Portsmouth, 8 August 2025
The Royal Beach hotel on Portsmouth’s seafront is a Victorian-era building with (so I’m told) excellent views of the city’s historic port. Built in 1866 in the Edwardian Baroque style, this faded palace has hosted some illustrious guests over the years, including Winston Churchill, General Eisenhower, and the Queen Mother. However, it is the hotel’s latest occupants who are arguably causing the biggest stir.
As of March, 749 asylum seekers had received support in Portsmouth – 96 of whom were placed in hotels, with the remainder in dispersed accommodation, according to government statistics. On Friday 8 August, there was to be a protest on the Portsmouth seafront against the presence of a portion of that number in the Royal Beach.
I first learned about the demonstration from a local Facebook group. “The lions are gathering,” read one comment below the line. When I arrived in the city, I quickly spotted my first big cat: a bald middle-aged man in a loud Union Jack shirt. Having wagered that we were heading to the same place, I trailed my unwitting guide several hundred yards to the official meeting point on the promenade. I strolled between the placards – ‘stop the boats’, ‘veterans before refugees’, ‘fuck Starmer’ – while he blended effortlessly into the shimmying backdrop of red, white, and blue.
About 100 people had gathered in front of the South Parade Pier to protest against the asylum seekers shut away across the road. “No more refugees, send them home,” yelled a diminutive man into a loudspeaker. The smell of watermelon mist vape filled the air. The oratory, which drowned out the keee-yaaah squawks of local seagulls, was directed at the occupants of the hotel and a smaller group of counter-protestors from Stand Up To Racism who had assembled across the street. “Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here,” they chanted. The intermittent toot of car horns for the anti-migrant protestors told another story.
This Friday had been designated by radical-right groups as “abolish asylum day”. Mass protests had been organised at eight locations across the country where asylum seekers were being housed. There was another protest here a week before; there was also one outside Portsmouth Guildhall for which more than 1,000 people turned out; and another down the road in Waterlooville, where the council had planned to house 35 asylum seekers in a former retail premises. The plans were dropped after a local outcry and the intervention of former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, the area’s MP. The protests mostly passed off peacefully, though some anti-racists reported being verbally abused.
Shortly after I reached the seafront on that Friday evening, a middle-aged man in a blue ‘Portsmouth Patriots’ T-shirt asked if I wanted a sticker for my lapel. Superimposed over yet another Union Jack were the words ‘STOP IMPORTING, START DEPORTING’. More revealing was the website listed at the bottom which belonged to Turning Point UK – a radical-right pressure group that wants to deport refugees while importing America’s ‘culture war’. It is a strategy that seems to be gaining traction. Between 30 July and 7 August 2024, 29 anti-immigration demonstrations and riots took place across 27 towns and cities in the UK. This year has seen a further wave of anti-asylum sentiment, though most of the protests have so far been peaceful.
Turning Point UK’s ‘chief operating officer’ (even the organisation’s nomenclature is parasitic of American corporate terminology) is Nick ‘Tenco’ Tenconi – a bombastic ex-personal trainer who assumed the leadership of the rump of UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party) in February.
Tenconi arrived on the seafront a little after 7pm, escorted by a couple of heavies. He made a short but vitriolic speech denouncing those shuttered up in the hotel as “savages” who didn’t care about our values. Really, they were his values. Liberalism was out and God was in. Tenconi promised that UKIP would “reinstate Christianity” were it to win power. Both prospects seem vanishingly small. Nigel Farage left UKIP in 2018, accusing its then Leader, Gerard Batten, of being obsessed with Islam and English Defence League co-founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’). “UKIP wasn’t founded to be a party fighting a religious crusade,” Farage told reporters at the time. Since his departure, UKIP has haemorrhaged support. Farage’s old party once forced David Cameron into offering a referendum on membership of the European Union. These days it is little more than a ramshackle street movement.
But the pivot to religious zealotry met with the approval of at least one ‘born again’ protestor on Portsmouth’s seafront. While his wife walked around behind us carrying a flag that said ‘JESUS IS KING’, a middle-aged man named Paul, clad like several others in a blue ‘Portsmouth Patriots’ T-shirt, told me that the Church of England was an “abomination” that had gone “completely woke”. Its endorsement of same-sex marriage was a particular sore point.
But what about the biblical injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’? I asked. Paul’s conception of it was an exclusive one. Refugees coming to Britain were “mostly Muslims” and “don’t respect our Christian way of life”. Paul still believed that the Southport killer, Axel Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff to churchgoing Christian parents, was Muslim.
I didn’t come to Portsmouth to argue the point but I was curious to know how Paul felt so confident in pronouncing on the religious beliefs of people he had never met. “Christians wouldn’t lie [to come to Britain],” he said. I felt I already knew what Paul’s rehearsed answer would be if I gave a counter-example: they were not real Christians. Besides, I wasn’t sure he would listen to an irreligious journalist who had come down on a day trip from London, a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah to the right-wing evangelical crowd.
With all the talk of Britain being a ‘Christian nation’, I felt compelled to look up the 2021 Census, which found that a minority (46.2 per cent) of the population still identified as Christian. Moreover, the dwindling flock of British Christians were mostly followers of the mild Anglican variety. The stuff Tenconi was espousing, on the other hand, was Christian nationalism – eschatological, Manichean, and thirsting for (in his words) a “political revolution” that would bring about “salvation”.
The neo-Nazi Homeland Party is active on the ground in Portsmouth. It has been handing out leaflets warning that “indigenous” Britons are being “replaced” by immigrants. A small coterie of the far-right were in attendance that night. The runic tattoos and occasional shouts of “burn them out” gave it away. Under the watchful eyes of the local constabulary, every so often, they hurled a half-empty can of Stella at the small anti-racist contingency across the road. “Paedos, paedos, paedos,” they chanted in motley unison.
Not everyone there could be reduced to leftist caricature. That would be to disdain what are, in some cases, legible complaints. Several people I spoke to were at pains to point out – often before they realised that I was a journalist – that Britain needs some level of immigration. “We just want to know who’s living in our community,” said one 40-year-old woman.
Earlier this year, one resident of the Royal Beach, a 33-year-old asylum seeker, Rabie Knissi, was jailed for 10 years for a sex attack on a local woman of a similar age. The man pushed the victim against a parked car before attempting to rape her. Elsewhere, protests kicked off outside the Bell Hotel in Epping after an Ethiopian refugee, Hadush Kebatu, was charged with sexual assault for allegedly attempting to kiss a 14-year-old girl.
Many of the flags and placards on display in Portsmouth played on a wider purported threat to women and girls. ‘PROTECT OUR CHILDREN’, screamed the largest banner that was draped over railings on the promenade. ‘Protect our girls, how many more?’ read another.
Such complaints are hard to disentangle from the inflammatory portmanteau of zombie statistics, tabloid hearsay, and provincial prejudice that often accompanies them. During his speech, Tenconi reeled off some implausible-sounding statistics of his own, which I’d previously heard Farage cite. “Forty percent of sexual assaults in London over the course of the last five years have been committed by those born overseas,” the Reform UK Leader has claimed.
In reality, foreign-born individuals are less likely to be charged with sexual offences than those born in the UK. Ironically enough, Farage had arrived at his inflated percentage by drastically undercounting the number of foreign-born people that actually live in Britain.
After the arrest and trial of Rabie Knissi, George Madgwick, one of Portsmouth’s independent councillors, toured the studios of right-wing television implying a cover-up. This is now part of the radical-right’s modus operandi. Its members style themselves as dissident truth-tellers and foes of the establishment. Last year, after the Southport murders, Nigel Farage used his platform on GB News to sow speculation as to whether “the truth is being withheld from us”. In Nuneaton, a Reform council leader recently accused police of “covering-up” details about two men, reportedly Afghan asylum seekers, who were charged over the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl. Warwickshire police dismissed the claims.
The number of hotels being used for asylum seekers has reduced from more than 400 in the summer of 2023 to fewer than 210 today. The Government has announced plans to end the use of hotels to house migrants altogether by 2029. It has also said that foreign criminals will face immediate deportation after sentencing.
But some people are never happy, and the protests continue. Some of those involved in the demonstrations make no effort to hide the fact that they see the Labour Government as illegitimate. Almost all the Facebook groups set up by organisers of the anti-migrant protests feature petitions demanding an immediate general election. Among all the caps lock fury and bumptious lectures on Englishness from people who show scant respect for the language, a common theme emerges: the Labour Party is an existential threat to the very survival of Britain’s history, culture, and traditions.
But it’s not all apocalyptic rhetoric and mawkish peans to a lost England. The culture war is big business – especially for the online bottom-feeders who see local grievances through the prism of clicks and cash. One YouTube influencer, who films himself entering migrant hotels and taunting staff and residents, is reportedly earning thousands of pounds a month in advertising revenue. Other self-styled ‘citizen journalists’ line their pockets on X by pumping out a torrent of rumour and hearsay. I spotted at least one of these media entrepreneurs in Portsmouth, the camera at the end of his selfie stick gliding across the surface of the crowd like a submarine’s periscope.
The macho men of the far-right have long sought to position themselves as the protectors of damsels in distress. Tenconi styles himself as a defender of masculinity, Christianity, and conservative values. The heavyset UKIP Leader narrowly avoided jail in 2011 after punching a rival alpha male in a duel over a cigarette. His own version of ‘chivalry’ asserts that women need protecting – not just from wily foreigners but from themselves too. An opponent of abortion, he accuses the left of “pushing liberal freedoms on women”.
As to the fate of Britain’s menfolk, the asylum seekers in the hotel across the road were described by Tenconi that night as “fighting-age males”. The man dispensing the Turning Point UK stickers said the same. Other protestors called them “invaders”. It was a constant paranoiac drumbeat: the swarthy men coming to Britain from war-ravaged territories were not seeking sanctuary but conquest – of our lands and our women.
The idea that immigrants and refugees are would-be sexual predators has long been a staple of far-right discourse. The trope was deployed against Jewish refugees in the 1880s, and was used again in the 1950s against immigrants from the Caribbean. In her 2018 book, Bring the War Home, a deeply researched account of America’s white power movement, Kathleen Belew showed how the figure of the black rapist has been deployed in far-right literature (and not only far-right literature) in the United States. “The innocent white mother and child symbolised the race under siege,” she writes.
Today’s British anti-migrant street movement has its own women’s caucus, the reassuringly conventional ‘pink protestors’ whose raison d’être is to “stand together against the danger posed to women and young girls by unidentified men in our community”. One should probably take some of the women’s grievances at face value. However, at least one of the ‘concerned local mothers’ interviewed by GB News at a recent anti-migrant demonstration at the Barbican in London was revealed by anti-extremism organisation Hope Not Hate to be a longtime associate of ‘Tommy Robinson’. Toni Collins (‘Ginger Toni’) was spotted a few days earlier in a Turning Point UK video of another protest in Epping, once again claiming to be a concerned local resident. It could be that she has two London residences (she wouldn’t be the first person caught moonlighting as a plain-speaking tribune of the people). But it seems more likely that she was on an ‘astroturfing’ mission.
If it wants to root out violent misogyny, the radical-right would do well to look in-house. Of those arrested following the anti-immigration riots of last summer, 41 per cent had been previously reported to the police for domestic violence. Offences included actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint, and non-molestation orders, controlling coercive behaviour, and criminal damage. In one jurisdiction, police reported that 68 per cent of those they arrested had previously been apprehended for domestic abuse.
Nigel Farage has warned that undocumented men from ‘misogynistic’ countries pose a threat to British women. Yet, earlier this year, the beaming Reform Leader was pictured hanging out with the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor. He has been accused of rape (McGregor denies the allegations but was ordered to pay €248,000 in damages last year after losing a civil case in Ireland). Farage has also been photographed with misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate. He has described Tate – who refers to women as “bitches”, “hoes”, and “selfish cunts” who are “barely sentient” – as an “important voice for men”. Tate is awaiting trial in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking – charges he denies.
‘We don’t feel like we can talk about immigration’.
This sentiment was relayed to me several times that Friday evening. Sections of the media like to play it on repeat. The apogee of this style of discourse can be seen in the hysterical output of Matthew Goodwin, the academic-turned-Reform UK supporter who presents his own show on GB News every weeknight. “Am I a terrorist? How the British state views opposition to mass immigration as an indicator of terrorist ideology,” wrote Goodwin in a typically incendiary article for his Substack newsletter in June.
The notion that nobody in Britain can talk about immigration is a persistent myth. People talk about the subject a great deal; and frequently in a truculent and jingoistic register. Two years ago, I appeared on a news panel on Talk TV alongside the veteran radio DJ and ‘shock jock’ James Whale. Whale died from cancer this month and, in the aftermath, the newspapers tripped over themselves to lay it on thick. All the usual clichés were trotted out about a “loose cannon” who “broke all the rules” and so forth. The Telegraph described Whale as a “leviathan of late night broadcasting who would do and say the unthinkable”. Whale’s reputation was furnished by outbursts such as the one I witnessed up close in 2023. During a discussion about small boats crossing the English Channel, Whale called for the Royal Navy to point its guns at the men and women in the boats. There were a few audible gasps in the studio, but alas, Whale suffered no lasting career damage. Indeed, six months later he was made an MBE. Cancel culture, indeed.
The political salience of asylum seekers in small boats has increased as the media has been steadily cannibalised by the radical-right. This new strain of reaction is a student of the old revolutionary left; as such it understands the importance of monopolising the means of communication. It doesn’t need to storm the newspapers and occupy the radio stations because it can simply buy them up. In 2022, the right-wing tech billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. He has since used the platform, now known as X, to help put Donald Trump in the White House and attempt to foment ethnic strife in the UK. Sir Paul Marshall, an oligarch of our own who bankrolls GB News along with the Spectator magazine and UnHerd, was exposed last year by Hope Not Hate for liking and retweeting a series of racist posts on X. One of the offending posts suggested that a civil war between “native Europeans” and “fake refugee invaders” was imminent. Rupert Murdoch, who is always eager to lower the tone, made his own foray into tabloid television in Britain with Talk TV.
In Nigel Farage, anti-asylum protestors have a charismatic leader who is adept at converting generalised public dissatisfaction into focused anger and prejudice. Currently riding high in the polls, Farage will at some point have to set out a practical vision for governing Britain. This will require a delicate balancing act to keep the protest movement onside without scaring away the middle classes. There are already grumbles from Farage’s right flank. Out on the streets of Portsmouth on Friday night, I was told on several occasions that the Reform UK Leader had “sold out” to the establishment. At one point during the protest, Tenconi performed what looked like a Nazi salute.
It seems clear that, if his party is to achieve genuine electoral success, Farage will have to sell out the radical wing of his base many times over. Maybe it will be him the protestors eventually come for.
This piece was originally published in the September edition of Byline Times.
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