Thetford is in the grip of racist disorder. For three nights crowds have targeted homes they believe are being used to accommodate asylum seekers. People have tried to force their way into properties and asylum seekers have had to be taken away for their own safety. Police have been hit with rocks, bitten and spat at. One man has been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Residents say a list of supposed asylum accommodation addresses was circulated on a local Facebook group before being deleted.
People being targeted in their homes does not come from nowhere. Reform UK has spent years dragging British politics to the right over immigration. Just last week Nigel Farage was again declaring, “The invasion continues”. Earlier this year Reform’s Zia Yusuf repeatedly described migration as an “invasion” while setting out plans for mass deportations. And as opposition to RAF Barnham grew, Farage said people living near the proposed asylum site were “very worried and very scared”.
Reform now has enormous political weight in Norfolk. In May it won 40 of the 84 seats on Norfolk County Council and 31.2 percent of the vote, becoming by far its largest party. Then in July Reform candidate Colin Sutton won the election for Norfolk Police and Crime Commissioner. Reform county councillor Scott Hussey was repeatedly present around events and supplied photographs or video used by ITV, including material from Tuesday night. Reports quote him characterising what he witnessed as “spirited” but peaceful, while police accounts of the wider sequence describe attempted entry to homes, property damage and assaults on officers. Reform does not have to organise a racist riot for its politics to shape what happens on the streets. It has helped make the idea that migrants are an invading force, imposed on “our communities”, into everyday political currency.
The agitation around nearby RAF Barnham shows how this process works. The government is considering turning the former military site into asylum accommodation. Protests at the gates have operated under the slogan “Barnham Says No”.
But this is not simply a local protest. Outside right wing and far right agitators are already coming into Barnham. Sarah White, a prominent activist from the Epping anti-asylum protests, has already travelled to RAF Barnham and spoken at a protest. White said afterwards that it had been ‘an honour’ to be asked to speak outside the base.” The New Statesman quoted her saying of migrants, “They don’t integrate” and “They’re not evolved like us.”
Britain First was onto Barnham almost immediately. On 29 June the fascist organisation published a video boasting that its activists had visited RAF Barnham. Its headline described the people who might be housed there as “illegal immigrant invaders”. The organisation has also been active elsewhere in Norfolk, holding a so-called “March for Remigration” in Norwich in July.
And Britain First is not alone. Patriotic Alternative and Restore Britain have intervened in protests around Barnham and the other proposed military accommodation sites at Bicester and Wethersfield.
Rupert Lowe, the MP for nearby Great Yarmouth, has made RAF Barnham a major political campaign. He tabled a barrage of parliamentary questions asking about asylum seekers’ movements, surveillance, internet access, facilities, escorts and security at the site. He has also publicly backed the Barnham protesters and urged local Restore members to become involved. In that intervention Lowe described prospective asylum seekers as “third world men”, “conmen and scumbags” and told supporters to “keep these men away from British women and children”.
Restore itself shows how the ground opened up by Reform allows forces further to its right to grow. An investigation reported by The Times last month found neo-fascists, Hitler admirers and supporters of ethnic cleansing taking positions in local Restore networks. It reported that Steve Laws of the “Remigration Now” movement had explicitly encouraged followers to join Restore and obtain branch and candidate positions.
Thetford shows where that politics can lead. Once migrants stop being people and become “invaders”, “illegals” or hundreds of threatening foreign men, it becomes easier to decide that the house where one of them supposedly lives is itself a legitimate target.
Asylum seekers living in a terraced house did not cause any of the problems that working people face. Refugees did not sell council homes, run down the NHS, hold wages down or make landlords rich. Reform’s great political trick is to take all the insecurity produced by a rotten system and direct it against people with even less power.
Those smashing windows and trying to force their way into migrants’ homes have to be opposed. So do the outside far right agitators trying to turn Barnham into another national rallying point. But it is not enough to condemn the people throwing rocks while leaving untouched the politics that gives them confidence.