When I returned from Hong Kong on Saturday, there was a larger than normal police presence at Hull railway station, of the kind normally seen when visiting football supporters come to see their team play Hull City. It transpired that riots were expected as hundreds of protesters were congregating in the city centre for a protest related to the stabbings in Southport. One of the local Islamic centres near the city centre was surrounded by local Muslim men, presumably in anticipation of trouble.
Soon after my return at midday, the station was closed, bus services through the city centre were cancelled, and the trouble began. Protesters clashed with riot police outside the Royal Hotel, which adjoins the railway station. Bottles were thrown at and injured police, windows were smashed at the front of the hotel and a shoe shop was burnt out. According to one unconfirmed report, the scented soap outlet Lush was raided, presumably by opportunists who like bath bombs, while the Humberside Police were otherwise engaged. Bins were set alight and a flaming barrier was erected on a main road out of the centre. After 20 arrests the trouble subsided but police remained in the city centre overnight.
I went downtown at 6:30am on Sunday to see what evidence there was of the day’s events. Very little in fact. The road where the barrier had been erected was scorched and cordoned off and other bins had evidently been set on fire. About half of the windows on the ground floor of the Royal Hotel were boarded up and on the pavement outside the hotel you could see broken glass. The police were dealing with some troublemakers outside the station entrance but, while the altercation was between white men and a few men of colour, it was probably related, not to the protests, but to alcohol as the local night clubs emptied.
But why Hull and why the Royal Hotel? The Royal Hotel, once described as a “first class hotel” by Travel Weekly, has changed hands several times in recent decades, each change of hands finding it under the management of progressively less prestigious owners including Mercure and lately Britannia Hotels. Once a fine example of a former British Rail hotel which was used, for example, by the university to house prestigious visitors and was a busy conference centre, the hotel has since plunged downmarket and is no longer a sought-after venue for events or accommodation.
The most recent owners, therefore, must have been delighted to have been approached by Mears Group, a housing and social care provider which is contracted to the Home Office to provide accommodation for asylum seekers. Initially only a few asylum seekers were housed there (even local MPs have difficulty establishing precise numbers), but the number has increased to the point where the hotel is no longer accessible to the public. The attractive art deco entrance from the station has been locked for months. Being one of two Hull hotels housing asylum seekers, the issue has united local MPs David Davis (Conservative) and Dame Diana Johnson (Labour) both of whom have raised concerns in Parliament.
Hull has a long history of accommodating asylum seekers which extends through both World Wars to the Hugenots who were expelled from Catholic France in the 16th through to 18th Centuries. More recently, and before the most recent and voluminous waves of asylum seekers arriving in the U.K., a single house in a fairly prestigious neighbourhood was used to accommodate a handful of asylum seekers.
However, in the past decade the face of Hull has changed noticeably. Two main shopping streets with small businesses are now almost completely in the hands of Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners. The streets are now ostensibly Muslim areas with large groups of young men hanging about at the entrances to businesses. There is little, if any trouble, but some locals feel increasingly uneasy and are vocal about their concerns, if not in public, most certainly in the pub.
The above immigrants to Hull are largely former asylum seekers granted leave to live in the U.K. and Hull continues to pride itself on being friendly to asylum seekers. But placing hundreds of young, mainly Muslim, men in the heart of the city has tested Hull’s resolve. People in the city centre feel particularly galled by the fact that, while those in the more middle-class parts of Hull such as Cottingham, will wax lyrical about the need to house asylum seekers, their enthusiasm wanes at the thought of having them in their midst. Protesters brought Cottingham to a standstill when it was proposed by the University of Hull (not located in Cottingham) to sell its halls of residence in the leafy suburb to the Home Office to house hundreds of asylum seekers. The university relented and shelved the plans.
Those in the centre of Hull who complain about the influx of asylum seekers, but feel powerless to change things, consider that a double standard exists regarding the housing of asylum seekers depending on your social status. Nevertheless, there have never been riots in Hull before and there is no doubt that there was an influx of protesters this weekend determined to show their displeasure and stir some of the locals into action of the most violent and destructive type. The fact that the murders in Southport had nothing to do with an asylum seeker seems not to have registered.
I share concerns about the influx of asylum seekers to Hull and the changing face of many parts of our small city. But we do not want riots here and we do not want outsiders with malicious intent attacking police, property or asylum seekers.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
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I make no apologies in saying that I’m sick to my back teeth of seeing this blatant obfuscation of the truth being made. People are revolting against mass immigration and care not one iota how the immigrant arrived on these shores – in this case through Rwandan immigrants (of what type I don’t know and, quite frankly, don’t care). This sort of patronising of ordinary people is exactly the same game that the far-left play.
Indeed what a cowardly patsy article. Dripping in moral superiority and sanctimonious judgement.
Immigration – legal, illegal, semi-legal – whatever it is, is the issue. Muslimification. Asianisation. Africanisation. None of the totalitarianisms or Dr Watson’s asked the rest of us our opinion on wiping out our history, culture and heritage. Powell warned quite rightly of rivers of blood 60 years ago. Maybe Watson et al should understand that unless the borders are shut, the illegals shipped out and our country’s history protected, this will get much worse.
We have had many asylum seekers and immigrants over the centuries but up until recently none of them hacked people’s heads off or blew themselves up with the intention of killing as many people as possible.
Southport cannot be separated from the following:
9/11,
7/7.
Lee Rigby
The Bataclan
Charlie Hebdo
Madrid Railway Station
Manchester Arena
Tunisia
Nice
Barcelona
Berlin
London Bridge (twice)
Westminster Bridge
Glasgow Airport
Rotherham Rape Gangs
London Acid attack
Salmon Rushdie
Samuel Paty
Sir David Amess
Priest Jacques Hamel
Lieutenant Colonel Mark Teeton
Dublin knife attacks
Manchester Airport
Stockport knife attack
Greenford Knife attack
Southport knife attack
I forgot the Boston Marathon, but I’m sure there are more. Tunisia for example?
The two Swedish girls in Morocco?
How many of the above were government instigated to frighten the people and make more draconian laws to take our freedoms away and “protect” us?
Hardly any as the intent to harm the West is inbuilt within the Islamists and International Marxists. However, and overall Mass migration is a weapon and it is apparent that those wanting mass migration want to bring down western society.
Send that list to TWO (T)KEIR STARMER
What has happened is supposedly what PC Clod wanted to avoid with their usual gaslighting of the public with respect to details of the (alleged) perpetrator – unless they are White of course.
They could have released details other than actual identity but did not and instead their usual coy routine, so into the information vacuum rushed rumour which on past experience was entirely credible.
After CoVid, the Net Zero lies, lies about curbing immigration vital to provide essential skills and enrich our culture, the gaslighting doesn’t work any more. People have had enough.
Will ‘lessons be learned’? I doubt it because 85% of the population are just a ‘tiny minority of Far Right thugs’ and can vilified, demonised, be brutalised and made to shut up.
“But we do not want riots here and we do not want outsiders with malicious intent attacking police, property or asylum seekers.”
How about Sweden where there are now immigrant Ghettos that are no go areas for not only Swedish citizens but also the police? Gang warfare involves machine guns and hand grenades. These immigrants are outsiders with malicious intent and they attack the police and property.
Did somebody say ”civil disorder”? This is Sheffield;
https://x.com/EuropeInvasionn/status/1820110809860567358
Look at these far-right thugs in Middlesborough carrying weapons on Sky News. Oops…
https://x.com/mickyb200/status/1820131994233458846
What a difference your ethnicity makes though, eh? Remember the vids I shared of the Downing Street peaceful protesters, standing about chatting with their mates then getting singled out and handcuffed, decked if they put up the slightest resistance, the guy who was punched in the face multiple times for precisely nothing? It seems being a patriot makes you public enemy number 1 but being brown and running around with bats, planks of wood and machetes ( jihad flag optional ) gives you a free pass. Where’s the dogs to set on people now?? Why you not battering people this time round?
https://x.com/TkeMedia/status/1820116298350686327
Okay, this is truly amazing. The government’s mouthpiece, the Beeb, actually reporting truth from Bolton. Probably because there’s now so much footage going viral online that they can’t deny it any longer and have to give the Muslim thugs some acknowledgment. Wonders never cease;
”I can’t believe it! The BBC reported at a peaceful pro-British protest where 250-300 Muslims turned up and charged at the police chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ which enflamed tensions.
Two-tier Keir’s “far-right” narrative smashed by the BBC.”
https://x.com/addicted2newz/status/1820142101574844917
Do you think Starmer is referring to the Muslim hooligans here? Nah, me neither;
“Those whipping up the protests online”
What does this mean? Having an opinion on them? Reporting on them? Is he referring to the organisers of the protests?
Absolutely dystopian stuff.;
https://x.com/NiohBerg/status/1820130286090547278
Kneel is going to get people killed. What a vile, vile POS!
Just tried to get into your links and my account is blocked until I give them my age! Well they can ….. …!
Anyone else getting J6 vibes about the ‘uprising’. Seems like protests with a bit of shoving. MSM desperate to describe every incident in apocalyptic terms. No police officers noticeably injured, no looting to speak of, a flaming wheelie bin, give me a break.
I think it was obvious the game was lost after the Rivers of Blood speech. Even Peter Hitchens, who is a lot more astute than most, disapproved of it.
In today’s Mail on Sunday, Mr H writes a full-page article urging ‘responsible, conservative patriots’ to reject ‘Faragism’.
What is ‘Faragism’?
It might be conjectured that it is a euphemism. A euphemism for an ethnic community with a leader. And, moreover, a community that could be represented by a political party headed up by that leader.
All the communities have their community leaders, even where these are overtly ethnic or religious communities. Except the ‘white’ community. Although this ‘white’ community is never treated as a community, it is not to be allowed a leader. This is because the ‘white’ designation was created by the establishment as a counterpart to the BAME (now ‘global majority’).
There cannot be a ‘white’ community with a leader since the then-Labour government’s response to Powell’s notorious speech, a response that limited immigration, has been replaced by the New Labour creation of a Britain that rejected the ‘narrow, English-dominated, backward looking definition of the nation’ in favour of a Utopia of a ‘community of communities’.
If the people who support Reform, and the tens of thousands who voted for it in the general election (note that 74% of respondents supported Powell’s speech at the time), think that this party and its leader is tantamount to representation of an ethnic white community, this ‘Faragism’ cannot be allowed to succeed.
While not mistaken or ignoble, this objective has to be described by a euphemism. This is necessary for otherwise the inconsistency of the other communities that are overtly ethnic having their own leaders, and now the beginnings of a political organisation explicitly dedicated to challenging Labour, would have to be acknowledged. Up to Powell’s intervention, concerns over immigration had been dealt with by silencing the issue. This silence is now seems to be reinstated with euphemisms.
He will be a Tory anxious to paint Reform as somehow responsible for riots. Of course they are not but they are more aware of the causes than any Tory.
Hitchens is certainly not a Tory. I don’t think he has voted for them for a long time.
A very good analysis. I don’t read Hitchens since they went behind a paywall. I think he is very wrong on this – odd as I agree with an awful lot of what he says – which is unusual for a public figure!
Every Western democracy has been attacked in the same way. Enoch powell’s speech made no difference.
Sadly true.
Given that there’s trouble in loads of cities, where are these outsiders coming from. Are the Middlesborough lads going to Hull to riot, while the Hull crowd are going to Middlesborough?
“Outsiders” is out and out gaslighting.
The police are evidently not about discriminating against women, as long as they’re of a certain colour that is;
https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1820155018785210788
The murder of the 3 little girls caused obvious outrage.
However, that outrage was compounded because the murderer was black.
It was reported quite quickly by the BBC that he was 17 years old, of Rwanda parents and he was born in Cardiff. There has been no mention of whether he was a Muslim or not.
Demonstrations were organised by Tommy Robinson and to his credit he asked them to be peaceful.
However, Tommy Robinson is a Zionist asset who has been working for the State of Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counterjihad’ Islamophobia movement established by that state. When the EDL, was incorporated in 2011, it was named the English & Jewish Defence League.
Fomenting hatred against Muslims is an old Zionist trick.
Perhaps the knuckledraggers who are rioting can explain how looting shops like Lush assuages their anger at 3 little girls being murdered by a black 17 year old.
You’ve attracted a lot of downvotes – some related probably to the “Zionist” comment and some possibly to “knuckledraggers”.
I think your point about looting shops is valid – it’s an own goal, surely – but if people are extremely angry and feel that whatever they do, they are ignored, they will often do daft/bad things.
Zionist?
1. The riots have been instigated by the Zionist asset Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), who has been working for the State of Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counterjihad’ Islamophobia movement established by that state. When his organisation, the English Defence League, was incorporated in 2011, two years after its inception, it was named the English & Jewish Defence League. The Jewish Defence League, a Zionist terrorist organisation, has been a key part of violent Islamophobic street thuggery in the UK over the past decade.
2. Yaxley-Lennon is one of the most high-profile actors in the State of Israel’s Online Influencers Programme in response to Operation Al-Aqsa Storm. He and others, like Oli London, Noa Tishby, Hen Mazzig, Arsen Ostrovsky and Emily Schrader (and many others) are paid to distribute Zionist propaganda, of which pushing back against pro-Palestine protests and sowing Islamophobia are two important and interlinked aims.
3. The recent Islamophobic riots in the UK should be seen as the latest phase of the State of Israel’s war on British Muslims, who it sees as originating the protest movement in the UK. These riots are designed to punish Muslims for their anti-Zionist sentiment after various other methods to suppress opposition to Zionism by the State of Israel have been thwarted. The State of Israel’s attempts to use its assets and operatives in the British political and media class — such as Suella Braverman and Michael Gove — to thwart pro-Palestinian protests have failed. Zionist counter-protests have failed to mobilise significant numbers. Sporadic Zionist thuggery and the use of other assets — such as Iranian secularist extremists — have also failed to intimidate Muslims. So now the State of Israel is weaponising its cannon fodder on the white nationalist far-right, who have greater numbers than either Zionist street thugs or Iranian monarchists and secularist extremists.
4. Finally, there are also questions about which actor authored the idea that Muslims were responsible for the ostensible triggers for these events. MI6 and its assets (eg Paul Mason) are desperately trying to pretend this was a Russian disinfo op. But the original stories did not come from Russia. Where did they come from?”
David Miller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Strathclyde (2004–2011) and the University of Bath (2011–2018) and was Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol (2018–2021).
Knuckledraggers?
Apart from his staunch support for the murderous Israeli regime and his disdain for the vast majority of peace loving Muslims I quite like his courage against the Covid nonsense and other issues.
I have been watching Luton Town F.C. ever since 1967 and the Town and Tommy Robinson are well known to us.
That is why he was banned from the ground and the fans asked not to sing his name which they haven’t for some years.
I’ve seen him at some away games and also seen him when we are lucky enough to play at Wembley.
One match at Oxford City he was sitting next to his friend who was black, so I know he is not racist against ALL people of colour, just Muslims.
The vast majority of the 2 billion Muslims in the world are peace loving.
My 57 years of going to football matches makes me well qualified to recognise a “knucledragger” when I see one.
I have been punched on the nose by knuckledraggers so also feel I can recognise them, though just because they are knuckledraggers doesn’t mean they are wrong to be angry. Perhaps using that term isn’t that helpful, even though it’s partly accurate.
“The vast majority of the 2 billion Muslims in the world are peace loving.” Maybe, but I still don’t think we want any more of them here, and I wish we had fewer of them. I wish we had fewer immigrants of any kind, full stop.
They are wrong to be angry against Muslims in this particular case of the 3 murdered girls as there is currently no known link to Islam.
I too wish there were less migrants to the UK but it doesn’t make me want to steal from a Lush shop.
It’s very sad and I see no way out.
The way out is for the UK to adopt Proportional Representation and for the people to elect a Party that will make the reduction of immigration and the assimilation of migrants already here a top priority.
Well people could have voted for Reform who might have done that, but most didn’t.
There was a lot of tactical voting because of FPTP and many wouldn’t have voted Reform because of that.
With PR you get what you vote for and I believe more people would have voted for the Reform Party.
Tactical voting is not a great idea IMO especially now Reform actually seemed to offer a serious alternative to the Uniparty. Sadly 86% rejected that alternative including six million supposedly conservative voters
I can’t remember whether it was the Hull or York branch of Lush that used to display a “Refugees Welcome” poster in their window.
Maybe a red rag to a bull if they are still displaying it?
Huge it’s were culturally similar to their new fellow citizens. They did not receive either subsidies or social and legal advantages.
They were coreligionists with the bulk of the English. Their numbers were never more than 30k in a year and probably 109k overall.
one realises the population of the UK was smaller then but it was also mainly homogenous. We had not already suffered decades of unassimilated mass immigration.
Now there are earlier antagonistic immigrants keen to fight the battles of their original countries over hear.
Please stop suggesting the current position is just like then.
So Dr. Watson is happy to live and work in China, which has one of the strictest immigration policies in the world.
And yet he criticises his own fellow Englishmen at home for protesting against one of the WEAKEST immigration policies in the world.
Does that mean he will return to China and tell the Chinese to weaken their immigration policy?
A totally cowardly article that ignores actual cause, a two tier system where this nation has been swamped for years on end.
When your town, your area and your country is being turned before your eyes into a multi-ethnic/cultural hellhole by an arrogant, out-of-touch, insulated, virtue-signalling governing class, it’s hardly surprising if – eventually – even the generally law-abiding working class starts kicking off.
It’s THEIR communities and THEIR standard of living which are being wrecked.
When the arrogant, out-of-touch, insulated, virtue-signalling governing class “promise” to reduce immigration / stop the boats, but then do the complete opposite it’s hardly surprising if there is a reaction.
And when the police, with the encouragement of the arrogant, out-of-touch, insulated, virtue-signalling governing class, operate a blatant Two-Tier Policing strategy ….. against the native working class and in favour of immigrants (legal or not) …… again, it’s hardly surprising if there is a reaction.
Basically, you reap what you sow. The arrogant, out-of-touch, insulated, virtue-signalling governing class has sowed the wind.
As Matt Goodwin said in his substack “What did they expect?”
I lived all my life in Hull until I moved a few miles away 8 years ago. I even spent my wedding night at the Royal Hotel (It was the Royal Station Hotel then, and still posh).
Until we moved, there were a number of Kurdish refugees in the Avenues area but the overwhelming number of migrants were Polish/Russian/Eastern European to the point where it was only occasionally that you heard English being spoken in the street.
Acquaintances at church yesterday were chatting about the disgraceful rioting and how social media was to blame for spreading misinformation. They seemed genuinely surprised when I offered the observation that the PM’s speech had probably inflamed the situation and 2-tier policing provoking unrest. “Do you think so?” they said.
Absolutely never heard of 2-tier policing. The middle classes remain seriously misinformed.
“we do not want outsiders with malicious intent attacking police, property or asylum seekers.”
As I said in a comment yesterday has it ever occurred to anyone that these might possibly be agent provocateurs stirring up trouble to enable Starmer to act like the dictator we always knew he was going to be?
Why does Roger Watson keep referring repeatedly to these foreigners as « asylum seekers »? He does not know
“I share concerns about the influx of asylum seekers to Hull and the changing face of many parts of our small city” The question is then, what to do about it? Voting against immigration has made no difference
Stop debauching the term asylum seekers. They are welfare-seekers, and many are thugs.
The Huguenots, Jews and others from Russia who were escaping the Bolsheviks were genuine asylum seekers, in flight for fear of their lives and who blended in and made positive contributions.
Um, that sounds fine until you say that Jewish people were escaping from the Jewish Bolsheviks, whose “Russian Revolution” was entirely funded by wealthy Jewish people settled in America. Not Russians at all.
The same ones who carried out the Ukrainian Holodomor, starving Twelve Million Christians to death in only one year, seven years before the start of WWII.
Just ask Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
No one really complains much about Chinese or Indian or other nationalities and religions as immigrants because they tend to just get on with work and family life and cause no trouble. I am afraid that Muslims do cause trouble wherever they go and the more lenient law enforcement is, the more trouble they will cause. The best example is the Grooming Gang Scandal where the authorities ran away from their responsibilities of equal justice for all so their multicultural dogma did not come under theat.
It looks like paid actors are involved in this past week’s “riots”. The real question is, who is funding them. Nothing has changed in the UK. Everyone knows the boy who murdered three young girls, was born in the UK. The placement of illegal boat people has been going on for over three years. Paid actors folks. Someone knows who is paying them. How can anyone with a brain think that suddenly, Brits have turned into “thugs”. Sorry not buying it. Turn off msm, it serves no purpose.