WTF is going on in Epping? A town made famous by being named on half of all central line tube trains heading east. The end of the line. The end of London. Deepest, darkest Essex. It’s a nice town. Sweet. Got its own forest, innit? A fabulous expanse of ‘wild’, where we used to go on school trips. Collecting frog spawn. Doing bark rubbings. In the days when school trips were by coach, rather than by BA763 to Quito, as they tend to be now.

And suddenly, Epping is ALL the news. Rioting every day. Protests. Counter-protests. Masses of police drawn in from all over the country. And all because of a sexual assault. Ish…

The ‘ish’ being because there was a sexual assault, which is horrible, and the perpetrator was an ‘asylum seeker’ from a local hotel where they store such people. Therefore, the ‘event’, the actual sexual assault, immediately becomes secondary to the immigration status of the perp. The poor victim becomes an anonymous pin-up girl for Nigel Farage.

As happened following last year’s horrendous murders in Southport of the little girls at a dance class, without much in the way of concrete information, the hard right take over, on a national level, and escalate the ‘response to the crime’ to truly riotous proportions. In that any ‘white’ man committing a sexual offense is just a bad person. Whereas any asylum seeker doing the same is just a representative of an entire class of people who collectively must be punished. If one does it, they can all do it.

So the nice people of Epping complain, understandably, that they really don’t want an asylum hotel in their midst, because their daughters are no longer safe. I’d think the same. But then the aggravators and instigators and provocateurs come along from Burnley and Norwich and Taunton, bringing their gangs with them to escalate the cause. Its probably not the residents of Epping throwing fire extinguishers at the police.

And we have a problem, really. That our asylum seekers are predominantly young, fit, able men. And most of them arrive here having been brought up in a different culture altogether. Often a culture where women are viewed as second class citizens, except their mothers, obviously, or otherwise a culture where contact between the sexes is forbidden. Then they bring these mindsets here and are presented with all the freedoms the liberated West can offer. And they don’t know the limits.

So what do you do? The asylum seekers arrive, they have to be kept somewhere, and yet by the very nature of their gender and culture represent a threat.

Not all refugees are rapists. Unfortunately, you don’t know which ones are. And that’s something the hard rightists play on.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx