Two years ago, 14-year-old Courtney was walking home along the Southsea promenade when she started being followed. Her pursuer, she claims at a protest outside the Royal Beach Hotel on a balmy mid-August evening, was someone she had come to associate with its residents. Clad in scaffolding and bed-sheeted windows, the property looms over Courtney and her mum Sarah, its dirty white facade gazing indifferently across the Solent towards the Isle of Wight.
Southsea is where England peters out into a languid seaside boredom. A place once built for convalescing naval officers and Victorian holidaymakers is now home to a churn characteristic of provincial England in the 2020s: pensioners, bored teenagers, the unemployed, and the largely male migrants who have arrived, both legally and illegally, since 2022.
In July, a man staying at the Royal Beach Hotel was charged with attempted rape and voyeurism in the Portsmouth town centre. Since then, a weekly protest has become a regular Friday night fixture. Yet whether or not Courtney’s pursuer really was staying in the hotel is ultimately beside the point, mum and daughter both insist. In fact, the protests weren’t just about the attempted rape, or Courtney’s stalker, or even the resented owner who had “sold his soul” in a deal with Serco and the Home Office to cash in on Britain’s small boats crisis.
Instead, the protest was about the direction of the town itself. Since the hotel had converted in 2022 to house asylum seekers, something very strange has been happening across Portsmouth. In fact, something very strange has been happening across England.
At the start of the summer, Westminster feared a repeat of last year’s violence, as the small boats kept coming and Keir Starmer seemed helpless in their wake. What has happened instead is one of the odder turns in the country’s decade-long populist experiment. As the days got warmer, anti-migrant protests involving tens of thousands, at over 70 sites, formalised grassroots and localised opposition into a national movement that, in the words of one Labour MP, transformed Britain’s asylum system into “moral and political matter”.
The sense of forever protest has been further been normalised by “flagging”, the unofficial regalia of Britain’s rising provincial malaise. This has since manifested itself in other ways, from vigilante patrols in parks to community litter picking. To quote the “Weoley Warriors”, the group that kickstarted the flagging trend in Birmingham, the idea is “to show… local communities that all isn’t lost and they are not alone”. It’s a sentimentality so amorphous that it could be courted by everyone from the Prime Minister to social media influencer Tom Skinner.
Britain’s political establishment, unable to assert any sense of control or direction in this emerging new England, has reacted with a mixture of opportunity and panic. In Epping, for instance, the council leant on the Town and Country Planning Act to close the now-infamous Bell Hotel. That could yet embroil the Home Office in legal disputes with dozens of other councils, notwithstanding yesterday’s judgement that, for the moment, the Epping migrants can stay.
With the Government’s policy now to move Britain’s tens of thousands of small boat migrants into private accommodation the only viable alternative — and one which has inspired this summer’s most successful protest in Waterlooville — a once-unthinkable precedent for localised extra-parliamentary action has therefore been established. “These protests are not interested in conventional party politics,” says 43-year-old Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots, the protestors’ unofficial compère and looking rather like a teacher who’s lost control of a rowdy school trip. “It’s gathering momentum on its own. It’s doing it all by itself.”
Yet it’s also clear that the grassroots howls on the English streets, and the spontaneous wave of flagging, has nervously upended Westminster’s old means for understanding the forces of populism. Nigel Farage’s inner circle, which once bulked at Rupert Lowe’s fondness for “mass deportations”, has now borrowed the phrase in an attempt to ride the new mood. Just this week, it unveiled a new policy of detain and deport, complete with a mocked-up airport departures board featuring Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia.
Even the Labour party, rhetorically at least, has conceded to this new reality, pivoting from the outrage of last summer and opting for the model of Starmer’s now-forgotten party 2024 conference speech, one which decried the violence before moving onto a Blue Labour pastoral about the sense of insecurity stalking small-town Britain.
Such language has come to quietly set the Government’s tone. Stephen Morgan, for instance, the Labour MP for Portsmouth, has tried to hedge: acknowledging that his constituents had joined “out of frustration” — before decrying their exploitation at the hands of the far Right. Birmingham Mayor Richard Parker, asked to wade into the war between the flaggers of a long forgotten Birmingham suburb and the local council, glibly described the bunting as “uplifting”.
This uneasy dance between rising provincial populism on the one hand, and Britain’s anaemic political establishment on the other, comes with a sense of unpredictability: both for a Reform Party eager to harness the anger, and a waning establishment keen to both appease and sooth its outpouring. In a country increasingly lacking any common hearth for political mediation — either through its media or culture — the spectacle of protest and flag has unveiled a fearful and increasingly ambiguous new front.
In their 2021 book Technopopulism, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Accetti argue that our populist era has created a new political logic, one which mixes the rhetoric of populism with technocratic fixes to ensure, amid the illusion of anti-establishment upheaval, ample opportunities for existing elites, and indeed even challengers, to preserve their authority while maintaining the basic contours of the status quo.
At the forefront of this new political logic is a cynical appeal to both technocratic competence and the idea of the “popular will” — an empty sop for political parties marooned between the chasm that now exists between politics and society. The outcome, Bickerton and Accetti argue, is a kind of confidence trick, a “permanent campaign” that, if dealing with particular policy problems, ultimately obscures the more existential issues that underpin them.
Certainly, this framing takes us closer to the unspoken dilemma at the heart of British politics as politicians vie to control the public mood: can Britain’s malaise be solved solely through tackling illegal migration via technocratic wheezes? From reforming the ECHR to reviving the Rwanda plan, it’s an approach increasingly embraced across Westminster. Yet as the protests and flags suggest, and Courtney and her mum do too, fights over hotels have morphed into something more existential: the anxious, fragmenting drift of life in 21st century England after two decades of a failed economic consensus driven by a policy of mass migration.
Portsmouth is the epitome of this new politics. A city transformed over the last two decades, its port and industry have been replaced by a Blairite emphasis on higher education, creativity and public service. All the while, a cadre of property developers have turned the city into a kind of halfway house, converting its dwindling housing stock of Victorian villas and former social housing into HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation). All told, Portsmouth today has roughly double the national average of such properties.
This transformation of the city has turned the fading Blairite vision into an ironic receptacle for new residents, an increasingly insecure realm filled by downwardly mobile labourers, lower-middle class private sector workers; unemployed migrants; and now, via the hand of Whitehall, asylum seekers.
“The hotel has become a symbol of discontent with the government, over the level of migration and general unhappiness with how things are going,” says George Madgwick, Reform’s leader on Portsmouth Council. His response has been to ruthlessly exploit the city’s summer discontent, leaking a series of stories to the press over the council’s alleged attempts to “cover up” the identity of Royal Beach Hotel rapist.
“100% these protests will mark a seachange in driving out Labour,” Madgwick emphasises. “I’m saying that because of what I see on the ground. I’ve never seen anything like this.” When I asked the council’s Labour leader if she agreed, she didn’t respond. Either way, Madgwick’s strategy feels especially fitting in Portsmouth. After all, the city is also at the forefront of moving asylum seekers into private accommodation, with the council describing it as a “sanctuary city” as far back as October last year.
And, sure enough, the most recent weekly protests moved on from the Royal Beach Hotel to the council offices. On the eve of this new demonstration, I again speak to Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots. “We don’t just want them to close hotels, we want them to stop using HMOs to house migrants,” he tells me. “The city has completely changed, it started a decade ago but since the pandemic it’s completely exploded.”
How will the group’s tactics change to reflect this new focus? “We have discussed protesting housing,” Barry says, “but we don’t want to do it down residential streets. But I am worried that if things don’t change soonish, people’s patience will start to run thin.” Other observers are also sceptical about Reform’s ability to control the discontent. “I can see a situation where individual houses start being protested against and it could turn nasty,” says Mark Zimmer, a former Reform candidate and now a member of Ben Habib’s Advance UK. “Reform and the other actors jumping on it don’t understand the fire they’re playing with.”
To prove his point, Zimmer takes me to a quiet residential road of terraced houses, where an HMO has upended this erstwhile suburban retreat. The sight of visitors investigating a rumoured “illegal HMOs” draws out an interested group of neighbours. “This used to be a nice road,” says Diane. But, now she continues, no one has any idea who lives there, with the house in question occupied by Deliveroo drivers and other itinerant workers.
One night, Gary, who has lived in the street since 2019, was threatened by a man from the house who thought he was spying on him. The residents are supportive of the ongoing protests in Portsmouth, but now have their eye on a bigger prize. On 13 September, they say, they will travel to London to join a Tommy Robinson rally for the first time.
That South Coast suburbanites are openly aligning themselves with someone like Robinson is telling. As Bickerton and Accetti warn, in time technopopulism only heightens the conflict between the popular will and mainstream politicians: until both are hollowed out of all meaning. It seems clear, anyway, that the flags and protests will test the logic of Westminster’s political confidence trick. Even for Reform, courting the unrest may only serve to accelerate the system’s unravelling.
The day after this latest protest, I ask Courtney’s mum Sarah what she hoped to achieve from the ongoing protest in her city — now set to continue amid the Government’s use of HMOs to house migrants. “It’s not about victory,” she tells me, “it’s about having no faith in politics or government to keep girls on the street safe. Everyone needs to actually vote Reform to see if [Farage] is going to do what [he says].” When I ask what would happen if Reform failed to restore the Portsmouth she once knew, Sarah paused. “I don’t think I’m ready to answer that.”
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Fred Sculthorp
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
