Revealed: Asylum hotel protests dwarfed by runners going to Parkrun

Protests outside asylum hotels have been the defining hot topic of the summer leaving Britain bracing for a wave of anti-immigration demonstrations over the last bank holiday weekend.

A ‘broken’ asylum system and a growing anti-immigration backlash has been a headache for the government while MPs have been on summer recess. Immigration and asylum remain top of YouGov’s poll of the biggest issues facing the country, narrowly ahead of the economy.

But has that really translated into numbers on the ground? Big Issue compared the numbers attending protests to the number of people attending Parkrun events over the bank holiday weekend. Why? Because organising and mobilising people to take action on a Saturday takes a lot of effort, commitment and passion – just like Parkrun! And our brief investigation shows protesters lagging behind.

Following the High Court ruling that will see asylum seekers removed from The Bell Hotel in Epping, a number of ‘Abolish Asylum System’ protests were organised. Headlines warned ‘Asylum hotel protests expected to swell this weekend’ and branded the unrest as a “weekend of chaos”.

Around 30 protests reportedly took place in Cardiff, Chichester, Cheshunt and elsewhere last Friday (22 August). Protests took place the following day in places such as Bristol, Liverpool, Aberdeen and Perth in Scotland, and Mold in Wales.

With hundreds of people attending protests – from ‘concerned families’ to far-right activists – and the issue dominating the mainstream media, Big Issue looked at whether the numbers warranted the coverage.

Asylum protests vs Parkrun

The running phenomenon Parkrun sees scores of runners around the UK head to their local park every Saturday morning for an invigorating 5km run. Results are posted online every week – so they can tell us how many people attended the event.

For this investigation, we compared verified Parkrun events to estimates from media reports of how many anti-immigration protesters attended each event.

It’s not an exact science – estimates in the media are often down to quick head counts or guesstimates from journalists – but with few reliable sources of information on attendance, it’s the best indication.

We found 11 media estimates of how many protesters attended events on the bank holiday weekend.

In all but two of the protests, the local Parkrun event was more widely attended.

Mold in Wales reportedly saw the peak numbers for anti-immigration protesters at around 300, far in excess of the 106 runners at nearby Wepre.

In the Chadderton area of Oldham, Greater Manchester, around 150 people protested outside the Victoria Hotel compared to the 95 people who ran 5K at Chadderton Hall. However, this Parkrun event is not the biggest – the upcoming event this weekend has been postponed due to a shortage of volunteers.

Elsewhere, Parkrun events largely dwarf asylum hotel protests.

Demonstrations in Horley, Surrey, were widely reported in the media over the weekend with around 200 protestors in attendance. That fell far short of the 420 runners at nearby Reigate Park.

In big cities such as Bristol, Liverpool and London, the gap between runners and protesters was sizeable.

Bristol reportedly saw around 50 protesters in Castle Park – they were met with a larger counter protest. The Parkrun at Ashton Court recorded 439 runners on the same day.

Liverpool was the subject of a march from UKIP members, which counter protesters claimed they averted. The 150 protesters who hit the streets were nowhere near the 484 runners who completed the Parkrun at Princes Park in the city.

Media estimates put the number of people protesting at the Britannia Hotel at London’s Canary Wharf at around 20 people. Just up the road at Mile End Park, 416 people turned out for Parkrun.

Another asylum hotel in Orpington, south-east London, was the subject of a protest on Friday night but Big Issue was unable to find an estimate of how many protesters attended.

A fellow Friday protest outside the Park Hotel in Chichester attracted around 100 protesters. A total of 386 people turned up for the Parkrun the following morning.

Tensions have been high in Labour-run Tamworth for weeks and it was one of the local authorities to declare it would consider taking legal action to remove asylum seekers from hotels following the ruling in Epping.

Around 150 protesters turned up on Saturday in the town while 288 people attended the Tamworth Castle Grounds Parkrun event.

In Epping itself, it was a more close-run thing. Around 150 people demonstrated outside the Bell Hotel, which is set to be cleared next month following the High Court’s decision to impose an injunction. The nearby Roding Park Parkrun attracted 179 runners.

Nick Beales, head of campaigning at refugee charity Refugee & Migrant Forum of Essex and London, has seen the summer protests in Epping take place on the charity’s doorstep.

He sees the solution to the use of asylum hotels as giving people seeking the right to asylum an opportunity to work to support themselves while their claims are being processed and also advocated for community-based housing to “foster stronger ties”.

Beales told Big Issue: “Despite what politicians claim, it is actually a very small number of people who are seeking to threaten and intimidate the men, women and children housed in these hotels. Polling consistently shows that the wider public are actually sympathetic towards people who’ve fled war, persecution and famine.

“What people want is a fair asylum system. What we currently have, with people spending years on end stuck in awful hotels and prohibited from working and developing ties with their local communities, is neither fair nor functional.”

There was a gulf between protesters and runners in Perth, Scotland. Again, around 150 protesters were recorded outside the Radisson Blu hotel in the Scottish city. But 350 people were up early for the Perth Parkrun.

The biggest chasm between the two could be found in Long Eaton in Derbyshire. A paltry 12 anti-immigration protesters attended, according to the NottinghamshireLive liveblog. Meanwhile, 505 people ran the local Parkrun.

Asylum hotels protests ‘over-reported’

Asylum hotel protesters continue to dominate the news landscape despite, as our analysis shows, the numbers of people involved can’t even top organised weekly running events.

The protests are even divisive among the wider population. Ipsos polling found 36% Brits considered protesting outside hotels acceptable while 39% considered it unacceptable.

So why has the issue continued to have legs despite a repeat of last summer’s riots, so far, not materialising.

Sunder Katwala, the director of think tank British Future, has been tracking media reports around asylum protests over the summer and recording his results in threads on BlueSky.

His opinion is that the summer’s protests have been “significantly over-reported and exaggerated”, even though they have taken a different shape to the violence that bubbled over last year. 

Read more:

• Asylum hotel court ruling risks letting ‘violent mobs dictate government policy’, experts say
• Scapegoating asylum seekers is not the answer to violence against women and girls
• As number of asylum seekers housed in hotels rises, there’s one thing everyone agrees on

“I think the other thing that’s been missed is just how different the pattern is this summer from last summer. It’s much more southern. It’s much more suburban. It’s very, very quiet in terms of large processions and disorder in the places that saw riots,” said Katwala.

“I think that tells us something about the reaction to last year: that the places that saw riots and violence don’t want to see them again and that some of the ringleaders are in prison. There’s a memory that people actually did get prosecuted and there’s a desire not to see that so people who might have protested aren’t doing it.

“I think while there is broad public interest and debate and scrutiny and frustration with the government, I don’t think what we’re seeing outside hotels is reflective of public opinion.”

The summer’s anti-immigration protests have taken up a lot of oxygen on news sites, newspapers and broadcast channels. Big Issue, too, has focused a lot of attention on the protests and the far-right activists driving them.

Perhaps more so than other issues where the numbers of people attending protests has dwarfed them – Katwala gave the example of the approximately 100,000 people attending the London Trans+ Pride march at the end of July.

The British Future director suggested that the make-up of people protesting is part of the reason why the issue has captivated newsrooms.

“I think some of the relatively neutral channels – the BBC, ITV – are over-reporting. I think they wouldn’t see climate protesters or trade unionists or trans rights or gay rights protesters as representing the public, they’d see them as a particular group,” sad Katwala.

“When a sort of vocal minority from the white British majority are out, there’s almost a kind of naive sense of maybe this is what people really think.

“So to some extent, I think there’s a challenge to the media here, which is that the media are mostly people who are university graduates. They were worried around Brexit and Trump that they would miss the story and so they were trying to compensate from maybe not spotting things.

“Now I think this summer, they’re overcompensating. And if populist or far right groups say everyone is behind us, there’s a naivety in accepting or reflecting the claim rather than scrutinising it.”

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