The leopard versus the Home Office
The high court's decision to close Epping's asylum hotel is the inevitable consequence of years of hostile anti-immigration rhetoric
The closure of the asylum hotel in Epping this week should not have come as a surprise to the Home Office, and yet, of course, it did.
The High Court’s decision to side with the local council – which had challenged the government’s policy to house asylum seekers in the Bell Hotel based on planning decisions – is not a sudden rupture in the politics of migration. Instead, it is the predictable collision at the end of the slow-moving car crash of years of immigration policy. It is a case of the leopard, finally, eating the government’s face.
For over a decade, successive governments have fuelled a climate of hostility around migration: in which immigrants are cast as an existential threat, something to be contained, minimised, and ultimately feared. Just months ago, our Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer likened Britain, with its high levels of immigration, as an “island of strangers” and pushed forward with the tightening of requirements for legal migration, despite crucial sectors crying out for more staff.
On top of this, the government continues to release “deterrent” deportation videos and doubles down on hotel use while making the asylum backlog worse. Both main parties have ceded ground to Nigel Farage and his acolytes, stirring up fear around migration, minimising its positives, and refusing to address the elephant in the room: with our ageing population, we desperately need immigrants.
The outcome of this approach is entirely predictable. Communities, emboldened and exasperated by years of hostile messaging, have chosen to take matters into their own hands. Residents protest the asylum seekers residing in their local community, councils take it to the courts, and local leaders have little choice but to act on the very anxieties Westminster has stoked.
Now the government is facing the very real prospect of multiple legal challenges from numerous more councils, all buoyed by an opposition frothing at the mouth for division and political point-scoring. The government must learn quickly that the only way to prevent a cascade of insurmountable challenges that threatens to rip the already faltering asylum system apart at the seams is to get serious and humane about the issue.
The moral case for offering asylum to those fleeing war and persecution barely gets a hearing anymore, despite global displacement exploding across the globe for predictable reasons: unchecked conflicts, climate emergencies, and crumbling aid infrastructures.
But neither does the practical case. Britain faces labour shortages across key sectors, from agriculture to social care, worsened by Brexit, COVID, and countless illogical policies. Safe, legal routes to claim asylum remain limited. Investment in the Home Office backlog has been neglected – sometimes deliberately – with tens of thousands left waiting in limbo for years. Yet, the government insists on barring asylum seekers from working while their claims are processed, stripping people of dignity, fuelling dependency on hotel accommodation and stirring up resentment in host communities.
This policy rests on the flawed belief that allowing asylum seekers to work would act as a “pull factor.” But the evidence suggests otherwise: Most people risk their lives crossing the Channel not for the chance of low-paid casual work, but because of war, persecution, poverty, and family ties. In 2024, over 37,000 individuals crossed the English Channel in small boats, Notably, between 2018 and 2024, the asylum grant rate for people who arrived by small boat was 68 per cent – higher than the grant rate for asylum applicants overall. This underscores that the perilous journey is driven by necessity, proven by our decision to grant asylum, not the pursuit of low-paid casual work. Allowing people to work while waiting for a decision would reduce pressure on communities, free up public money currently spent on expensive hotel rooms, and enable asylum seekers to contribute to British society rather than being scapegoated by it.
Instead, we are left with a framework designed to weaponise problems rather than solve them. The government clings to the notion that only deterrence works, while the courts, councils, and communities push back against the unworkable reality.
The Epping case should be a turning point. But if recent history tells us anything, it is that the main parties will read it only as a lesson in optics: more evidence, in their eyes, that migration must be curbed even further. The truth is that the more they feed the leopard, the hungrier it grows. Unless the government dares to make the case for migration, it will be eaten alive by the monster it created.■
About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster. Zoë then worked as a policy and politics reporter at the New Statesman, before joining the Independent as a political correspondent. When not writing about politics and policy, she is a regular commentator on TV and radio and a panellist on the Oh God What Now podcast.
“The moral case for offering asylum to those fleeing war and persecution barely gets a hearing anymore…”
But there is no moral case whatsoever for the present system. According to the Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie (OID), there are 580 million people who would have a right to claim asylum in France. Presumably the figure is similar for the UK since we are both signed up to the refugee convention. But we make no attempt to offer asylum to these people. We could easily do so if we wished. We could set up special flights to bring people from troubled countries. For example, gay people from Uganda. Or we could tell everyone in Iran that if they don’t like the Iranian government, they just need to escape to Turkey next door and will fly them to the UK. We don’t do this because we don’t want these people.
What we do instead is we set up an obstacle course. We make it as difficult as possible for asylum to reach this country, but when they get here, we let them stay. In order that we can maintain the right to asylum in theory, we do everything we can to stop people availing themselves of that right in practice.
Obviously this policy is not morally serious and people writing articles like this need to stop pretending that it is.
We are going to destroy the asylum system completely, as in people will vote for a British Trump, if we on the liberal left continue to pretend that the system is working correctly. By your own words you justify people crossing the border unlawfully to then claim asylum because of their "... poverty and family ties". No, those are not reasons to claim or grant political asylum. Do you ignore the direct testimony of people who are paying people-smugglers, who repeatedly tell reporters that they want to enter the UK, rather than settle in another country, because of the opportunities to work here? Any ordinary member of the public knows that these men are simply economic migrants.
It doesn't matter that half the asylum claims made here by the "boat people" are being granted, because there is now no public confidence that the claimants are being truthful, rather than gaming the asylum tribunal.
This misuse of the asylum system by economic migrants cannot be acceptable to any reasonable citizen of any country. The Right are successfully exploiting this because we on the left have fooled ourselves that people would turn a blind eye to the abuse of the asylum system, provided the numbers stayed low. We are now busted.