Forget the White Van Man stereotype. The truth, finds ROBERT HARDMAN, is that the Epping hotel protests are being led by concerned mothers

Daily Mail​

25-07-2025

Civil disorder – or civil war? It could almost be the film set for a suburban apocalypse drama. There are police vans tailing back down leafy lanes all around Epping. Platoons of coppers in full riot garb have been massing at the station, along the Georgian high street and out in the woods since mid-morning.
Units have been bussed in from Hampshire, Staffordshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent, in addition to the Metropolitan Police.
It's the sort of presence you might expect for a grudge match between Premier League arch-rivals or a full-fat Hamas solidarity parade through central London.
Instead, these reinforcements have swamped Sir Rod Stewart 's pretty former home town in semi-rural Essex to help the local force keep an eye on 150 locals standing across the road from The Bell Hotel.
What is immediately apparent is that many of the protesters are women and children. Indeed, this whole protest has been organised by women.
Many – if not most – of the passing motorists who honk their horns in support are also women, including one who drives back and forth eagerly beep-beeping away in her claret Land Rover Discovery (you can forget the White Van Man stereotypes in this corner of Essex).
What has galvanised these residents is a near-universal demand for the closure of The Bell as an accommodation centre for migrants following a recent attack on a 14-year-old schoolgirl.
A hotel guest, a 38-year-old Ethiopian man, who had arrived in Britain eight days earlier, has been charged with three sexual assaults and denies them all. Suddenly the debate on small boat migration has become incendiary.
Protests here a week ago turned violent when far-Left activists were escorted in by Essex Police to stage a counter-demo. That, in turn, brought out the usual suspects on the hard-Right and things soon turned ugly.
By Thursday, though, there is no prospect of trouble because there are no dissenting voices. The rent-a-mob from Stand Up To Racism – a masked offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party – have not turned up. Nor have any hard-Right saboteurs allied to the toxic Tommy Robinson. It is raining, after all.
That has not deterred the true believers who have a fervent desire to see The Bell – now fenced off and looking more like a disused military base – either bulldozed or transformed back into the local wedding venue of yesteryear.
And I mean everyone. That not only applies to the drenched posse marching on the local council offices, chanting 'Save Our Kids' and 'Starmer Out', but the councillors gathered in the chamber – including Sir Keir Starmer's own man.
Epping Forest council only has one Labour councillor, Martin Morris. Even he joins the Tories, Reform, the Lib Dems, the solitary Green and sundry Independents in a unanimous vote to demand the immediate closure of The Bell.
In fact, they all demand a lot more than that in a thumping two-page motion which also calls for the closure of another hotel-turned-migrant centre up the road. All media eyes have been on The Bell of late, but the situation is not much better at The Phoenix Hotel.
That mysteriously caught fire four months ago, although asylum seekers still occupy most of it. The man charged with arson has turned out to be a guest at The Phoenix who was then generously rehoused at, you guessed it, The Bell. The same man has been charged with trying to burn that down, too.
There is a thunderous standing ovation in both the gallery and the council chamber after Tory councillor Shane Yerrell reads out a message from the father of the girl subjected to the recent assault.
'I do not want or condone any of the violence that has taken place at the protest,' says the message from the unnamed dad. 'I just want the hotel to be moved, not only away from our streets, but away from making any other family feel how we're feeling right now.
'It's not fair that the Government is putting our children and grandchildren at risk. I didn't think my little girl's story would be as big as it was.'
His daughter, he adds, has been greatly comforted by messages of support and a JustGiving page which has raised £3,000 for counselling. 'Eventually we will get her confidence back to the point where she is able to go out without feeling scared.'
The father, it transpires, is actually in the gallery.
We have now, very clearly, got beyond the point where the Government can trot out the usual mantra 'It's all the Tories' fault and we've got this migration thing under control ' and expect things to blow over.
The default position of the legal establishment, the police and most of us in the media – namely that the main problem is dark online forces stirring up xenophobia – is manifestly no longer tenable.
Having spent the previous week in northern France watching the people smugglers, I have spent this week looking at the other end of the equation.
I have seen the protests popping up in Epping and Canary Wharf, east London (where a huge hotel has just been commandeered by the Home Office). And there are two very striking trends to this new wave of popular protest.
The first is that the protagonists are being open about it. They tell me their names and stories. There is no sense of shame or fear of being branded a 'racist' any more.
The second is that this is very much a unisex campaign, if not an overtly female one.
One of the main architects of the peaceful protests in Epping is Orla Minihane, a mother of three teenagers and now a vocal council candidate for the Reform Party.
'I think women are naturally more tolerant – we have got to put up with men after all – but when you start to threaten our children, then we snap,' says Mrs Minihane, who is marching through the rain waving not the Cross of St George, like some of the men, but the green, white and purple flag of the Suffragette movement.
She's lived in Epping since childhood, has worked for a City bank for 25 years and is married to Scott who owns a building business ('and can't stand this political stuff').
Mrs Minihane says she was appalled by last week's violence in the town and blames Essex Police for facilitating a Left-wing counter-demo which, she says, triggered all the aggro. It has prompted Reform leader Nigel Farage to call for the resignation of the chief constable. 'There was only trouble when the police caused it,' he says.
For the Tories, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp says that Essex Police 'lamentably failed to keep the protesters apart'.
Mrs Minihane says: 'The day after that trouble I went on our Facebook group – there's about 700 of us – and said we are never going to win if we have more protests like that. We need to change the narrative. So we ordered a batch of T-shirts saying 'We Are The Children's Voice'. And we are going to show that this problem is much worse than people think it is.'
She talks of repeated incidents of women being pestered while jogging or walking their dogs and recounts the story of a friend, a mother of four girls. Her 15-year-old, she said, was chased on the local common by a man who, she says, was living at The Bell.
'She told the police, who did nothing at first,' says Mrs Minihane. 'When she went back again, they told her to be careful. They said: 'Remember what happened to those protesters after Southport.' But we're not putting up with that any more.' I later verify the story with the girl's mother.
Mr Farage explains that what Mrs Minihane is doing in Epping reflects a broader trend.
'The boats issue is increasingly becoming a female issue. Mums for Reform, call it what you will, is a real thing,' he says, pointing to this month's Tory-to-Reform defections of Laura Anne Jones, a member of the Welsh Senedd, and Westminster city councillor, Laila Cunningham, along with a marked shift in the party's membership.
Having been 58 per cent male and 42 per cent female at the last election, he says, it is now 50:50. It's hard to see what more the Tory-run council can do. All are as one when it comes to the failings of the Home Office, which commandeered the hotel without consulting the locals first.
'We are speaking to the Home Office on a regular basis. I have to say to you, at the present time, they have not been overly co-operative,' council leader Chris Whitbread tells the meeting.
Holly Whitbread, his fellow Tory councillor (and daughter), is more forthright: 'It is my firm belief that the Government is now treating our community with contempt. Contempt for local democracy, contempt for public safety, contempt for our town which deserves better than this.'
The hotel has been the trigger for plenty of other complaints, too. Hairdresser Barry Seago tells me that today alone he has had five cancellations from customers worried about trouble in the town.
Locals point to the trouble they have in finding an NHS dentist – hence their fury when they saw a mobile dental unit turn up at The Bell.
This week has also seen protests an hour away at Canary Wharf, where the Home Office has taken over the vast Britannia International Hotel, which has 531 bedrooms, as a new accommodation centre.
I remember the days when my old newspaper used to hold (rather dreary) office parties there. It might be more Alan Partridge than The Ritz but it's not cheap.
As Whitehall maintains its customary reluctance to discuss these things, rumours are rampant that migrants will be housed three to a room, suggesting a new population of 1,500 predominantly young, undocumented adult men with nothing to do. Here, I meet a small group of protesters in the rain, all native East Enders who live around here.
Once again, they are happy to be identified. 'You've got working people round here using food banks – my Mum runs one – and then people are being put up here on three square meals a day and we don't know anything about who they are,' says Ben Cavanagh, 45, a scaffolder and father of three.
Fellow scaffolder Matthew John-Lewis, 44, says tensions have gone off the scale. 'I'm busting my arse off to pay taxes for all this. I can barely afford the rent on a two-bedroom flat and this lot get given everything,' argues the father of four children.
He adds that he does not want his children to be targeted by gangs of bored young men who 'don't understand' British culture. 'And don't anyone dare call us racist. My family were immigrants and I'm three-quarters black,' he says.
The hefty police presence here and the even bigger one in Epping are an acknowledgement that we are at a very ugly tipping point.
With another Stand Up To Racism protest against the residents of Epping – or 'organised Nazis' as they call them – planned for Sunday, further outbreaks of violence are no longer a question of if – but when.