Should we have seen it coming? Lewis Goodall reported from an anti-immigration protest in Rotherham last year

In brief...

• Far right riots are breaking out across the country after the Southport knife attack, with thugs targeting asylum seekers and spouting racist chants amid the violence.
• In one terrifying incident over the weekend, a violent mob set a hotel housing asylum seekers on fire and even blocked a hotel exit. This is the same hotel - Rotherham’s Holiday Inn Express - which Lewis Goodall visited in February 2023 for an investigation into right wing, anti-immigrant movements.
• While last year’s demonstrations not on the same scale as the rioting we have seen over the last week, could they have been a sign this was brewing?

What did Lewis see in Rotherham last year?

You might have seen the chaotic scenes at the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham - a hotel housing asylum seekers targeted and set alight by right wing thugs over the weekend.

If this location seemed familiar to you, that could be because it's the same place Lewis visited last year to report on anti-immigration rallies for a special episode of The News Agents. And as his trip last year showed, tensions were already high even back then.

“Stop the invasion”

“No more refugees”

These were some of the slogans seen on the banners as right wing groups demonstrated outside Rotherham's Holiday Inn Express in 2023.

Some people were even making ‘Heil Hitler salutes’.

Lewis said at the time: “Anyone who tells you that these people aren’t far right or neo-Nazi are either lying or they’re ignorant.”

He added that they successfully “play on very real fears”.

One protester told Lewis: "They're robbing, they're kidnapping...they're selling drugs...I hate them, why should I like them?. Look what they've done, they're f***** our country up."

She added: “I have to live in my house in fear, because they’d rather pay for them dirty, scummy bastards to be in there, than protect the English”.

One group that was protesting outside the Rotherham hotel was Patriotic Alternative - a far right group which reportedly grew out of splits in the British National Party and other organisations.

Rosie Carter, director of policy officer for campaign group Hope Not Hate, told Lewis: “They want to whip up tensions.

“Groups like Patriotic Alternative, incredibly extreme, will turn up to a place, they will start to leaflet about a local hotel.

“And in that way, they are framing themselves as moderate local opposition. But they’re not, they’re just using the issue to get attention for themselves, to gain media attention, to be given a platform that they just normally wouldn’t be given.”

Lewis also spoke to counter protesters who blamed government rhetoric for enabling the far right and “fascism”.

One counter protester told him: “Refugees and asylum seekers have a right to be here. We’ve got a moral and a legal duty to look after them and we don’t want fascists basically telling them to go home.”

There was also a third group who had received the right wing leaflets and seen their ads, who wanted to come and see the protests out of curiosity.

But Lewis noted: “Talk for a while and it doesn’t take long to see the far right’s work at play. Many stories, often on Facebook, via leaflets, based on misinformation, some fused with very old prejudice.”

This time round, disinformation shared online about the Southport stabbing killer is partly to blame for the rioting that has taken place across the country over the last week, disinformation expert Marc Owen-Jones told The News Agents.

Lewis also took note of the vast numbers of police who turned up to the protest in Rotherham in 2023.

He said this was “indicative of just how seriously the police and the authorities feel they are going to have to take these sorts of protests which are happening up and down the country.”

What is happening now?

The scenes have reminded Lewis of his trip to Rotherham last year.

He said on The News Agents podcast: "It was very weird seeing the footage of it last night, it was very familiar to us because we spent time there. The far right have been using that hotel for a long time. It has nothing to do with what happened in Southport."

Jon Sopel said of Lewis' trip: "What we heard here was very telling, almost the kind of prediction of what happened this week and the build up to it.”

Fast forward a year, and police are physically clashing with hundreds of rioters.

At least 10 officers were injured in Rotherham as missiles and bottles were thrown while thugs in balaclava tried to force entry into the Holiday Inn Express.

There were around 500 people who held "far-right and anti-immigration views" at the scene in Rotherham, South Yorkshire police have said.

Similar scenes unfolded outside a Holiday Inn Express in Tamworth, Staffordshire.

Violence has also spilled over into Belfast, Southport, Liverpool, Bolton and Middlesbrough, Leicester and Stoke.