with my camera.

Every visit is more difficult; every story is more haunting. Since September last year, the prefecture has issued more than a dozen decrees to prevent organisations not mandated by the state from distributing water and food in the Calais town centre. When, last October, a hundred volunteers tried to prevent an eviction from a camp in Calais in a peaceful manner, the police responded with tear gas.

But it’s not just the police who have created this tragedy. The main funder of the aid providers in Calais, Choose Love, has actually hindered their work in recent months. In May, it forbade the NGOs it funds from distributing leaflets that provide basic “safety at sea” lifesaving information. Organisations were told they had to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” promising not to “carry out activities which risk breaching [UK immigration] law” — or risk having their funding pulled. Last month, Choose Love announced its withdrawal from Northern France, presumably under pressure from the Home Office.

Choose love, they say, as long as you’re not in Calais.

The tragedy continues to unfurl in Calais. Without support from the French Government or British NGOs, the situation has become increasingly desperate. Although the Franco-British border has always been deadly — at least 336 deaths since 1999 — the last few months have been particularly grim. On 24 November, 27 displaced people, including children, drowned while trying to cross the Channel.

The week before, I had met several shipwrecked victims in Grande-Synthe, a town about 20km from Calais. Kazhall Ahmad was from Iraqi Kurdistan and was alone with her three children. She was exhausted; the police had evicted their camp that morning without allowing them to collect their belongings, and she had spent the past month desperately searching for water for her children. Despite their grim situation, the children were hopeful for their lives in England, dreaming of becoming barbers or art teachers. Whether they get there is a different question.

The shocking drowning in November of so many — the worst the Channel has seen since records began in 2014 — turned the spotlight back on Calais. It was the first time I had seen so many journalists in the area. The displaced people I spoke to took heart from this, hopeful that the media attention and the shock it has caused among politicians could make things better.

But if the past years have taught me anything, it’s that when it comes to meaningful action, don’t hold your breath. Over the past month, both French and British politicians have talked up the existence of legal routes and opportunities for visas. But this is nothing more than a distraction. Freedom of movement is a right for Western white people, not for those who are displaced like me.

On both sides of the Channel, governments accuse smugglers of being entirely to blame for the deaths of innocent people. In truth, it’s mostly the lack of legal and safe access routes to the United Kingdom that contributes to the development of these smuggling networks. The smugglers are a key part of the problem: they use people’s distress to make money; they put people in danger by overloading the boats; they lie to people about the crossing being safe; and when migrants refuse to take the boat, they are threatened and abused.

Such facts are inconvenient, though. It’s far easier for the French government to invest thousands upon thousands of euros strengthening border control systems and deploying a Frontex aircraft over the Channel. This militarisation of the border serves no purpose. It will not deter people from trying to cross. They have no other choice; they will continue to pass, but in a more dangerous and clandestine way.

And the smugglers will win, those who are displaced will lose, and the political class will look the other way.

Yes, more than 4,000 people have crossed the English Channel this year on makeshift boats and inflatable dinghies. However, it is not armed units washing up on the beaches but rather men and women who are in many instances fleeing from armed conflict.

Farage, though, eager to reverse his flagging relevance, wants to be seen heroically manning the barricades while an indifferent and ‘soft touch’ political elite looks the other way.

And in some quarters, Farage’s influence still looms large: the Government appears to see the utility in marshalling public opinion against new arrivals. Last week, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, told Tory MPs that the asylum system was “broken” and promised new laws that will “send the Left into meltdown”.

more from this author

Why the Government's diet won't work

By James Bloodworth

This attempt to whip the country into a hysterical fervour over these ramshackle new arrivals appears to be making headway. According to a recent YouGov poll, 49% of Britons said they have little (22%) to no sympathy (27%) for migrants attempting to cross the channel from France to England.

Parallel to this, a counternarrative is developing on the Left where it is argued that Britain ought automatically to give sanctuary to people seeking asylum on the basis that this country has played a “major role” in precipitating the migration crisis, as Daniel Trilling puts it for The Guardian. Trilling writes that many recent refugees have arrived in Britain from “Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan and Yemen. Of these countries, two were invaded in recent history by a coalition that included the UK; one has been pushed into famine by a Saudi-led bombardment using British weapons and military expertise; one is in a prolonged conflict with Israel, which like Saudi Arabia is a UK ally”.

In other words, it is our fault that fresh waves of people are coming to European shores.

Trilling might have gone further and pointed to the destabilisation of Libya by Nato — once described rather unpleasantly as “the cork in the bottle” of sub-Saharan Africa under its deposed dictator Colonel Gaddafi — as one of the major reasons for increased waves of people seeking sanctuary in Europe. Many Libyans are making their way to Britain against a grim backdrop of civil war and strife. A total of 1,126 grants of humanitarian protection were given to Libyan nationals in 2019 — an increase of 31% on the previous year and more than half of the total number granted.

Yet there is a risk of reducing a complex situation to an argument about western intervention. This has become something of a reflex on the Left in recent years: a sort of inverted imperialism by which Britain remains at the centre of every important event in the world. ‘It’s our fault,’ goes the self-flagellating cry — beneath which lurks a familiar imperial solipsism.

In the year ending in March, the top four countries for asylum claims were Iran, Albania, Iraq and Pakistan. We needn’t re-tread the embittered old ground of the Iraq war here — though I would urge readers to watch the BBC’s Once Upon a Time in Iraq if they still harbour illusions about that particular episode of military adventurism. But Iraq notwithstanding, most who wind up seeking asylum in Europe are fleeing from countries beset by corruption, ethnic and religious persecution, as well as plain old bad governance.

Even in war-torn countries such as Libya and Syria — nations from which significant numbers of migrants have travelled west in recent years — it is a stretch to cite ‘western meddling’ as the main reason many have chosen to leave. Had things panned out differently in Libya in 2011, a fresh wave of migrants would surely have fled a revengeful and bloodthirsty Colonel Gaddafi. Indeed, 5.6 million people have fled Syria — whose war we decided to effectively wash our hands of in 2013 — since that conflict began nine years ago. Some of this is arguably down to contagion from the intervention in Iraq but much of it isn’t. Dictatorships are perfectly capable of creating refugees without external assistance.

suggested reading

Brexit Britain should welcome more refugees

By Giles Fraser

And yet, attacking the Left — or in Patel’s case trying to send it into ‘meltdown’ — risks parochialising the issue. It is the Conservative Party in government and myths around asylum are mainly propagated by Right-leaning newspapers.

One such myth is the ubiquitous claim that ‘soft touch’ Britain is overwhelmed with refugees compared to the rest of Europe. Au contraire: Germany and France receive double the number of asylum applications per year as the UK. It is also untrue to say that EU law requires that refugees coming to Europe must apply for asylum in the first safe country he or she arrives in — a common trope in recent weeks. A UK judge ruled in 1999 that “some element of choice is indeed open to refugees as to where they may properly claim asylum”. Additionally, the judge said that “any merely short-term stopover en route” does not invalidate an asylum claim elsewhere.

It is perhaps worth looking at the real reasons people try to come to the UK, rather than whipping oneself into a frenzy over fictitious ones. Shared language appears to play a big part motivating people to come to Britain. More than half (58.6%) of those interviewed at the notorious ‘jungle’ refugee camp in Calais in 2016 described their spoken English as ‘very good’ or ‘good’. This compared to just 3.8% who said they spoke ‘very good’ or ‘good’ French.

suggested reading

The world’s next jihadi flashpoint

By Will Brown

Life in Britain also retains a penumbra of grandeur in some parts of the world, even if this is largely driven by nostalgia (one of ways Britain markets itself these days, both at home and abroad). Travelling in Latin America 10 years ago, many of the local people I met viewed Britain — along with the United States — as a notch above various other ‘First World’ countries. Indeed, one of the reasons Britain still “punches above its weight” is the lingering cultural pull of the English-speaking world.

That many of these new arrivals are washing up in Dover by boat is mainly to do with the pandemic and the lockdown’s shuttering of haulage and other vehicle crossings — one of the traditional routes by which asylum seekers are smuggled to the UK.

So what can be done about the situation?

Despite Patel’s rhetoric, Britain is unlikely to withdraw from the Refugee Convention. Nor can the Royal Navy turn a significant number of vessels away without risking a tragedy on the high seas that would generate bigger headlines than a few inflatables washing up in Kent. Moreover, unless a new agreement between the EU and Britain is put into place at the end of the Brexit transition to replace the existing Dublin regulations, the UK will no longer be able to return any failed asylum seekers to northern France.

suggested reading

Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

One solution — which would also undermine the criminal people traffickers — would be to make it easier to process asylum claims outside of Britain. At present it is nearly impossible to make a legal journey to these shores to claim asylum. Those who wish to do so must invariably travel here illegally — there is simply no other way to put in a claim. The Government could reinforce the credibility of such a scheme by coming to a new agreement with Europe so that Britain processes more asylum applications in mainland Europe while agreeing that returnees will be accepted by France.

This, though, requires a constructive dialogue on the part of the British government with its European partners. So far, we have seen little of that. Instead, the Government has given the impression that asylum diplomacy is being formulated with eyes fixed firmly on the potential for melodramatic headlines — the home secretary is currently ramping up a pointless verbal spat with France, a country whose cooperation this country needs if it is to stem the tide of boats.

To suggest that Britain’s borders are under siege on the basis of a few telegenic landings off the Kent coast — or to call it a “national humiliation” as Farage has done — is to lose all sense of proportion. We live in a prosperous country in a tumultuous world — refugees are a part of that equation whether we like it or not.

more from this author

The emptiness of the Intellectual Dark Web

By James Bloodworth

But rallying public opinion against them can be a cheap political win. It is after all what both of our political parties have frequently done in times of crisis. Under Labour, the then Home Secretary David Blunkett claimed that the country was being “swamped” by refugees and tried to ban the children of asylum seekers from attending state schools. And that was during the relatively prosperous early 2000s.

Given the present home secretary’s statements about France that will likely make it harder to stem the flow of people — as well as her summoning of ‘new laws’ that will invariably fail to materialise — one must assume the present home secretary is pursuing a similar course.

As millions of Britons face the prospect of a moribund jobs market — and as awkward questions abound about its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic — the Government has noticed a potential way out of the expected deluge of negative media coverage. A few lurid headlines about asylum seekers can go a long way. History tells us that the surest way for any politician to appear ‘tough’ is, paradoxically, to lash out at those most desperately in need of our compassion.

So what was he to do with the family of four in the back of his cab? He had just brought them from Heathrow, he said. And they didn’t speak any English. Weary faces looked out of the back window, including those of a young boy and an even younger girl. These people had nowhere else to go. I said I would try and sort something out. As they got out of the taxi, I noticed that the mother was holding onto a small pendant containing the unmistakable, bespectacled image of Oscar Romeo. They were from El Salvador.

Oscar Romero was assassinated in March 1980, shot by a single bullet through the heart as he celebrated mass in the hospital chapel. To be murdered thus, in the course of celebrating the Eucharist, feels to this priest like the ultimate sacrifice – a reminder that the offering of the wine is also the offering of blood outpoured.

It was only last year, after much official consternation, that he was canonised. When Pope Frances conducted the ceremony he wore the very same cincture (a sort of liturgical girdle) that Romero was wearing on the day he died. It was still stained with Romero’s blood. For the people of El Salvador, it is the blood of a martyr.

Further reading

America 2025: a nation violently divided

By Michael Warren

Romero became the Archbishop of El Salvador in 1977, a few years before the military dictatorship took power. The coup sparked 12 years of civil war between the military Junta and various groups of Left-wing, some Marxist, insurgents.

Paranoid about the threat of Communism on their southern doorstep, the United States under Presidents Carter and Regan ploughed millions of dollars into El Salvador, supporting the military Junta, and its brutal suppression of leftist opposition. It was under the ‘very religious’ President Carter that the US funded the Junta that, in turn, funded the death-squads that carried out the assassination of Archbishop Romero.

Romero was a conservative, with strong links to Opus Dei. The Vatican hoped he would respect the difference between religion and politics. But, as the violence escalated, and as the Salvadorian security forces began disappearing those who questioned their authority, Romero started to challenge the brutality of the oppression.

On the day before he was killed, he used his regular slot on the radio to call for the army to disobey their orders: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”

The week following his assassination, 250,000 mourners gathered at Romero’s funeral. The army placed sharp shooters on the rooftops overlooking the funeral procession. There were 42 people were shot that day, and over 200 were wounded. Things got worse. According to a UN Truth Commission, more than 75,000 people were tortured, unlawfully killed and forcibly disappeared during the internal armed conflict in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992.

Further reading

What if Trump played nice with the Democrats?

By Henry Olsen

No one was ever charged with Romero’s murder. Even the Vatican distanced itself from an archbishop they suspected of being too influenced by ‘liberation theology’ – a doctrine that blended Marx and Moses, and one that was an anathema to the viscerally anti-Communist Pope John Paul II.

From Washington to the Vatican, Romero the martyr was something of an embarrassment, and so he was carefully re-branded as something akin to a terrorist sympathiser. Even the Salvadorian church, brutalised by the Junta, with priests and nuns raped and murdered, fell into line. Throughout the civil war, journalists who asked too many questions were often intimidated into silence. And in 1993, after the war had come to an end, the Slavadorian authorities passed an Amnesty law, preventing any investigation of the atrocities that went on during the conflict.

Outside of the more conservative quarters of the Roman church, however, Romero was being held up as a hero of the faith. In 1979, the Queen unveiled 10 new limestone statues of Modern Martyrs over the main front door of Westminster Abbey; among them were Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Fr Oscar Romero.

In El Salvador itself, it was ordinary church people that kept the memory of Romero alive. He was a saint to them long before the present Pope – who had himself ministered under a military dictatorship in South America – resurrected his reputation.

The children of the family that got out of the taxi on my doorstep were too young to remember any of this. But they live in its shadow nonetheless. During the Seventies and Eighties thousands of Salvadorian refugees made their way to the United States, seeking safety.

Further reading

Why we should welcome the populist victory in Mexico

By Charlotte Pickles

Many of them gathered in the poorer parts of Los Angeles, the city of angels. Here a number of them came into contact with gang culture and adopted its ways. Here the notorious MS 13 and 18^th Street gangs were born, famous for their face tattoos and extreme violence, many of whom were deported back to El Salvador.

Returning to a country in which civil society had broken down which was awash with guns left over from the war, the gangs flourished. Oblivious to the fact that the US helped create the conditions that had so brutalised El Salvador, Donald Trump has described these people as “animals”. They feature prominently in his justification for the building of a wall on the Mexican border.

But the history of a nation isn’t just one story. It is the accumulation of many little family tragedies. And my new friends, standing alone with a few bags in a strange car park in south London, were one such story.

The Home Office helpline for refugees was closed for the weekend. First we went up to the Columbian restaurant at the Elephant and Castle for food. I found them some bedding and contacted a priest at the nearby Anglican church that has a Spanish speaking mass so he could come and interpret.

Slowly, the local church community rallied round. A collection was taken. The twitter community donated money. I bought them warm clothes. A family took them in for food. They joined us for Sunday mass. On Monday morning – credit where it is due – the Home Office agreed to give them temporary shelter while their asylum application was being processed.

This story had a successful outcome; if not, as yet, a finally happy ending. But many don’t. The Asylum Seekers Day Centre  receives many whose experiences – from Iraq and Syria, from Somalia and Eretria – tell of large scale political upheaval and of individual personal tragedy. And while our political leaders do not always distinguish themselves in response to the helplessness and pain of asylum seekers, it is worth noting that many ordinary people do – both church people and non-church people. Little victories count.

Further reading

The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

Back in El Salvador it is the evangelical churches that have developed a particular ministry among gang members. MS 13 employ a hand signal of ‘devil horns’ to signal their membership. For some, the only way to leave gang culture is through religion – gangs allowing members to quit only if they have a demonstrable commitment to faith. “The only way out is through Jesus” as one gang member put it.

There are all sorts of problems with this, of course. Is such a commitment real, we may ask, from the comfort of our own living room – as if salvation were merely an intellectual debating point. But for many, escaping the grip of gangs is precisely what salvation looks like.

Salvador means saviour. And that comes in many forms. For saints like Romero it meant following Christ to the place of execution. This week, for Christians in safer lands, it will mean the liturgies of Holy Week – which will also entail facing the cross and all its horror and abandonment. This too is a battle of good and evil. And, for Christians, one in which our salvation is also very much at stake.

Crucial evidence is emerging on the ground in places like Jordan, where some things have been made to work, and Lebanon, where economics have lost out to politics. Meanwhile, the balance of conversation about refugees in Europe is stuck on whether or not they are coming this way. They are not. Media images of refugees are emotive but dishonest, showing them in camps or on boats, when in fact they are in cities like Jordan’s capital, Amman, trying to fend for themselves.

Countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Ethiopia, where a refugee jobs pact has been struck, will determine where and in what conditions refugees live. These ideas and experiments need the oxygen of attention and journalistic scrutiny to keep career politicians and multilateral lenders honest about what is working and what is not.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.