We stand with refugees – by Michael Ward, Chair of Arundel & South Downs Constituency Party
22nd August 2025 – a fine summer evening at a nondescript roundabout on the outskirts of Chichester – not far from the sea, not far from Goodwood and the South Downs. By the roundabout is a hotel, now used as temporary accommodation for refugee families – mostly, women and children. Usually, on fine evenings, the children play in the open space outside.
But not that evening. Immediately outside the hotel a crowd had gathered – perhaps 100 people – waving union jack and St George’s flags. They shouted slogans – two four six eight, time to repatriate. There were baseball caps, embroidered with the words Make Britain Great Again. The demonstrators call themselves patriots.
The refugee parents kept their children safely inside the hotel.
Over the road there was a counter demonstration. Probably slightly fewer people – Labour Party members from Arundel and South Downs and Bognor and Littlehampton; members of the Green Party and the Socialist Workers Party, and plenty of non-aligned concerned citizens, many with a record of working with refugee families.
Uniformed police courteously but firmly kept the two groups separate.
It was a very British evening: demonstrators, counter demonstrators and police alike all parked their cars in the nearby Sainsbury’s carpark, maintaining a guarded civility towards each other.
Very British – but very sad. I seem to have been here all my life. As a student in the 1960s I marched against Enoch Powell when he raised the call for repatriation of immigrants. For decades, repatriation as a policy demand existed only on the far fringes of political discourse.
Governments came and went; for the most part, British governments kept to an old liberal consensus, centred on tolerance, integration and respect, and the acceptance of different cultures.
In 1968, when Enoch Powell made his rivers of blood speech, the Conservative Leader, Edward Heath, sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet. But nobody sacked Robert Jenrick, Shadow Justice Secretary, when he joined an anti-migrant demonstration outside a hotel in Epping on 17 August.
Four years later, when Idi Amin expelled the Asian communities from Uganda, Heath’s Conservative government accepted the expellees, and mounted an operation to resettle them; Heath spoke of Britain’s ‘long humane tradition’.
But now, the long humane tradition and the old liberal consensus are under attack as never before. Nigel Farage and his followers call for mass deportations, of children as well as adults, without regard to the safety of those deported.
Now more than ever it is time to stand up for the values of tolerance, humanity, and mutual respect, and to stand against those harassing families and children in migrant hotels. Time to salute the volunteers who work with refugees and asylum seekers as befrienders, teachers, and counsellors.
And time to join those who, quietly, calmly, and certainly non-violently, stand with refugees and against those stirring up hatred.