The organisers of the anti-refugee actions are veteran leaders of Nazi and far-right organisations, reports Chris Nineham

This summer’s protests outside refugee hotels have been reported as local events and have sometimes drawn large crowds, but they have been organised by national, fascist hate groups.

The first big protests at the Bell Hotel in Epping in July were no exception. The administrators of the ‘Epping Says No’ Facebook group which co-ordinated the protests are members of the Nazi Homeland party.

One of them, Callum Barker has posted images that reference the code ‘1488’ which refers to Hitler and the phrase, ‘We must secure a future for the white race and also for white children.’

Barker has also posted pictures of himself wearing a leather mask holding up the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, a US terrorist who murdered three people during a seventeen-year reign of terror.

Another admin of the group, Andrew Piper, is a parish councillor in Market Deeping, 85 miles away from Epping. In January 2024, Piper posted a series of tweets claiming it is ‘factually true’ that ‘the Jews’ run ‘banking and government’ and cast doubt on some of the facts of the Holocaust.

Homeland split from fascist Patriotic Alternative group in 2023. It was founded on Hitler’s birthday by former officials of the British National Party, led by Holocaust denier Nick Griffin.

Homeland’s leader is Kenny Smith, formerly a senior figure in the BNP under Griffin, and a man with a 2022 conviction for firearms offences.

A 500-strong Manchester protest in August was organised by Britain First, a viciously Islamophobic political group. They believe in a clash of civilisations between the Christian West and Islam, and regard Muslims as a fundamental threat to British identity.

In its early years a decade ago, it tried to differentiate itself from other far-right groups like the EDL by wearing paramilitary uniforms and parading in military vehicles.

Its leader is Paul Golding who was the star speaker at the Manchester event. According to Britain First’s own count, Golding has ‘been arrested twenty times, been in three different prisons and prosecuted ten times’ as of October 2021.

He has been banned from entering all mosques in England and Wales in 2016, he served time for religiously aggravated harassment in 2018, for producing material intended to stir up hatred in 2019, and in 2020 he was convicted under the Terrorism Act.

Ukip leader Nick Tenconi has helped organise some of the recent far-right protests including one in Liverpool last month and Southampton earlier in the year. Tenconi spoke at a Tommy Robinson conference in January, calling for the detention and deportation of “all Islamists” and “all migrants who are here to colonise”. A leading member of Turning Point UK (TPUK), linked to the American far-right Turning Point USA, he helped to move it towards a street-fighting strategy, forging links with the violent Democratic Football Lads Alliance. In case anyone has any doubts about his philosophy, he was caught on video at a protest in Portsmouth last month appearing to give a Nazi salute.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, has been encouraging the protests on his socials just as he did the riots last summer. He very publicly promised to attend one of the protests in Epping, although he did not show up.

He too was briefly a BNP member when he was in his twenties, until he became the main organiser of the English Defence League that caused mayhem with racist demonstrations in city centres up and down the country in the 2010s.

He claims that he is an anti-Islam campaigner, not a white supremacist or a fascist. Unfortunately, his own words tell another story. His obsession with Islam is really cover for a violent hatred of all Muslims. He made this clear with his 2016 threat to ‘personally send every adult male Muslim that has come into the EU over the past 12 months back tomorrow if I could. Fake refugees.’ His list of violent attacks and threats includes storming offices and making night visits to the houses of political opponents.

From Bristol to Stockport and the Isle of Dogs in London to Falkirk in Scotland, a similar pattern is being reported of an organised hard right or fascist core pulling around them groups of angry local people who are being drawn towards dead-end but very dangerous racist ideas. This is being enabled by mainstream politicians and the media who are daily pumping out lies and distortions about the situation. There is much to be done, but one central task is to expose the extreme racists and fascists at the core of these protests.

The original version of this article made an inaccurate claim against Callum Barker. It has since been corrected.