12-05-2025
Migrant hotels cost Labour more than money
It was the end of November 2022, a brand-new hotel near Heathrow. Numb subarctic cold. Autumn sunsets in mid-afternoon. Aircraft sharking low and splitting the air every other minute. Wandering aimlessly through this landscape of deserted conference centres, brownfield scrap, chain-link fences and a lonely horse tethered to a pole in a dirty green field, I met Bro.
Bro had just moved into the hotel. Whenever I hear another home secretary promising to end once and for all a 'free-market experiment' in migration, or read about another 'landmark' immigration white paper like this week's, or come across a minister pondering whether to put 'anti-migrant jet skis' on standby, as Priti Patel did in January 2022, I think about Bro.
I had been sent to the
