Shabana Mahmood Declares “Crowborough is Just the Start”. Those Words Will Come Back to Haunt Her

Last Sunday another large protest took place in Crowborough where, as has been well publicised, the Home Office has taken over an army training camp previously used by forces cadets to house a large number of illegal migrants.

On the very day the first cohort of migrants arrived, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood made a public statement that was akin to pouring a can of petrol on an already smoking fire. Having said that “illegal migration has been placing immense pressure on communities” and that she wanted to make communities safer, she then delivered her coup de grâce.

Crowborough is just the start. I will bring forward site after site until every asylum hotel is closed and returned to local communities.

Given the highly publicised opposition to the Crowborough camp plan, Mahmood’s boast of inflicting exactly the same on numerous other places is extraordinary. To further contend that such plans will somehow make communities safer is bewilderingly irrational.

The reasons for the Crowborough plan being inappropriate are well documented: its proximity to a small Sussex town with minimal facilities, the impact on local services, repercussions for the local economy. Above all, there is the undeniable threat posed to local residents by hundreds of young single unemployed men of unknown backgrounds being free to come and go 24/7.

It was no surprise therefore that the protest march last Sunday had a huge attendance of several thousand. Given the preceding publicity, interested parties from the media and various organisations were there to observe. Nonetheless, as on every other march, the vast majority of those marching were local residents.

Crowborough is indeed a small town with no marked demographic features. The local residents are of mixed age, mixed class, mixed political stripe and are generally obliging, amiable and compliant: in other words, it’s a microcosm of middle England. 

However, a few short weeks ago all that changed. Once the news broke of the Government’s plans to move 540 illegal migrants into the town’s army  camp – which was in constant use as a training area for local cadets – the situation changed rapidly.

The first public meeting was hastily convened by – as it happens – local Reform leaders. They were joined by an independent Wealden District Councillor and it was made abundantly clear that this would be a non-political meeting. So it was and so has the protest remained throughout the subsequent weeks. A further meeting was convened by the LibDem/Green Party alliance which runs Wealden District Council. This was notable for the fact that the joint leader Rachel Millward – who is also Deputy Leader of the Green Party – sat on the stage above the audience and – to its disgust – smirked patronisingly throughout the meeting.

As with Mahmood’s misplaced pronouncement, transient insights into the mindset of leaders can become unexpectedly totemic in how things develop subsequently.

Doubtless unexpected by Millward and her colleagues was how one person emerged from the crowd at the meeting to found a grassroots protest organisation. Its Director Kim Bailey and a small group of volunteers have been instrumental in creating Crowborough Shield, raising a substantial amount of money and launching a legal case against the Home Office with the objective of achieving a judicial review. She has been joined by many other individuals and groupings – all of whom have one aim: holding the Home Office to account and ultimately shutting the camp.

Bailey and her team have been instrumental in motivating, galvanising and enabling people to have their voices heard. The movement has given people a chance to emerge from the shadows, to express their views and concerns – the same views which so many British people have but which they have been cowed into not voicing for fear of being given pejorative labels or shunned socially. Throughout the country, resentment is slowly but surely building and people increasingly feel disadvantaged and even despised by those who rule us.

When the Government forces a plan on a community against its wishes the generalised resentment and discontent become refined into a very specific grievance. So, like a dam bursting, on Sunday thousands of Crowborough residents again flowed along the streets and, finally, they are voicing exactly what they think of the Government and its plan – and they are saying with one loud united voice: ‘NO!’

Once the silence is broken and once permission is tacitly given, those who would never have marched in protest in their lives, those who would never have walked along their town’s streets shouting, suddenly feel empowered to do so. The protests could not be more different from those staged by professional political activists.  There are many flags and the signs are homemade. The chants are ad hoc. The protesters are not funded by anybody, they haven’t got a prepared script and their spokesmen haven’t had media training. They are not there to voice dissent against another group. There is an air of positivity in this joint endeavour and shared sense of citizenship. However, the target of their anger and resentment is clear. It is the Government of their own country: a country of which they are innately proud as the object of their patriotism.

There are different groups which coalesce around the leaders and they bring different skills and different opinions. What they do all bring is a solid commitment to continue the protest. Unlike Starmer’s ‘coalition of the willing’, here we have ‘a coalition of the unwilling’. Unwilling to be ordered around, unwilling to stay silent while damage is done in plain sight and unwilling to accept the unacceptable.

Presuming Mahmood’s Home Office pursues its aim of seeding large groups of illegal migrants all over the country to live alongside unwilling towns and villages, there are likely to be many more Crowboroughs. Just as its residents have found their voice, so may many others. It may well prove to be the catalyst for an outpouring of dissent and blank refusal to stay silent and comply with whatever this Government forces on the people of this country. Let us hope so.

Madeleine Gillies is a Crowborough resident with a career in language teaching in the UK and abroad.