Why we’re standing with people seeking asylum living at the Ibis hotel in Gloucester. The article below was written ahead of a counter-protest against a far right protest outside the hotel on Saturday 30th August, which has been organised by a violent racist. We have since learned the “Patriots of Gloucestershire” are planning a further protest against people seeking asylum on October 5th – there will be another counter-protest, details to follow.

See details of the counter-protest at the end of this article or on our webpage here.

2,800 words – appproximately 15 minute read.

Content Warning: racism, sexual violence, child sexual exploitation

Tough times and a bleak future

We live in times of huge uncertainty, regularly receiving awful news about things happening in this country and around the world. It’s often hard to see the future as anything other than bleak. Everything is costing more and more, so many of us are overloaded, underpaid and disrespected at work – and public services are falling apart after decades of underfunding. There are long waiting lists for NHS treatment, you get put in endless queues any time you ring for any kind of support, and everywhere we turn there’s endless forms or some annoying digital process you have to navigate in order to be able to … well, live. Town centres are full of empty shops and homelessness is at an all time time – and no wonder when rents and house prices are completely ridiculous. In so many places around the country it feels like any sense of community is being broken, or has been long lost. And violence against women is terrifyingly common. Every week there are women who are killed by a partner or ex-partner, and one in four women experience domestic violence in their lifetime – that’s us, our family members, our friends, neighbours, and people we work with. It is hard to think of anything more horrific than the sexual abuse of children, and understandably it is a crime that incites a lot of anger within our communities. But again, if we don’t have direct experience ourselves, we will all know people who have – whether we know of their experiences or not.

We all adapt to living in this messed up world in different ways – we all do what we have to do to make it through. One thing that is hard to watch is how people respond to the mess of the world by adding to the hatred, division and nastiness themselves.

Scapegoating

We’ve seen in the past how, when things get especially bad – like in the Great Depression of the 1930s for example – cruel and ruthless leaders prey on people’s fears and manipulate and channel them into hatred of people who have nothing to do with the problems that actually face people. This is called ‘scapegoating’. It’s what the Nazis did in Germany – blaming the economic problems in the country following WW1 and the reaction to it by the victors of that war and blaming them on Jews, migrants, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, their political opponents and… well… anyone except the people actually responsible.

We’re seeing the same thing play out today – a whole cast of characters spending their entire time turning whole groups of innocent people into the “other”, making them less than human, making them our “enemies”. Maybe you’ve noticed how it seems like the targets change week to week, or that the targets seem to be chosen almost at random… and that’s because they are. The people who peddle hatred are just throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks – what their audience will latch onto, what gets the most clicks or engagement online, what will make people angry, what will generate its own momentum…  what the mainstream media or the Prime Minister will join in with.

And if one peddler of hate gets some success targeting a particular group of people? Well then the others will all join the chase. When you think about it, it’s incredibly lazy. What’s frustrating is how these grifters and hate mongers are somehow able to speak to all the anger we feel about poverty and the cost of living, our societies and environment being destroyed and politicians promising change and then delivering mostly just more of the same… they take that righteous anger and redirect it onto other working class people, and away from the billionaires who are hoovering up all the wealth and the systems that sustain inequality and injustice. In 2024 alone, “UK billionaires saw their collective wealth increase last year by £35 million ($44m) a day to £182 billion ($231bn)”. Instead of talking about how we could better distribute the wealth we all produce, we get rich white men funded by even richer white men telling us that “climate change isn’t real”, but people fleeing war are a “threat to civilisation”. 

For a while the focus was on disabled people, then we’ve had a whole panic about trans people, and right now it’s back to that familiar target of hatred – “asylum seekers”. Whether its Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, or local figure Rone Taylor (more on him in a second), the arguments are just reheated versions of the same nonsense we’ve heard since the early 2000s (when papers like The Sun and Daily Mail kept trying to attach the word “bogus” to the term “asylum seeker” in a a desperate attempt to convince us all not to have compassion for people feeling war and persecution). As ever, those pushing hatred will claim they aren’t racist, they just have “legitimate concerns” that for some reason always single out people from other countries as the problem, rather than the actual causes. As if there haven’t been around 700,000 empty homes in Britain since 2012, and as if high rents aren’t the result of profiteering by landlords, developers, banks and a whole system that treats housing as a source of wealth rather than a basic need.

Protecting women and girls

This time around there’s a particular focus on “protecting women and girls”. Who doesn’t agree we should do that? It just comes as a bit of a shock to learn that the people who’ve been attacking feminism, praising the likes of Andrew Tate as he faces rape and trafficking charges, or defending Donald Trump… are suddenly concerned with women’s safety.

There’s a long and grim history of white men pushing racism by claiming whole other groups of people are a threat to women and girls, but we saw a particularly stark example of this last year. When Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar were killed in Southport, with other children wounded and traumatised when attacked attending a Taylor Swift themed dance workshop, most people responded with horror and support for the people, families and communities affected. But the hate merchants and far right organisations had other ideas.

“In August 2024, six days of racist rioting spread across UK cities. Asylum seeker centres were fire bombed, Black and Brown people were subject to pogroms, pulled out their cars and attacked on the streets. It was multi-racial communities, coming out in unity and self-defence, that put an end to the violence – not the police or politicians.” (Black Lives Matter UK)

But though the attacker was Black, he was not an “asylum seeker” – nor was he representative of all Black people. There is no evidence to suggest that people seeking asylum are disproportionately sexual offenders or violent criminals. People seeking asylum are human beings, and some human beings do horrible things. We don’t need to pretend all people seeking asylum or all Black people are perfect, but it absolutely is bigoted prejudice to suggest that every person applying for asylum and placed in a hotel by the Home Office is inevitably criminal, or more of a threat to women and girls than anyone else.

And while it’s true that not everyone who attends a protest outside a hotel is a long-term member of a far-right organisation, or a violent racist, it’s revealing to look at who is involved in these protests and riots, and who is involved in organising them.

Rone Taylor – organiser of the Gloucester hotel protest REVEALED

Let’s start with “Rone Taylor”, who appears to be the main organiser of a protest outside the Ibis hotel in Gloucester, where people seeking asylum are living.

On the 18th August, Rone posted that this protest was “upcoming” and prominent in his advert is “PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!!” His name on Facebook now is “Rone Taylor”, but he is quite open that this is a new name adopted since his previous account under his full name “Byron Glyn Taylor” was disabled for breaching Facebook’s Community Standards. We understand this was related to being reported for racist comments, and nothing to do with the Online Safety Act.

In 2020, Byron was jailed for 18 months for physically attacking and racially abusing schoolchildren, while in his mid-late twenties. He “pleaded guilty to the racially aggravated assault of a teenage girl by beating her and damaging her property on May 2, 2019. He also admitted assaulting two other teenagers by beating on the same date.” He had followed three schoolchildren, “shouted some racial comments at them and made derogatory comments about their dreadlocks”, before swinging a punch at a girl with a closed fist. “He later swung his fist at a female pupil and assaulted a male pupil with a punch to the victim’s head. Taylor then turned his attention to the first girl and punched her again.” Is this someone you can believe is holding a protest outside a hotel housing people seeking asylum because he wants to “protect children”? Is it more likely it is because of racism, however hard he tries to deny it?

This wasn’t the first time Taylor was convicted of a crime and sent to prison. In 2012 he was sentenced to 6 months for falsely accusing 3 innocent people of rioting (including two members of his own family). Not only has Tayler had his Facebook pages taken down in the last few months, he also informs his followers that the Police and the Prevent programme made him take down his YouTube channel. His TikTok account has gone the same way as the YouTube channel and his Facebook account. Rone Taylor claims to be a peaceful Christian patriot. In fact he is a racist criminal who assaulted children. Can you trust what he says?

Are the far right really interested in protecting women?

“Rone Taylor” isn’t the only example of someone who has claimed to be prioritising protecting women and children to disguise their racism. 899 people were arrested for taking part in violent disorder in the August 2024 riots. Two in every five of these people arrested (41%) “had been previously reported to the police for domestic abuse… Previous offences include actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint and non-molestation orders, controlling coercive behaviour and criminal damage.”

We’ve had decades of the far right trying to focus on “Asian grooming gangs” to justify hate, bigotry, and violence towards people of colour. These grooming gangs exist and are appalling, but somehow the existence of grooming gangs made up of white people seems to draw far less attention. When Police officers themselves have been implicated in the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal, with five victims also accusing three police officers of raping them, this horrifying aspect has been treated as less important, or ignored altogether. As Hope Not Hate say, “There have clearly been major systemic failings. Whether it is Telford, Rotherham or Rochdale children have been let down by police, councils, social services and the wider community. We must put justice for survivors first, as we oppose [Tommy Robinson’s] racist opportunism.”

Tommy Robinson” (real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon) has – through the “English Defence League” he founded, other far right organisations and his own platform – been one of the main hate mongers pushing hate against people seeking asylum, migrants, and Muslims – and claiming it is because of an interest in protecting women and girls. But his campaigns are opportunistic, driven by racism – and hypocritical in 2022, Hope Not Hate reported how there have been at least 20 members and supporters of the EDL “convicted of child sexual exploitation offences. At least 10 of these were active in the EDL while Lennon was still leading it, and at the time of writing they could not find a single condemnation from Lennon.

We know that Bryon Glyn Taylor / Rone Taylor – the organiser of the protest outside the Ibis Hotel, is a fan of Tommy Robinson from an old Facebook profile picture and banner image of an EDL protest. He’s also pictured with Laurence Fox – a man notorious for his misogyny and racism.

Ending sexual violence, standing against hate

As the Institute for Race Relations have written, “Whatever the ethnicity of perpetrators, we need to ask what were the structural conditions in that context that enabled sexual abuse, and understand what obstacles victims face in seeking help and support. Funding for youth services and accessible support spaces that do not stigmatise or criminalise victims would be a start. And if we are serious about dealing with issues of sexual violence within different communities, we must also fight for specialised support services that can address particular cultural and language needs of victims – many organisations on the frontlines providing this kind of support are having to fight for survival. Already many have been shut down.” Funding for refuges has been cut by a quarter since 2010.

And this raises another question about the approach of Rone Taylor and all the far-right groups organising protests outside hotels housing people seeking safety. Why aren’t they protesting against the cuts to support services for victims of sexual violence, with Sisters Uncut? Why aren’t they calling for interventions to reduce the likelihood of people of any ethnicity or background committing sexual offences, like the work of Beyond Equality?

The reality is because they don’t care about sexual violence. They are motivated by racism. Groups seeking an end to violence against women have regularly called out far right tactics. Sadly, “There is a very long history of minority communities being framed as a sexual threat by the far right. Whether it is the centuries old blood libel or the characterisation of Jews as paedophiles before the Second World War, attacking African-Caribbean immigrants as rapists and pimps in the post-war period, and now painting Muslims as groomers, the far right have always sought to racialise sexual violence and child sexual exploitation” (as Hope Not Hate write).

As Black Lives Matter say “The painful reality is that sexual violence occurs across all racial and ethnic groups, and in most cases, it is perpetrated by someone the victim already knows. Yet, rare but sensationalised incidents that fall outside this pattern are often exaggerated and weaponised, fuelling moral panics targeted at particular communities.”

To meaningfully end sexual violence and protect all victims, we desperately need to address the underlying causes of sexual violence – most obviously a culture of patriarchy that makes abuse rife – rather than only taking an interest when the perpetrators are from a certain race or background.

We will stand by people seeking asylum. They are human beings. The nastiness and nonsense that’s being said about people fleeing their countries and travelling to the UK is increasing day by day. To state basic facts: everyone has the right to seek protection in a country other than one they have fled from – that’s all an “asylum seeker” is, and it is a legal human right. No one becomes ‘illegal’ just by lacking immigration documents or taking irregular passage to get to a country in which they claim asylum. People making a claim for asylum cannot work, cannot choose where they live, and receive a pitiful amount of money to live on. Refugees are those who have been granted asylum, once their claim of fleeing persecution, conflict or human rights violations has been proved. We can’t support “genuine refugees” without having a system whereby people apply for asylum. There are around 27 million refugees across the world and the UK takes in some of the lowest numbers in Europe – and is home to only 1% of refugees in the world.

Inhumane plans to spending millions deporting thousands more people seeking asylum – as Reform and the Conservatives are now proposing isn’t going to help anyone living here. Nor is targeting migrants who live outside of their country of origin but aren’t seeking asylum, or people of different skin colours or backgrounds who’ve grown up in this country. Scapegoating asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants, or people from different ethnic backgrounds will not solve any of the problems in this country. Losing our sense of shared humanity will lead to a far worse country for everybody and together we need to stand up to it.

We can fight against sexual violence and against racism at the same time. We can welcome people seeking safety. We can build community solidarity – join us.

Join us and other groups across Gloucestershire on Saturday 30th August from 12.30pm outside the Ibis Hotel in Gloucester, GL4 3DG

Take a stand in solidarity with people seeking asylum who are being threatened by a far right protest advertised to take place at 2pm at the Ibis Hotel in Gloucester where people seeking asylum are living.

Groups across Gloucestershire are working together to hold a counter protest. We won’t let the far right scapegoat people seeking refuge for the problems in this country – we won’t be divided.

Read our key info on time, location, and protest and security guidance.