Charities "more vulnerable than ever" as far right threats spiral
As far-right and anti-immigration sentiment has grown in the UK, charities have been forced to increase and introduce radical safeguarding measures to protect staff.
When GB News published an article listing 11 organisations “thwarting” the Government’s deportation plans last September, a wave of fear spread across charities that work with refugee and immigrant women.
Many felt forced to scramble together risk mitigation plans and some even closed their offices.
Women For Refugee Women [WRW], a charity set up to support refugee and asylum-seeking women who have fled persecution, was forced to close its offices for two weeks. It also brought in new safety measures such as disallowing lone-working in the office, implementing a “buddy system” instead and is working towards having CCTV installed.
WRW, which has successfully campaigned for the Government to introduce, and maintain, a 72-hour limit on the detention of pregnant women, and is currently campaigning to end the use of asylum hotels, made the decision to remove all staff and trustee details from its website, and created new impersonal email addresses.
Around the same time, the Charity Commission took the highly unusual step of removing the names of trustees from several charities listed on its website. This was because the Home Office gave a far-right influencer the names of some organisations with which it had had meetings about asylum accommodation, following a freedom of information [FOI] request. WRW had also had a meeting with the Home Office about the malicious use of FOI requests in this context.
Such tactics – deployed by a movement claiming to protect women and girls – are leaving workers anxious, angry and unable to offer the service they want to. “I’ve worked in the refugee sector for over 10 years and this feels like the most hostile it’s ever been,” Natalie*, who works WRW, tells The Lead.
“This is the most hostile it’s ever been.”
Over summer, Natalie’s own work email was shared online – and although it isn’t clear by who, it is assumed it was by the far-right. “I received thousands and thousands of spam emails over a couple of days that completely clogged my inbox,” which stopped her from being able to do her work efficiently.
“It did cause quite a lot of anxiety,” she says. “I was more angry in the moment, but then I was quite worried, and my mum and my partner were very concerned.”
Southall Black Sisters [SBS], who provides holistic specialist support services for all forms of violence against women and girls, also closed its offices last year. The charity has organised safety measures for staff including rape alarms and lone-working policies.
Set up in the face of the rise of the National Front in the 1970s, the organisation continues to focus on the needs of Black, minoritised and migrant women and campaigns on migrant rights as well as violence against women and girls.
“Southall Black Sisters is a by-and-for organisation, which means that our staff are from the communities that we work with, and many have had experience of the immigration system, says Aditi*, who works for the charity.
“I feel more vulnerable than ever.”
“In the context of increasing far-right aggression and mobilisation, it’s a triple threat. Some of us are on temporary visas, and the current political climate and the immigration changes and the precarity of the system are also really concerning for them.”
Priya*, who also works for SBS, says she feels “fearful just walking around” at the moment. “I feel more vulnerable than ever just being out and about, especially knowing where I’m working,” she tells The Lead.
Women and girls at risk
These fears are very much rooted in reality. Marie*, who works for the charity Derbyshire Refugee Action, frequently came face-to-face with far-right protesters between September and December last year.
“Every Thursday and Saturday morning for the last three years, I pick up a group of asylum seekers from their accommodation and take them to our charity for English classes and help with anything else they need, but once the protests started, it became problematic to be dropping them off during protest windows,” Marie tells The Lead.
“Whenever I dropped the guys, I’d be hurled abuse and called a ‘fucking traitor’,” she says. “One time, one of the protesters blocked my view of the road using a flag, which is very unsafe because it’s a busy road at the national speed limit, and I couldn’t pull out.”
She reported this incident – which was caught on video and posted online by the perpetrators themselves – to the police, who gave her a crime number and took him in for questioning. She was also concerned because she realised the protesters figured out the location of her charity, but no one ever showed up.
“I have C-PTSD [complex post-traumatic stress disorder] and it was very distressing to me, and left me a bit shaky, and it did affect my sleep when it first happened,” she says.
She adds: “I’m determined not to let anybody hurt me. I am protecting these lads who have done nothing wrong and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”
A National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson said: “We are committed to tackling any and all ideologies which pose a threat to the public’s safety and security, and treat the threat from the far right in exactly the same way as any other ideology used to spread mistrust and fear in our communities.
“Forces work closely with local communities to respond to concerns and put measures in place to keep people safe. We would encourage anyone who has concerns for their safety or has been the victim of any crime to contact their local force so that they can help you.”
The increased focus on safeguarding means charities and organisations are being pulled away from doing vital work, and closing their offices meant services can’t be accessed by those who needed them.
“Ideally, we wouldn’t need to do all of the safeguarding,” says Aditi. “It takes time and resources away from our service provision, our support provision, which is our primary function.”
Charities at breaking point
Charities all over the UK are struggling to make ends meet. A recent report from the Charity Commission found that around two in five charities (41 per cent) had expenditure that exceeded income in the last financial year. There were also 139,725 fewer jobs reported in 2024 than in 2023. The rising cost of living has led to cost cutting measures across the majority of UK charities over the last two years.
Aditi points out that services were already stretched prior to the service having to make adjustments. “There’s always extreme demand for our service... and of course, we don’t have more funding for that.”
“The Government must act decisively to protect charities.”
Natalie agrees: “It is distracting from the vital work that we should be doing, and we don’t have the resources to put in place for lots of things that we would like to.” She notes the charity will need to find the money to install CCTV.
Everyone who spoke to The Lead for this story made the same point: it’s the Government’s immigration policy itself that is not just fuelling the far-right but also harming those working in the immigration sector.
Following the 2024 riots, Southall Black Sisters and Women For Refugee Women, along with Latin American Women’s Rights Service, Safety4Sisters and Imkaan, sent a list of demands to the Government to tackle the far-right.
They called for the immediate protection of immigration centers and the suspension of in-person reporting to shield minoritised communities from violence, a total dismantling of “hostile environment” policies and a reversal of austerity measures to fund community cohesion. They also demanded an investigation into social media’s role in spreading misinformation and a formal acknowledgment that decades of institutional hostility and alarmist rhetoric have directly fueled the current unrest.
“The Government has a really important role to play because I think so much of this undermines how civil society can function, and I really think that the government needs to stand firm and call this out ” says Natalie. “The Government needs to realise that they are chasing a vote that they’re never going to receive and they’re actually just adding to the hostility and racism that’s proliferating in the UK at the moment.”
This comes in the context of a raft of sweeping changes introduced by the Home Secretary last spring, that drastically reduce the rights and entitlements of asylum seekers, such as lengthening the time required to secure Indefinite Leave to Remain, making it harder for refugees to bring family members to the UK and accelerating the removal of individuals with no right to be in the UK.
Women for Refugee Women is calling on the Government to act decisively to protect women’s charities.
“Civil society organisations play a vital role in upholding human rights, supporting marginalised communities, and holding power to account,” she says. When the far-right targets charities like ours, it is not just organisations under attack, but the democratic space that allows civil society to function at all.
“The Government must act decisively to protect charities, publicly condemn far-right intimidation, and safeguard the legitimacy of civil society.
“Women-led organisations like ours should be able to focus on supporting refugee women to recover from violence and persecution, not be forced to divert scarce resources into security simply to stay safe.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is widely known that the Home Office engages with a broad range of stakeholders, including NGOs, when developing asylum policy. This is a well-established and transparent part of our policymaking process.
“We strongly condemn any form of harassment or intimidation. Anyone who engages in such behaviour can expect to face the full force of the law.”■
About the author: Ella is a freelance journalist specialising in worker's rights, housing, health, harm reduction and lifestyle. You can find her work in Prospect Magazine, Dazed, Observer Magazine, Women’s Health and - most importantly - here at The Lead.
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