‘Racist, far-Right’ protesters: a Sikh, a Chinese man and a veteran with mixed-race kids

The financial district was once a byword for Britain’s glittering future. Now it merely reflects our national misery

Of the thousands of bankers in Canary Wharf, only one crossed the footbridge to the newly designated migrant hotel opposite the district’s glass towers, curious to witness the commotion.

Metal fencing surrounded the entrance of the Britannia Hotel, guarded by a wall of police and a private security guard in a surgical mask. Territorial support vans crawled past. It was hard to escape the feeling that a great crime had been committed.

Across the road, a smattering of protesters milled about – some live-streaming the police, who filmed them in return – while others cheered as cars honked in support. The lone banker, smartly dressed in a suit, watched from the edge. His colleagues weren’t overly bothered by the disturbance. “They live in Battersea and Fulham.”

The demonstration outside the Britannia was in its second day, having originally been sparked by a false rumour that asylum seekers from the Bell Hotel in Epping had been moved here. The Home Office have nonetheless confirmed the hotel will be used to house another group of asylum seekers, after reports of tourists having room bookings suddenly cancelled without proper explanation were shared online.

Few residents welcomed the prospect of people fresh off dinghies arriving in the sanitised core of London’s financial district. “This is the only place in London you’d walk around in a Rolex,” the banker said. “A lot of Chinese, Japanese and Hong-kongers live here. It’s not like Tower Hamlets.”

Hotels have been used to house migrants for decades, usually in peripheral Northern towns few in Westminster knew or cared much about. In 2017, it was found that 57 per cent of asylum seekers were housed in the poorest third of Britain; the wealthiest hosted only 10 per cent.

That quiet dispersal worked for a while. The benefits of porous borders were privatised – cheap labour for the gig economy, rising rents for landlords – while the costs were offloaded onto the public via tax-funded migrant support, suppressed wages, overstretched services, and housing shortages.

The scheme spared ministers the grubby work of signing off on border control, creating conditions that allowed a small class of opportunists to enrich themselves from the crisis. Slum landlords could become Home Office millionaires, while the ageing magnates of hotel empires – among them, Britannia’s owner Alex Langsam – were spared from market forces by taxpayer-funded subsidy.

Over 170,000 people have now arrived in Britain by crossing the Channel. There are simply no “suitable” locations left for accommodation. The use of hotels, itself a concession to the need to quickly house the excessive number of arrivals, has seen asylum seekers placed both in leafy market towns like Epping and Diss and London cultural centres like Shoreditch and the Barbican. Even Canary Wharf, a place once intended to advertise modern Britain to the world, is expected to share in the burden. 

Perhaps the strangeness of the decision to house asylum seekers – here of all places – was reflected in the surprising diversity of those hanging around the demonstration. A brawny Sikh man in a Louis Vuitton-branded turban held a sign reading, “Stop calling us far-Right. Protect our women and children.” Nearby, a smartly dressed Chinese man waved a similar placard, standing alongside residents from Malaysia and Australia.

They mingled among more provocative signs, including a St George’s flag emblazoned with, “The English began to hate”, a line from Kipling’s wartime ballad The Beginning. A visibly agitated Frenchman implored passing journalists to cover the protest fairly.

The Reform chairman for Newham and Tower Hamlets Lee Nallalingham, speaking in a personal capacity, claimed the coalition extended to his own family. “Look, when my Sri Lankan father, my Ukrainian step-mother and my Japanese wife are all sharing the same views, there’s clearly something there,” he said. “We like to pretend it’s some stereotypical demographic issue. If it was, I wouldn’t be here.”

Concerns about safety and fairness predominated. The deal arranged by the Home Office would house up to 400 asylum seekers in the hotel for £81 per night. At full capacity, the cost is just shy of £12 million per year, in an area where the average one-bed rent is £3,000 and around 20,000 people are stuck on housing wait lists. Perhaps Tower Hamlets Council feels it can afford the expense: it recently advertised a £40,000 post to expedite asylum housing and tackle “racism and inequality”.

“I don’t agree with it,” said Terry Humm, 56, his beret marking him as a former member of the 2nd Battalion Royal Green Jackets. “There are thousands of ex-servicemen on the streets in England – what about housing people who fought for Queen and Country?” He was quick to head off any charge of prejudice. “I’m not racist at all, my children are mixed race,” he said. “I just find it disgusting.”

Mr Humm, who joined the army in 1989 and served in Northern Ireland, warned of renewed sectarian tension on this side of the Irish Sea. “The ingredients are in the mixing bowl – someone’s bound to make the cake”. A Met officer who’d served in the Welsh Guards passed by and paid his respects.

Humm heard about the demonstration on TikTok. Others mentioned WhatsApp groups that had grown from 100 to over 3,000 members in the space of weeks. There was talk of “civil war” and Britain being a “ticking bomb”, echoing government fears of unrest spreading across the country.

“There’s going to be riots within the next six weeks, mark my words,” said one man, a builder in his 40s from Stepney. “They’ve brought them here because they think Canary Wharf is secure. But what they don’t realise is Tower Hamlets will not have this. It will escalate into a war,” he said, his voice rising. “Epping set an example,” he added. “It showed that as a community if you stand together you can make your voice be heard.

The rhetoric of protesters seems to match up with the reality of increasingly inflamed tensions this summer. Earlier this month, migrants in Gravelines lobbed Molotov cocktails at French police, reportedly using fuel siphoned from the very dinghies they intended to board for Britain. A spate of sexual assaults and other violent crimes by illegal migrants stoked public frustration at an asylum system that appears impervious to reasonable adaptation.

The protest remained fairly civil until the arrival of counter-demonstrators from Stand Up To Racism, an organisation open about its collaboration with the Socialist Workers Party. Divided by the road, the two groups screamed abuse at each other: “paedophile protectors!” met with a reply of “racists!”

One female activist reminded me of someone I had met while reporting on the Bibby Stockholm barge, who furnished migrants aboard with toiletries, pens and maps. Earlier this month, one of its occupants was convicted of assaulting a teenage girl on a beach, telling her he’d “never been this close to a white woman”.

As I spoke to another far-Left activist, an egg splattered on the pavement between us, lobbed from the balcony of a luxury apartment building next to the hotel. The first 15 or so floors are reserved for affordable housing. South Asian residents in Islamic attire gathered on balconies to watch the scene. Inside their separate entrance, the only visible signs were an “Eid haircut price list” and a notice warning residents not to hang clothes, toss cigarettes, or display flags or banners from their windows.

Apartments there can cost millions. According to one resident, their Saudi neighbour is “furious” at the decision to place the migrants next door, and the occupant of the penthouse flat is rumoured to have decided to sell up.

Canary Wharf was once lauded as a turning point in Britain’s post-war decline – “a citadel of finance,” as Reuters put it, “atop once-derelict docks.” It stands as a crowning accomplishment of the Thatcher years. But London is no longer the unquestioned centre of international finance. Canary Wharf appears now to be sliding back to its pre-regeneration state, blighted by empty commercial lots and chintzy stores that never seem to have customers. Residents of luxury residential buildings will live side by side with asylum seekers, just as the rest of the country is expected to.

Amidst the pomp of Canary Wharf’s creation, Margaret Thatcher warned that “where there is no vision, the people perish.” She no doubt had the glittering financial district just across the river in mind. Today we need only look at the Britannia Hotel.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/4eebd35c48af6c0b