Protesters outside the former Bell Hotel in Epping, July 31, 2025
AT LEAST 20 far-right protests are planned outside hotels on Friday as fascists seek to repeat last summer’s race riots, anti-racist campaigners have warned.
Stand Up to Racism warned that members and former members of the nazi terror group Combat 18 and the neonazi party Homeland have been organising or attending many of the protests.
Counter-demonstrations are being staged across the country as Labour-run councils joined Tory and Reform authorities looking to block hotels from housing asylum-seekers.
Reform leader Nigel Farage called for the protests after the High Court ordered the closure of the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, following a series of anti-migrant demonstrations.
Stand Up to Racism co-convener Weyman Bennett said: “This is a dangerous moment. The Epping ruling and the so-called protests are a licence for racism and racist attacks.
“Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick are competing for the racist vote, and in the process are openly encouraging fascists on the ground to employ violence to get hotels closed. This will cost lives.
“They want a repeat of the violent riots last summer. We won’t let them and will oppose the far right and racists every time they take to the streets.”
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Counter-demonstrations will be held in Bournemouth, Cardiff, Chichester, Leeds, Leicester, Orpington and Portsmouth on Friday, and in Bristol, Cannock, Horley, Leicester, Liverpool, Long Eaton, Newcastle, and Wakefield on Saturday.
Climate science denier Nigel Farage explains that it’s simple to blame asylum-seekers or Muslims for everything.Keir Starmer refuses to be outcnuted by Nigel Farage’s chasing the racist bigot vote.
Robert Jenrick pictured with Eddy Butler, former member of Nazi terror group Combat 18
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has attended a demonstration organised by a neo-Nazi party and posted a picture of himself with the founder of a terror organisation.
On Sunday evening, Jenrick attended a rally organised by members of the Homeland Party in Epping. The event was addressed by Callum Barker, a member neo-Nazi group Homeland who have a history of endorsing racism and terrorism.
Jenrick later posted pictures of himself with demonstrators, which included Eddy Butler, one of the founders of neo-Nazi terror gang Combat 18. The numerals in Combat 18 refer to the first and eighth letters of the alphabet, referencing the name of Adolf Hitler.
After the demonstration, Butler posted a picture of himself standing directly behind Jenrick with the text, “At the Bell Hotel riding shotgun for Robert Jenrick.”
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Legitimising fascist violence
Jenrick’s attendance at the demonstration legitimises a growing fascist movement that is targeting refugees across the South East and around the country.
Many participants in Sunday’s Epping demonstration had been at a protest earlier in the day in Canary Wharf, where men in balaclavas clashed with police outside asylum-seeker accommodation at the Britannia Hotel.
A view of HMP Northeye in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, which the Home Office bought for £15 million
Government urged to put ‘clear distance between it and the cruel, wasteful camps policy held by the previous one’
THE HOME OFFICE failed to rule out housing asylum-seekers in an asbestos-filled former prison today after the government’s spending watchdog blasted the Tories for wasting £15 million on it.
Tory ministers Robert Jenrick and Oliver Dowden “cut corners” and made “poor decisions” when they paid for the Northeye site in East Sussex, a damning National Audit Office (NAO) report said.
The “rushed and misjudged” decision was made despite the “technical due diligence and approvals process not having been undertaken.”
Shadow justice secretary Mr Jenrick announced that Northeye would be developed to house 1,200 people a month after an environmental review had identified a contamination risk from “asbestos-containing materials in existing buildings and contaminated ground” in February 2023.
The diligence report also estimated the cost of repairs to buildings at the site to be £20m.
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Jeff Newnham, who leads the Save Northeye campaign against the development, told the Star that the asbestos-contamination risks were widely known following a fire at the former prison in the 1980s.
Labour said the report “raises serious questions about [new Tory leader] Kemi Badenoch’s judgement to appoint someone to her shadow cabinet who has no regard for public money.”
But the Home Office declined to rule-out housing asylum-seekers at the site themselves when asked by the Morning Star today.
The department has not finalised its plans for Northeye but insisted that it “will always act in the best interests of the taxpayer.”
Conservative MP Priti Patel speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2021. Credit: GB News / Facebook
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint proposes sweeping anti-climate policies.
New Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel earlier this year welcomed into Parliament a radical U.S. organisation behind Donald Trump’s hard-right plan for a second term as president.
As reported by DeSmog, Conservative MP Patel met with Kevin Roberts and Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation in March, praising the pair on her Facebook page as “our friends across the pond” who stand for “Conservative values and beliefs at home and abroad”.
Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, while Gardiner is the director of its ‘Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom’.
The Heritage Foundation is an ultra-conservative group that authored the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Donald Trump term, which proposes a range of radical anti-climate policies, including slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency.
Project 2025 has been accused of being “extreme” and “authoritarian” for setting out a plan to rapidly “reform” the U.S. government by shuttering bureaus and offices, overturning regulations, and replacing thousands of public sector employees with hand-picked political allies of Trump. The agenda also proposes radical tax cuts, and a crackdown on reproductive rights.
On Wednesday (6 November), following Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, Roberts sent an email on behalf of the foundation, saying that: “starting now, we will execute our plans to dismantle the administrative state.”
At least 140 authors of Project 2025 worked for the last Trump administration, according to CNN, while several are expected to hold positions in the next Trump White House.
Patel also gave a speech about national security to the Heritage Foundation, hosted by Gardiner, in November 2021. Patel was at the time serving as home secretary, and her address was published on the UK government website.
This news comes as the Conservative Party realigns itself after the election of new leader Kemi Badenoch, positioning itself as having better relations with the incoming Trump administration.
In her first Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week, Badenoch called on Labour not to oppose a Trump address to Parliament, and asked whether Foreign Secretary David Lammy had apologised to the Republican for labelling him as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” in 2020.
Patel was appointed to Badenoch’s new shadow cabinet earlier this week, alongside Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, who also has ties to the Heritage Foundation.
In February, Jenrick – who came second in the recent Tory leadership election – gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC entitled, “Securing Sovereign Borders in an Age of Mass Migration”.
Project 2025 proposes new sweeping restrictions on immigration into the U.S., while setting the foundations for mass deportations – a key promise of Trump’s 2024 campaign.
After being introduced by Roberts, Jenrick praised the foundation, and described meeting with and learning from Heritage while working as an intern for Condoleeza Rice, who served as secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush.
Jenrick also praised the event’s co-host Gardiner, whom Jenrick described as “the special relationship made flesh”. He said Gardiner, who writes a regular column for the Daily Telegraph, “creates links between conservatives here and in the UK”.
As revealed by Democracy For Sale and Byline Times, Donald Trump and U.S. Republican campaigns received more than $45 million (£35 million) from donors who have funded the influential network of hard-wing Tufton Street think tanks in the UK.
“That senior Conservatives would take time out to travel halfway around the world to give talks at a pro-Trump think tanks is very revealing,” said Peter Geoghegan, editor of Democracy For Sale. “We need to be aware that the dark money that fuelled the likes of the Heritage Foundation is washing up in Britain, where secretive Tufton Street think tanks refuse to declare their donors but take millions from pro-Trump U.S. conservatives.”
A Heritage Foundation spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Project 2025 is a coalition of conservatives who wrote ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’ which was published in April 2023, before any candidate declared a run for office. Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”
Project 2025 and Climate Denial
Project 2025 proposes replacing green investment with the further deregulation of the oil and gas industry.
Speaking at an event co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation and the Hungarian Danube Institute in September, key Trump ally Robert Wilkie – who served as U.S. veterans’ affairs secretary from 2018 to 2021 – confirmed that his former boss would “kill” climate budgets.
The Heritage Foundation received over £4.9 million between 1997 and 2017 from groups linked to the fossil fuel giant Koch Industries. The brothers behind the company, Charles and the late David Koch, have been the principal funders of climate denial groups in the U.S. since the 1980s.
As revealed by DeSmog, advisory groups working on Project 2025 have received at least $9.6 million from Charles Koch since 2020, along with at least $21.5 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is funded by the Mellon oil and banking fortune.
The Heritage Foundation has disputed these figures, though has not offered its own calculations. A spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Heritage research is independent and accurate, these numbers are not.”
At a 2022 Heritage Foundation event, Nile Gardiner said: “I do think the British government needs to rethink the whole green energy agenda. It’s not a conservative agenda, in fact it’s a socialist agenda”. He added: “I think net zero has become basically a form of religion, and anyone who questions the dogma on this immediately is accused of being a heretic.”
As DeSmog has reported, Kemi Badenoch has regularly criticised the UK’s green ambitions, describing herself as a “net zero sceptic” during her Conservative conference speech in October.
During the leadership contest, Badenoch published a 40-page manifesto that cited the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a U.S. group led by former advisors to Trump, which has likened climate science to believing the earth is flat.
Jenrick has also attacked net zero policies and has advocated for increased fossil fuel extraction, including the development of new coal mines.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark RichardsOrcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels. Second version, corrected text.
HARD-RIGHT shadows lengthened over British politics with the election of culture warrior Kemi Badenoch as Tory leader at the weekend.
Ms Badenoch beat rival Robert Jenrick by 53,806 votes to 41,388 from the shrivelled Conservative membership, less than 73 per cent of whom bothered to vote.
The former business secretary becomes the first black woman to lead a major political party in Britain, a fact she does not make much of.
She inherits the Tory leadership from Rishi Sunak following a Tory election defeat of historic dimensions. Nevertheless, the ineptitude of the Labour government has encouraged hopes in the party of a swift return to office.
The Conservatives are now neck-and-neck with Labour in most polls, with the Farageist Reform party also surging, meaning the two hard-right parties are laying claim to nearly half the electorate between them: quite an indictment of the Starmer administration.
Ms Badenoch is known as an abrasive operator who puts speaking her mind, whatever may be in it, before winning friends.
During the leadership race she called for the jailing of 10 per cent of civil servants, queried the value of maternity pay, dismissed autism as a health issue and suggested migrants should be vetted over their attitude to Israel.
Protesters outside the former Bell Hotel in Epping, July 31, 2025
