Asylum: Fury at Linton
By Pete North - May 19, 2022
This evening I attended what was a fairly large protest against the migrant camp the Home Office is installing at the RAF base at Linton on Ouse. Home Office officials were to speak at a village hall meeting later. They were loudly booed as they arrived in a black goon car.
In attendance was most of the mainstream media, seemingly half the village, and a number of activists from outside the area – described as “far right”. There’s been a concerted effort to exclude them from the Facebook group and the “official” action group is censoring “prickly” opinions from locals. What’s amusing, though, is they’re not saying anything that local residents weren’t saying at the meeting tonight. The mood inside was hostile, and the general consensus is that the village has been treated with contempt, and residents fears dismissed as irrational.
As the penny drops that the camp will go ahead, and that local objections, and local democracy have no bearing on the decision, the self-appointed official action group is finding it harder and harder maintain their control over the message. Especially now it’s fully understood that the migrants will be men of fighting age. The villagers know damn well the implications for their safety, the value of their homes and the cost of home and business insurance.
Being that I’m often smeared as far right myself I made a point of talking to some of the activists. Say what you like about “far right” people but you always get a coherent discussion out of them as opposed to mealy-mouthed screeching leftists. Two of them were from Patriotic Alternative, who were perfectly civil, and though I disagree with policy position, their view on the dinghy issue does not differ from my own (or those of many locals I’ve spoken to). I also spoke at length (on camera) with “Brexit activist” James Goddard, whom I’m only dimly aware of. Again, nothing he said was anything particularly “far right”.
Though I live locally, I didn’t make any special effort to gain entry to the meeting, not least because it’s being recorded, and if spaces were limited then it is right they were reserved for Linton residents who are most affected. In any case, the local dimension is playing out exactly as I anticipated. The action group thought that if they played nice and kept the message sanitised then they’d be listened to. Their concerns have been brushed aside, and as you can see from the recording, their safety concerns have been fobbed off with bland managerialism. It’s clear that the government is not listening and was never going to.
For me, though, the issue is much, much bigger than the impact on the Vale of York. The very existence of this facility is symptomatic of a total failure of this government to control our borders on any level. The dinghy crisis is just the more visible aspect of illegal immigration, but there are over a million illegals in the UK and the Home Office is not making sincere or credible effort to remove them. Dinghy migrants should be removed immediately, but this facility tells us that the Home Office doesn’t believe its own removal policy will work.
The other aspect is the absolute contempt for local democracy. The news was dropped on residents out of the blue and many only found out via television news. The whole community has mobilised against it, including the local Green Party, and refugee group “Ripon City of Sanctuary” – which still maintains the fiction that the dinghy migrants are refugees. Nobody wants this facility, but the official response from the government and Home Office officials has been a two fingered salute.
The parish council, though, is just as guilty, and in some respects deserve what they’re getting, because they themselves have taken action to alienate locals who just wanted their voices heard. They’ve selectively deleted comments from Facebook and banned locals, displaying a snobbish nimbyism in the belief they have the exclusive right to speak for everyone.
Perhaps it’s the case that they want this viewed exclusively as a local issue, but it isn’t. This is only the beginning. The Linton facility will grow and it will be replicated across the country and still nothing will be done about the influx at Dover. Meanwhile, those of us who bother to speak out continue to be smeared. They’ve got some hard lessons coming their way.