The Altrincham asylum hotel is even worse than you think

It could be you next

Granted a charter by King John, for centuries Altrincham was a market town sat at a kink on the Chester-Manchester Road, until the railway expansions of the 1840s drew it into Manchester’s commuter belt. Lying on the edge of the Cheshire Plain, with easy access to beautiful countryside, with winding lanes and villages wrapped around stout Norman churches, but also with a dual carriageway and a tram line pointed straight at the city centre, it has long been the most expensive town in Greater Manchester. It has been able to maintain two first-rate single-sex grammar schools, two very good Roman Catholic grammars, and a number of high-performing comprehensives. It has a well-run non-league side who have been to Wembley three times, a lovely covered market, and an ice hockey team, huddled at the bottom of a set of rolling, leafy hills which make up Bowdon and Hale, favoured haunts for Manchester United players since the ’90s. It even used to have a Michelin-starred restaurant.

In other words, Altrincham is a nice place to live. Little surprise, then, that Yvette Cooper has decided to move three-hundred unvetted Kurds and Afghans there, at taxpayer expense.

The response has been what you’d expect: local residents who would never think of themselves as racist — but so what if they were? — pleading with the council and a ‘community police officer’ to reconsider. Who are these refugees?, they wonder. Where have they come from?, they ask. What about all the trouble they might cause? Is it really wise to house them next to a girls’ grammar school?, they say.

The Inspector was having none of it. Didn’t the ratepayers know that there have been asylum seekers in Trafford for decades, and they haven’t caused a spike in crime? To give him his due, the Britannia Hotel in nearby Hale has been housing asylum seekers for some time now; however, crucially, the majority of them are in family units, with women and (actual) children, not passport-lacking single men of uncertain age and origin. There is a reason why the recent influx was not announced: locals only found out after all hotel bookings were abruptly cancelled. Even the Home Office understands that this is something very different indeed.

There has been much written and said about the location of the hotel ‘ten minutes’ walk from a girls’ secondary school’. This is true, but still underplays just how disastrous this location is. The map below reveals just how bad things are: together, the hotel, two secondary schools (namely, Loreto Grammar, a selective Roman Catholic girls’ school, and North Cestrian, a mixed free school), and the tram and bus interchange form a triangle. At the centre of this triangle lies Stamford Quarter, a pedestrianised shopping district containing the aforementioned covered market, along with cafés, a pub, a Marks & Spencer, and some more down-market establishments, such as a Home Bargains (a budget chain akin to B&M, common in the north of England) and a CeX. Even in posh Altrincham, there are also the inevitable vape shops, and lots and lots of benches. It is as if it were designed for an unemployed Kurdish man who is being put up in a hotel five minutes away.

Heaven for unemployed Kurdish men living for free at taxpayer expense.

It also lies across the natural route for girls from Loreto and North Cestrian to reach the tram and bus interchange, and the draw that Altrincham’s excellent schools have across all of the south of Greater Manchester means that a large proportion of the students will commute in via public transport. The natural route from Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, located slightly further up the hill, also passes close by. In essence, the Home Office have created a situation analogous to a wildebeest having to cross a crocodile-infested river, except the wildebeest will have to do this every single day. The sexual harassment of teenage girls is bad enough on its own, but this is compounded when we recall the outrage that such incidents have incited in the past, even before this summer’s riots. It would be naïve to think that Altrincham, by virtue of its poshness, might be immune.

What can explain the decision? It is a combination of several factors, of course: a lack of local knowledge from those responsible for Home Office procurement; an (understandable) desire to spread the burden of asylum seekers across the country; and a growing shortage of available hotels in more suitable, preferably remote, locations. The most important reason, though, is that the Home Office, the police, and the Labour Party are all completely mad. You would have to be mad to come up with an idea like this. But then again, it is probable, even certain, that no single person came up with the idea; rather, this insanity arose as a result of the constraints placed upon us by our interpretations of the ECHR and the UN Refugee Convention.

But if you choose to believe — and you really do have to choose — that young men coming from war-torn France on dinghies can genuinely be considered ‘asylum seekers’, and that being an ‘asylum seeker’ necessarily affords someone a huge number of rights; and that it would be wrong to keep them in a camp, or even on a stylish barge in Poole harbour, instead of letting them stay in a 4-star hotel, and even more wrong to give these mysterious young men a curfew, you will find yourself in Home Office procurement signing off a contract with — would you believe it? — Greg Dyke to take three-hundred Kurdish and Afghan single men; fatherless, motherless, without genealogy, and put them up next to two girls’ schools.

Altrincham’s good transport links will also — predictably — make Manchester’s long-suffering city centre, already beleaguered with legions of spiceheads and disaffected youths with bus passes, even worse. The Metrolink, Manchester’s tram network, which has no barriers and almost no ticket inspectors, will allow the Kurds and Afghans to travel (in effect) for free straight to Piccadilly Gardens in just half an hour. Even if there is a ticket inspector on duty — something that is now highly unusual — they are no longer allowed to detain fare-dodgers because one of them had a heart attack and died, leading to manslaughter charges. Despite this incident taking place in 2016, the trial is scheduled to begin on the same day as Trump’s (second) inauguration. Into this chaos, enter three-hundred unknown male asylum seekers.

In truth, this is not even a uniquely bad situation. We are hardly alone in suffering from this: we’ve just received more attention because Altrincham is, well, posh. But there are many other less idyllic towns which have had similarly unacceptable costs imposed upon them with no press coverage at all. For years, across the country, hotels stuffed to the rafters with young male ‘asylum seekers’ have been the flashpoints of crime waves, inappropriate sexual advances, and general malaise. It could be you next. This is before even considering the opportunity cost of an entire hotel being shut off from public use — remember that 3- and 4-star hotels in Britain aren’t built for fun, but typically to satisfy some sort of demand. There are several couples getting married who now have a few weeks to find a new reception venue; there are hundreds of prospective guests scrambling to find somewhere else to stay.

The previous Conservative Government at least proposed some hare-brained schemes to solve (or at least alleviate) the problem, like the Bibby Stockholm barge and the Rwanda scheme, even if in practice they mostly dealt with it by booking up hotel after hotel and effectively granting mass amnesties to ‘clear the backlog’. Of course, it is true that the Tories never showed any willingness to tackle the root causes, but Labour’s proposals are, by contrast, so bad as to be insulting: one (yes, one) Turkish man has been arrested in France for selling a dinghy; ‘talks’ have been held with Georgia Meloni (not a great success on this issue herself); a new ‘border task force’ is being formed (although heaven knows what they will actually do). While a few thousand illegals have been deported this year, it is a drop in the ocean when a single clear day at Calais can see over a thousand new illegal immigrants arrive on our shores. The cost of migrant hotels alone has already reached nearly £5 billion a year. By comparison, the increase in inheritance tax on farms is projected to raise half a billion — so add farmers to the list of victims.

This all serves to turn the British state into a flat-track bully. It cannot bring itself to stand up to the real troublemakers: Third World migrants demanding the world, and committing crimes so bizarrely evil that one’s main reaction to them is astonishment, and who, at the first sign of trouble, can simply disappear into thin air and become Deliveroo drivers, no checks required. Instead, the state is interested only in slow-moving prey; the sort of people who will not put up much of a fight: council tax rates are being raised; PAYE earnings are being depressed by the National Insurance hike; and the slowest-moving prey of them all, farm estates, are being raided for just one-tenth of the annual cost of asylum hotels. This phenomenon has been described in America as ‘anarcho-tyranny’, but in Britain it is more the result of a lack of will and a lack of imagination; the inability to believe that it may, in fact, be possible for a competent state to maintain an order in which all can flourish.

The asylum hotel phenomenon, where a small group of foreign criminals are indulged at eye-watering expense because the state simply cannot imagine enforcing its own immigration laws properly, is just the tip of the iceberg. And the result of it all is that hundreds of schoolgirls in a nice Cheshire market town will have to run the gauntlet every day just to get home.