Politics: conclusions

By Richard North - July 18, 2025

As a boy, I knew Epping well. Each autumn, our whole family would decamp from our top-floor flat in Stamford Hill and undergo the arduous trek to the forest. There were no trains then, so it was busses, two of them with the second one taking us to the end of the line.

The hours the journey took made it feel like a trip to the end of the earth and, to an urban lad, the forest was the closest thing to genuine wilderness that I’d ever seen.

While parents and dutiful sister embarked on stripping the brambles of their fruit – soon to be converted into delicious blackberry and apple jam – I would venture out into the dense brush on my own adventures. No end of imaginary monsters were slain.

Little could I imagine that, sixty years later, the high street into which we disembarked from the bus would become a war zone, where angry parents and their supporters were mounting a demonstration demanding the closure of the local Bell Hotel.

It certainly would be beyond imagining that the hotel would be housing illegal immigrants at government expense, one of them having been arrested and charged on three counts of sexual assault; one count of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity; and one of harassment without violence.

And amongst the monsters that I had slain all those many years ago, not one could have approached the evil of the 38-year-old Ethiopian, Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, who had repaid the generosity of his host nation by preying on a woman and two girls, having only arrived in the country illegally in a rubber dinghy on 29 June – less than a fortnight before his [alleged] crimes.

And this is what the furore about the Afghan leak is really all about. The MoD have messed up big time and, as a result, we are to suffer another batch of predators amongst the 24,000 or so additional unwanted immigrants, with the added insult that this has been done in secret, using the courts to hide the official incompetence.

What the Afghan leak response has done is underline the growing conviction of what must now be the majority of the population, that we no longer live in anything even approximating a democracy, and that there is no solution through the ballot box to the government’s insistence on dumping thousands of low-IQ, sexually incontinent predators from the third world, on our settled communities.

Thus, while the demonstration at Epping has been fairly static for over a week, with only sporadic and quickly contained outbursts of violence, yesterday saw an eruption of violence, triggered in part by an ill-judged counter-demonstration from an organisation which calls itself “Stand Up To Racism” (SUTR).

Escorted to the demonstration site by the police, this small band of demonstrators was apparently content to cast itself in the role of supporting an Ethiopian sexual predator, against parents concerned for their safety of their children.

In the left’s playbook, however, any contradiction or absurdity can be quickly glossed over by branding the opposition “right wing”, which then legitimises action of the sort we saw yesterday.

They then rely on the nexus of Muslim support, with in this case the truculent Zara Mohammed supplying cover for the “racist” charge while playing the victim card by miscasting the illegal immigrants as “refugees” and condemning the “hateful and politically charged rhetoric” against them.

To an extent, the doubtless intended provocation worked, as the police – having made the counter-demonstration possible (unlike their stance in the fortnightly Gaza hate marches, where counter-demonstrators are quickly arrested) – were forced to protect it, antagonising the larger “resident” demonstration.

With police vans rapidly redeploying, ramming barricades and ploughing into standing demonstrators – again in marked contrast to their kid-glove treatment of “Just Stop Oil” blockades – by nightfall the helmets and shields were out, as baton-wielding riot police charged the crowd.

By now, the demonstration is getting some – albeit limited – media coverage. The local press takes the cowards’ way in its coverage, opting for a headline which declares: “Police under attack by far right thugs in Epping”, replicating a police press release.

The Guardian plays a similar game with the headline: “Far-right supporters attack police after protest against Essex hotel for asylum seekers” and a selectively phrased sub-head which tells us: “Riot police deployed to anti-immigration flashpoint in Epping as far right seeks to exploit local tensions”.

This, of course, has to be an “anti-immigration” demonstration, with no mention of “illegal immigration”, so the innocents in the hotel are characterised as “asylum seekers”, with the mandatory “right wing” exploiting tensions. As for the Ethiopian Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, he of course denies his offences.

We are allowed to know that two local Conservative MPs have called on Labour to close the hotel and another housing illegal immigrants in Epping, with immediate effect. The situation had become “increasingly alarming and distressing in recent days”, say Neil Hudson and Alex Burghart.

However, pride of place is given to Weyman Bennett, co-convenor of Stand Up To Racism, who was part of the counter-protest. Mr Emollient declares that “a peaceful demonstration made up of local and trade unions” had been “attacked by groups led by the far right”.

No mention is made of his organisation’s role in provoking the attack. Instead, he gets away with saying: “It is important to stand up against division; otherwise, we will witness a pogrom-type movement”.

To round off, the paper managed to find an obliging local resident to say that while they and others in the community “had concerns”, it was also the case that outside elements and local activists had been trying to inflame the situation.

Doubtless with unconscious irony, the BBC gets ethnic Indian Shivani Chaudhari to front its story, resorting to the same “right-wing” tropes, noting that there were about 40 “pro-refugee” protesters and about 400 “members of far-right groups”.

From Shivani, we get to hear from Weyman Bennett, a member of Stand Up To Racism who is said to have attended what now becomes “the rally”. He tells us: “Britain is a peaceful country in which people should be allowed to go about their business without being attacked”. Whether that includes Ethiopian Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu and his sexual predation, Bennett does not say.

What is perhaps significant, though, is that we’re coming up to the first anniversary of last summer’s riots, where it is evident that the Starmer regime has learned nothing from the experience and, far from addressing the underlying issues, has made the situation inestimably worse.

So far, the Epping demonstration hasn’t been anything close to the degree of intensity that we saw in the Southport riots, and it is notable that when the hotel housing illegal immigrants in Rotherham was attacked, it was subsequently closed down and the residents were shipped out.

That the Bell Hotel in Epping is still open tells its own story, from which conclusions may have to be drawn. As more and more people begin to realise that we have a totally unresponsive government, where the normal tools of democracy have ceased to function, those conclusions may have to be quite widely drawn.

Given the fragility of police force staffing and morale, one wonders how many Epping-like incidents there need to be before the policing resource is completely overwhelmed. With the hottest part of the summer yet to come, we may yet find out, but if not this year, the clock is still ticking.