The High Court’s ruling that asylum seekers must be moved out of the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, leaves Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, with a nasty headache. The small boats keep on coming and, under the law, asylum seekers must be housed somewhere while their cases are assessed.
The Home Office was behind the curve on the legal action by Tory-led Epping Forest District Council, issuing a last-minute plea to no avail. There is gloom among ministers, who fear a dangerous precedent has been set; they are privately bemused that the ruling was based on the hotel owner’s failure to obtain a change of use permission under planning regulations. Ministers fear this will encourage more protests outside other asylum hotels, creating an opening for the far right.
The ruling shines an unwelcome spotlight on the small boats crisis. In fact, the government has had a reasonable run on this nightmarish issue in recent weeks, announcing a series of initiatives in the fallow summer period, including the potentially game-changing “one in, one out” returns agreement with France.
Today, Dan Jarvis, the security minister, hoped to highlight a returns deal with Iraq, but his media round was dominated by asylum hotels. He struggled to spell out what his “other more appropriate accommodation” for migrants might be if more have to leave them.
The Conservatives and Reform UK are making mischief, encouraging other local authorities to take legal action aimed at closing asylum hotels in their areas. Tory-run Broxbourne is already following Epping Forest’s lead. The 10 authorities run by Reform will doubtless do the same. Nigel Farage has called for “peaceful protests” outside the hotels to “put pressure” on councils to go to law. This is divisive and irresponsible: if the far right again exploits such demonstrations, it will be nothing to do with Farage, of course.
The Tories are enjoying the government’s embarrassment, and their hypocrisy knows no bounds. The number of asylum hotels peaked at 402 under the Sunak government, when up to 56,000 people were housed in them. Today, 210 hotels house 32,000 people at a cost of about £5m a day. Labour has pledged to close them all by 2029, but the short-term pressures have suddenly got worse.
Sensible Tories know their party is guilty of double standards. A revealing WhatsApp exchange leaked to ConservativeHome shows that some Tory MPs complained about their party’s anti-Labour attack ad criticising the “huge list of freebies and perks” allegedly enjoyed by people in asylum hotels, because asylum seekers were afforded the same standards under the Tory government.
Lewis Cocking, the Conservative MP for Broxbourne, wrote: “This makes us look silly as we gave them all this too, which is why we are in the mess we are in today.” Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, agreed with the criticism but didn’t withdraw the ad.
This goes to the heart of an intense Tory debate about how far the party should apologise for its mistakes in power on issues like immigration and the economy. Some party figures think the Tories will not get a hearing from voters until Kemi Badenoch offers a big bang mea culpa. But Rachel Maclean, the party’s director of strategy, claims: “We’ve done the mea culpas, we’ve done the apologies, we’ve done all that.” I hadn’t noticed, and, more importantly, neither has the public.
There is little sign the Tories have learnt lessons. Incredibly, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, responded to the Epping ruling by calling on Labour to bring back the Tories’ discredited Rwanda scheme. He is flogging a dead horse that would never have run even if last year’s general election had not intervened.
It’s not easy for Badenoch. A messy tit-for-tat dispute ensued after she distanced her party from the Liz Truss mini-Budget by claiming Labour was making “even bigger mistakes”. This half-hearted apology didn’t stop the ever-unrepentant Truss from accusing Badenoch of repeating “spurious narratives” to “divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated”. Badenoch herself was not entirely absent from the scene of the crime: at the time, she praised the Truss mini-Budget.
I don’t think the Tory leader will be taken seriously by voters until she makes a fuller admission of her party’s mistakes in 14 years in office. Saying ad nauseam that her party is “under new leadership” won’t cut it. Nor can the Tories rely on an anti-Labour tide to sweep them back to power, because voters have somewhere else to go – to Farage.
Unlike in love, politics does mean having to say you’re sorry. Badenoch needs to learn how before it is too late for her and her party.
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