Dover and Portsmouth show hatred is being organised on our streets

Dover and Portsmouth show hatred is being organised on our streets

This weekend we watched, yet again, as our communities were treated as a spectacle for far-right bullies in balaclavas to march through. In Dover on Saturday, hundreds of masked, black-clad men shut down roads to the country's busiest port. On Sunday, as a boat carrying around 140 people seeking safety was brought ashore in Portsmouth, coaches taking them to be processed were blocked by far-right thugs who had travelled there specifically to harass and intimidate them. Local people had their lives disrupted for hours, with women and children telling the media how fearful they felt of the far-right. Migrants and asylum seekers, once again, had their arrival in this country turned into a stage-managed confrontation by those who have weaponised hate.

We are glad that ministers have found their voice this time. A cabinet minister was right to say that peaceful protest is not the same as masked crowds obstructing people's lives, and that concealing your identity to intimidate people on the street is not something Britain should tolerate. Opposition figures joined the condemnation too. We have heard condemnation before though, and we have watched it change little. Words after the fact do not undo the fear that spreads through migrant communities every time footage like this circulates. They do not answer the question we keep having to ask: why does it take masked mobs shutting down a major port, or blocking coaches of exhausted, frightened people just off a small boat, before politicians will say plainly that this is unacceptable? Enough is enough. We have seen the far right riots which have swept this country, and we have seen, so often, politicians trying to shift the blame onto our communities and away from the racists who attack them.

It should not need pointing out that the people who arrived in Portsmouth had just crossed the Channel in an open boat. Whatever anyone thinks about how they got here, they arrived frightened, cold, and in need of safety, and the response some of them met on British soil was a wall of masked men trying to stop the vehicles that would take them somewhere warm. That is the reality behind the footage of flares and chanting: real people, made to feel, on the very day they reached land, that they were not welcome and were not safe.

These protests did not spring up out of nowhere. They have been organised, promoted and choreographed for weeks by people who have built careers out of turning migrants into a threat to "protect" against. When politicians and sections of the press spend months telling the country that small boats are a crisis, that asylum hotels are a scandal, that migrants are a burden rather than neighbours, colleagues and friends, this is the result. The organisers didn't create the hostility alone, they mobilised a climate that has been built, speech by speech and headline by headline, over a very long time.

We say again what we have said after every one of these episodes: the problems this country faces, a cost-of-living crisis, stretched public services, housing shortages, underinvestment in the places people actually live, are not caused by people crossing the Channel in small boats, and they will not be solved by frightening them further. Migrants are affected by all of these pressures too, often more so. Blaming us is not a solution; it is a distraction from the decisions that have actually left communities struggling.

We do not ask people to ignore real anxieties about the state of the country. We ask that those anxieties stop being pointed, again and again, at the people with the least power to answer for any of it. We ask political leaders to do more than condemn scenes once they have already frightened people. Instead they must challenge, consistently and before the cameras arrive, the narratives that make events like Dover and Portsmouth inevitable.

We stand with those who arrived in Portsmouth this weekend hoping only to be safe, and with every migrant who watched masked crowds trying to block their path and recognised, once again, that this could have been them. We are not an "other." We are part of these communities, and we will keep saying so for as long as it takes to be heard.