“You’re writing lies,” the middle aged woman with a Union Jack flag around her shoulders shouts at me as I scribble down her words. “Look at her, she’s writing lies!”
Her tall, blonde friend starts filming me, while a third woman in a patterned blouse starts jabbing her finger, demanding I delete the photos I have taken of her. I haven’t taken any. They look to the police officers that have formed a barricade between the meagre gang of anti-migrant protesters holding St George flags and chanting “save our kids”, and the 500-strong anti-fascist protest that has occupied a cobbled street on Bristol’s waterfront to protect a hotel housing asylum-seeking people.
“You are for them,” she shouts, pointing at me. “And we’re against them. You need to go.”
A female police officer suggests I go join the anti-fascists: “the counter protest is over there,” she says softly, touching my arm. “I’m here as a reporter,” I reply, grateful for my press card that I have dangling on a lanyard. I’m not going anywhere, I think to myself.
“I’m a reporter,” I say to the angry women. “I’m just here to ask questions. Who are you saving the kids from?”
“Don’t bother,” she jeers. “You’re trying to wind people up. You’re here to wind people up.” The three women turn away, laughing and chanting “turn your backs on the scum”, as somewhere nearby a soundsystem booms out a scratchy recording of Rule Britannia.
We are many, you are few
It’s a bright blue-skied summer Saturday in Bristol. Families are posing for photos next to the Wallace and Gromit sculptures that are scattered around the city, tourists have arrived for the annual balloon fiesta, and people in smart suits and fancy frocks are heading to weddings at the registry office on historic Corn Street.
And in Castle Park, where a plaque celebrates the lives of the Bristolians who joined the international brigades to fight fascism in 1930s Spain, around 50 anti-migrant protesters have gathered, carrying St George and Union Jack flags, before marching towards the river to protest outside a hotel housing asylum-seeking people.
They are met by a line of police officers, keeping them apart from the far, far larger counter-protest blocking access to the hotel. Trade union activists, LGBTQ+ activists, pro-Palestine solidarity groups and anti-racist action members, as well as members of the public with no political affiliation but who care deeply about human rights, chant in solidarity with refugees and condemn the rise of the far right in the UK.
“It’s up to our movement to counter the poison of racist division,” Tom Baldwin, from the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, tells the noisy crowd.
“It’s important to send a message that threats and violence against people in our community will not be tolerated,” Sol, from Bristol Anti-Racist Action, tells me. Amber Williams, from the Nina Franklin fund, agrees. “People in the hotel have a right to feel safe,” she says. “We are here to show solidarity.”
In the no-man’s land between the two protests, trapped between two lines of police, I bump into Priyanka Raval from the Bristol Cable. We decide to team up and cross the police line together, not an easy task when one officer refuses to let us pass despite our press cards. We keep an eye out for each other as we speak to the far right. That’s when the women start shouting.
“We don’t like immigration,” a woman with blonde hair and sunglasses says to me, when I ask why she is here.
Why not? I ask. She shakes her head. “Don’t get me started on that.” The chants start. “Send them back,” she shouts down a loudspeaker. “Who are you?”
“They’re rapists,” I hear another woman yell out. “They’re dirty rapists.”
Unlike the counter protest, which is a diverse crowd representative of Bristol’s community, the far right group is almost all-white. Most of the small crowd are middle-aged and older, but there are younger men and women taking part too. One woman has even brought her kids.
“I’m here to represent England and Bristol,” a teenage attendee tells me. He and his two friends are aged 14, 15 and 16, and carrying flags. “What they are doing is letting illegals in and it’s ruining England. They’re taking our rights away.”
“What rights?” I ask. He looks momentarily confused. “The rights to freedom, the rights to do what we want to do,” he says. “They’re invading our country.”
His words, once extreme, have now become part of the mainstream anti-migrant rhetoric: in 2022 the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman described the “migrant crisis” as an “invasion”. I’m about to ask a follow-up question, when an older man interrupts and asks where I work. “openDemocracy,” I say brightly. He turns to the teenager and warns him off talking to me. “The only good media is GB News,” he says. The teen looks a bit embarrassed, as if he has been caught out.
GB News is one of several media outlets that pushes misinformation and anti-migrant talking points. One of its star presenters is Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage, who branded asylum-seeking people a “danger to our country.” But GB News is not alone. A report by the race equality think tank the Runnymede Trust found that “racist discourse from the highest levels of UK society, including politicians and the media, is used to frame immigration as an existential threat to the British way of life.”
Dr Hannah Ryan, from the University of Birmingham, says that “it is important to acknowledge the role of the British press in spreading sensationalist news stories based on anti-immigrant rhetoric. From the over-reporting of migration to the consistent use of the factually incorrect term ‘illegal asylum seeker’, the tabloid press in particular create the narrative of asylum seekers as problematic and threatening.” Media imagery, she told openDemocracy, “emphasises asylum seekers as dangerous others with a particular focus on men of colour who are represented as ‘breaking into Britain’.”
Media reporting and political quotes find its way onto social media, where the far right increasingly gets its information.
“I get all my news from X,” a young male protester tells me. “I’m not an idiot, I check things.” He’s keen to chat, hopping from one foot to the other with frustrated energy, his face often stiff with outrage at the chants and flags of the counter-protesters. “They’re communists!” he shouts, arms waving. It’s true that the Communist party has brought along a hammer and sickle flag.
He’s not racist, he insists. But “we're a tiny island in the North Atlantic. When is it going to be enough? We need to use the Navy to stop the boats. Not to hurt them. But to send them back.”
He’s the second person I speak to that day who insists that the Navy should be in the Channel to return small boats to France. Earlier, before the protest started in earnest, Priyanka and I approached a man who was livestreaming the event and is a regular at anti-migrant protests.
“I am tarred as a Nazi with a camera,” he says. All we have asked is what brought him here today. “I served in the British army in Germany so being called a Nazi and a racist and a fascist, it’s offensive. I’ve got opinions. I think we should stop the boats. [...] I would get the Navy to do the job they are supposed to do. Protecting our borders like they are supposed to do. The people on the boats would be turned back to France.” He stares at us, challenging us to react, to tell him the risks for an overcrowded dinghy meeting a huge gunboat. “Does that make me a racist? I don’t want them to come here anymore.”
A common enemy?
There is one thing both protests have in common: an anger with the current government and the broader political system. While the anti-migrant crowd chant “Keir Starmer is a wanker,” the counter-protest condemns Starmer’s Labour as “the enemy”, accusing the Prime Minister of enabling Reform and the rise of far right influencer Tommy Robinson.
Both sides are angry about homelessness, low productivity, unemployment, poor public services, long waits in the NHS. But while these issues have been caused by more than a decade of austerity under Conservative rule, and the financial crisis that preceded it, the far right has chosen to blame migrant people, claiming falsely that people seeking asylum are receiving preferential treatment and benefits, including by being housed in hotels.
“They arrive here and go straight into hotels and receive £49 per week,” a young man draped in a St George flag tells me. I politely correct him: asylum seeking people in hotels get £9.95 a week along with food. Far from luxurious, a 2022 report by the Borders Inspectorate found hotel food was directly attributing to nutrition related illnesses in migrant residents, such as diabetes and weight loss in babies and young children.
“We need to be looking after the homeless, the veterans, the drug addicts who are sick and need help,” he continues. “I’m protesting the atrocities of this government. Because British citizens should be their first priority. The asylum claims of the people on boats are false. They come here for financial reasons.”
In fact, between 2018 and 2024, the asylum grant rate for people who arrived by small boat was 68%, higher than the grant rate for all asylum applicants. The majority of small boat arrivals are from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea and Sudan, with almost all going on to be granted asylum due to the conflicts and oppression in their home countries.
The protester tells me he used to work in security in a hotel that was “closed so it could house migrants.”
“There was a hotel that had families and married couples with children, I don’t have a problem with them,” he explains. “It’s the fighting age males.”
Paranoia and misinformation
The far right has won support by portraying small boat arrivals as an “invasion” of “fighting age males” who pose a threat to women and girls. It’s a view that is increasingly mainstreamed by right wing MPs claiming asylum seeking people arrive in the UK with “medieval attitudes” towards women which leads to girls being targeted and threatened.
Sexual abuse has been weaponised by the far right who claim such crimes are “rape genocide”: an allegation rooted in great replacement conspiracy theory and the belief that migrant men want to “replace” white people in the global north. This focus on so-called “white genocide” sees sex offences purely through a racialised lens, as opposed to a crime committed mainly by men against mainly women of all backgrounds.
In recent months, a range of sources including Reform, and the Telegraph newspaper have incorrectly claimed that one in four imprisoned sex offenders were not born in Britain. The Ministry of Justice data shows that only 15% of sexual offences were committed by foreign nationals between 2021 and 2023, with a further 8% of convictions where the nationality was recorded as “unknown”. This false statistic, however, has taken hold in the far right, who whip up anger against migrant people by claiming they are criminals.
“I’ve got kids, I’ve got grandkids,” one man says to me, accompanied by his son or grandson, it’s not clear. I overheard him say that he won’t speak to me, but when I put my notebook in my bag he became quite chatty. “We follow football, and we get messages from team supporters around the country about what the migrants do. I worry for my kids’ and grandkids’ safety. The mainstream media don’t want to tell you what really goes on. They dump their documents. What are they trying to hide?”
Like everyone else I have spoken to, he insists he’s not racist, but that “you can’t have a conversation anymore.” Except the arguments voiced by the crowd are racist: that migrant people are dangerous and dishonest, put children and women at risk, and take rights away from British people, as is the insistence that sexual violence is a race, not a male, issue. And while the far right has set itself up as a defender of women and children when the alleged perpetrators are migrant or minority ethnic men, it is either silent on rape and sexual abuse allegedly committed by its own ranks, or piles gross misogynistic abuse on the victims.
At the protest, the soundtrack has switched from Rule Britannia to a range of pop hits: Angels by Robbie Williams, Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, and Is This The Way to Amarillo. The women are jumping up and down to House of Pain. In a surreal moment, D:ream’s Things Can Only Get Better starts to play, the 1990s anthem more usually associated with Tony Blair’s arrival in Downing Street. They are dancing and laughing. They are having fun.
There’s a gleefulness in this crowd that comes from a belief they are winning. It doesn’t matter to them that they are vastly outnumbered by the counter protest. They know they are closer to power than ever before. They have MPs in Parliament supporting “remigration” – a far right term for forced deportations. Reform UK is leading in the polls, and its leader Nigel Farage believes that people arriving on boats from repressive and dangerous countries such as Afghanistan should “go back to Afghanistan”, ripping up the refugee system.
“I don’t want that lot here,” an elderly man tells me, referring to all migrant people. “They abuse the system.”
But what if they are fleeing a warzone, I ask, thinking of Farage’s comments and the data that shows most small boat arrivals are fleeing conflict and persecution.
“Then they should stay there and face the consequences,” he replies, chewing his lips. He looks at me, quite matter of fact. “And die.”
