Don't turn away: the truth about migrant hotels

The video above goes into greater detail than this article - but the piece below has some vital details not covered by the video, so the best thing to do is read this and then watch the video.

This covers a heavy topic, one that is very controversial and tends to divide neatly along left-right political lines. It’s the subject of migrant hotels. If you go far enough to the left, you might say they don’t even exist - if you go far enough on the right, you might think whole towns in England are being de facto (or even de jure) run by young men trying to claim asylum while living in one of these hotels. Neither of these are true, but since everyone on either side wants to sell an extreme version of what’s happening, I feel compelled to intervene.

I have travelled around England and Wales a lot over the past year and a half as a journalist and researcher. I have been to Scotland and Northern Ireland as well, just not nearly as much. In England and Wales I have been to a lot of the “left behind towns” you sometimes hear about in passing in the media. Places where the economy never really recovered from the Thatcher years, never mind the 2008 financial crash or Covid. The kind of places mentioned in the grooming gangs scandal.

In doing so, I have borne witness to several migrant hotels. I have even stayed in a few myself (some are strictly for asylum seekers but a lot of them operate a hybrid model where they sort of pretend to go on being a normal hotel). Here are my surface observations of them, trying to be as objective as possible.

First of all, yes, they exist. Often, they are in what was clearly once the one main hotel in the town centre. The hotel will have fallen on hard times over the years, as fewer and fewer people used it, and so getting a large wedge of cash from the government to house asylum seekers will almost certainly have saved many of these businesses from going under.

However, here are the problems. One is that a principle fixture of these towns, the main hotel, a place where people would have got married in the recent past, is now effectively off-limits to the people who have lived there for generations (while a lot of these hotels take non-asylum seeker guests, as I mentioned, they do not run events or have a pub where anyone can come in. The grounds are strictly for guests only). As a result, it will feel to people in that town like a part of their community has been taken away from them. Again, an argument here could be that the hotels might well have closed without the money from the Home Office to house asylum seekers. Maybe. But that isn’t a great argument to put to people in these left behind towns. “Your town is so economically beyond hope, you better be glad we stuck the migrants here. What else are you good for?” is not a line that is going to play well electorally, believe me.

I think if it was mostly women and children in these hotels, as Labour cabinet members are wont to insist on occasion, it would be a different story. But the hotels are a). mostly young men, seemingly between around 18 and 30 and b). the media and political class are constantly saying that these hotels either don’t exist or when they do, are filled with women and children. And look, these young guys in the hotel are bored. They sometimes get up to no good, as young men can be in the habit of doing. People in these poor towns understandably have an issue with a lot of young, bored men from a completely different culture hanging around their town, all while being told those young men aren’t there and to even suggest they are is racist in some way.

This is a huge issue. I go into more detail on it in the video, so give it a watch. And look, I’m mostly a bleeding heart liberal on this stuff. I want people fleeing war torn countries to be looked after by Britain, I do. But we cannot keep dumping this issue onto the poorest towns in the UK, deny we’re doing so, and then not expect that to cause real societal problems somewhere down the line.