Outside the Best Western Brook Hotel in Norwich around 300 anti-migrant protesters sang along to Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond’s song about good times never feeling so good, but that wasn’t their message for the migrants living inside the hotel.
In a town where average rents have increased faster than the rest of England, and hospital waiting times are some of the worst in the country, many who turned out complained about the cost of housing asylum seekers.
Stuart, a Norfolk businessman holding a giant St George’s flag, said: “I see my company paying north of a hundred thousand pounds a year in tax and the money is not going back into our system, back into our NHS, when it takes two million pounds a year to keep one hotel open.”
In a theme that we’ve seen in protests across the country, residents also spoke of their fears for women and girls.
Protester Karen Williams said: “I have seen with my own eyes school children being hassled from illegal males from this hotel. Being followed, asked for their phone numbers.”
A man who didn’t want to be named added: “That hotel could be full of terrorists. We don’t know where they’re from, they’re undocumented males, all of a certain age. We’ve been invaded.”
Many wore T-shirts with slogans saying they were not far-right. Although a large portion of the crowd cheered when the name Tommy Robinson was hailed from the stage.
The day had been dubbed “Abolish Asylum Day” with a call to action for protesters to come out across the country.
Here, around 80 counter protesters also arrived on the scene and police used their vans and two lines of officers to create a green zone in the car park to separate the opposing groups.
The hotel curtains were closed but no doubt the migrants inside could hear as on one side, a group determined to get rid of them, chanted, “whose streets, our streets”, and sang Rule Britannia, while the other side’s chants assured them: “Refugees are welcome here.”
Counter protester Stuart said: “It’s unfair that these people are going to be intimidated like that and I want to show that not everybody in the UK thinks this way.”
Hayley, holding a banner which read, “save our kids from fascists”, said: “I live in this area, and I see these people every day and they do nothing wrong whatsoever.
“They genuinely are very sweet people who don’t deserve what’s happening.”
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Another counter protester, Cate, said: “They [migrants] are not who they are made out to be.”
“I would trust them any day – far more than I would those people,” she added, nodding towards the anti-migrant protesters.
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Organisers on both sides said they came in peace, and peaceful it was. But there is a bubbling anger.
The Brook Hotel was taken over by the Home Office nearly three years ago and protests here, that only began this summer, are seeing their numbers grow.
