Police have made several arrests over three nights of disorder in a small Norfolk town over what locals say is the sudden and unannounced imposition of illegal migrant males on the community by the government.
Thetford, a small town of some 25,000 near the Suffolk border in south Norfolk saw its third night of unrest and what some called an overly heavy-handed police response on Thursday over the emergence of so-called ‘HMOs’ — homes of multiple occupancy — regular family houses divided into small sub-units and used by the government to disperse boat migrants around the country. The apparently sudden and unheralded arrival of migrants placed in these HMOs on Tuesday came in a town already on alert over arbitrary migrant plantations given present government plans to turn a military base just a mile away into a massive dormitory to house 3,750 migrant arrivals in former Royal Air Force barracks.
The protests began on Tuesday after a group of five men, believed by locals to be “illegal migrants” were moved into a property in the town that morning. There was no warning that the group were to be placed in the property beyond neighbours being told by the landlord that the property was to be let.
News of the alleged arrival of the migrant males triggered a protest just hours later, and by Tuesday night three properties were damaged, with windows smashed, fences broken, and at least one attempt to break into a building by a group of around 100 people.
Police eventually escorted a group of five males, with hooded tops drawn tight over their faces and reported by the local newspaper to be “asylum seekers”, out of the property and away from the protestors, and into a waiting van to be driven away.
There was a “largely peaceful” anti-immigration protest outside Thetford police station the following day on Wednesday, but there was again an attempt to raid what locals understand to be a migrant HMO leading to scuffles with police. Officers issued dispersal orders ten times as rocks and eggs were thrown. Two officers were sent to hospital after one was struck by a rock, and another was bitten hard enough to break the skin.
Locals turned out again on Thursday and egged a HMO, and were met by riot police, backed by extra legal powers to require protesters to uncover their faces or face arrest.
Five people have been arrested over the course of the week on charges including “suspicion of racial hatred”, and public order offences. The chief of Norfolk police has promised further arrests relating to the injuries to officers and has promised the force will push for “firm, robust” prison sentences for those convicted, citing the example of the Southport riots where heavy sentences were passed down to some involved.
State broadcaster the BBC notes some locals have reflected that the police response to protests in the town have been “heavy handed” and complained that in one instance, a woman on a mobility scooter was pepper-sprayed. The chief constable Paul Sanford defended the force, asserting that the response had been proportionate and the lady in the wheelchair shouldn’t have been at the protest if she didn’t want to risk getting caught up in it. He told the BBC:
I absolutely refute that [we were excessive], we have people who are exercising their right to protest, and of course we will support that. There are people who live in Thetford who are concerned, understandably concerned about some of the things that are happening in their town.
However across three consecutive nights a group of people have crossed the line over what’s acceptable and we have been appropriately policing those behaviours. I’ve seen the reports of heavy-handedness, we’ve been firm, we’ve been firm with people who have broken the lawn. And if people wander into an active protest and ignore calls from the police to stand back, then there is a high likelihood they might get caught up in what occurs.
The top cop reflected that if officers hadn’t turned out, then protesters may have been able to storm alleged migrant HMOs and this could have threatened both the safety of the occupants “and indeed the protesters themselves”.
Local Reform UK councillor Scott Hussey has been a witness to the protests and challenged the police’s account of there having been major disorder justifying the deployment of riot officers. He accused the government of “opening a number of these HMOs across Thetford” and told the broadcaster: “There were some skirmishes, it was a spirited protest but I didn’t see any violence… We fully support their right to protest. I’d encourage people to protest peacefully and most of what I saw yesterday was peaceful.”
The councillor also told The Daily Telegraph — which reports that the three properties targeted in Thetford on Tuesday had all been bought by the same landlord this year — of one of the homes involved: “It’s a smallish three-bed terraced house which I understand was converted around two months ago into a [house in multiple occupation] for six people. It’s on a housing estate popular with young families, right around the corner from a primary school.”
Hussey’s Reform Party colleague Colin Sutton, a former murderer-catching Met Detective Chief Inspector who is now Norfolk’s elected Police and Crime Commissioner, said that while violence is wrong he sympathised with protesters when the government was rushing to plant migrants in local communities without consultation. He told the Newsnight programme on Thursday night: “I don’t know what people in the government actually expect.
“If you put these illegal immigrants into houses in the middle of housing estates, close to schools, next door to people, into communities who have absolutely no say in it, then I think it’s a pretty reasonable expectation that the people there will not be happy about it and will want to make a fuss. The fact is we’re getting about a thousand-a-week of these people coming in on small boats and we’re running out of places to put them.”
The protests in Thetford are just the latest in a series of incidents of public disquiet over government-forced plantations of new arrivals into communities in recent years, although it is somewhat unusual in that it brakes the norm of protests generally following high-profile migrant crimes being committed locally, rather than the mere arrival of incomers. One one such case, rioters clashed with police in Belfast earlier this summer after what was described as an attempted “beheading” in the city.