The starting point here is that the protests outside migrant hotels are led and organised by racists, that the people who participate in them fully understand that and that they are the product of a collapse of class solidarity and a far right hegemony in sections of the British and Irish working class.  If they are a response to the immiseration of working class communities, they are a dangerous and reactionary one. This BBC programme explores the subject.

A few years ago, returning to work in early January, we learned that an estimated two hundred asylum seeking families had been placed in the borough by the Home Office in accommodation provided by a deeply unlovely company called Clearsprings. It was a mix of tiny flats used as student accommodation and budget hotel rooms of the sort that are OK if you are visiting a place for a couple of nights.

What they aren’t OK for is indefinite stays for families with a couple of adults and two or four children and no money. They are better than refugee camps or sleeping on the street but must have felt incredibly claustrophobic to anyone cooped up in them in a very cold winter.

My job involved getting the children into schools, so this meant meeting the child and parent, seeing what level of English they had and any other needs. We had to give up doing the meetings in the Clearsprings run premises because the outside temperature was around zero, the inside temperature felt colder, the toilets were filthy and the local safeguarding officer gave a Clearsprings manager a bollocking because of how dangerous the place was.

Anyone who has any knowledge of education will know that British schools have been under huge pressure in recent years. The easy thing would have been for the headteachers and other staff we contacted to say “no, we can’t cope with a sudden influx of kids with limited English, learning needs, trauma and poverty.” With one exception, every single school went out of their way to make the new children feel welcome. Again and again, we saw kids’ eyes light up went they were able to get out of the cells they were living in and walk into warm, brightly decorated friendly buildings where they were immediately made to feel part of the community. It was one of those experiences that made the job worthwhile.

As for the parents, they all had stories to tell about horrible things that had happened to them, but we always made it clear that as far as we were concerned if their children were in our area it was our responsibility to see that they were given an education. They sometimes became emotional on hearing that their child was at last going to be given this fundamental right.

Back then there was a lot of anti-migrant rhetoric, but it rarely translated into fascist led racist mobs harassing parents and kids. I am not involved in that line of work anymore, but my sincere hope is that the people who are doing it are getting the same response from the schools they are working with and discovering that there are more decent people than baying racists in their communities.