Mayoral candidate and outgoing police and crime commissioner for Sussex, Katy Bourne, has been vociferous in her opposition to asylum seekers being housed at Crowborough Camp.
She wrote that “there is a real risk…that there are likely to be a number of criminals” and called for them to be fitted with electronic tags. She even joined a protest march in November 2025, directly supporting the outcry against the plans among local residents.
In this she joined her Conservative colleague, MP Nusrat Ghani, in whipping up public and media hostility towards a government policy which itself was responding to Tory objection to expenditure on hotels; and indirectly towards these poor young men.
This mischievous and inaccurate characterisation by a public servant whose duty it is to protect all residents of Sussex sums up so much that is wrong in this country’s now increasingly divisive politics. Bourne now faces a vote of no confidence.
Mixed reaction from the local community
There is indeed an outcry among local residents protesting this policy, with some justification. How appropriate is it for the Home Office at a stroke to dump 500 young men outside a peaceful rural community?
The fact that this location had already been experienced by a significant number of Afghan refugees in 2021 without such objection might suggest that it would be no trouble. Yet for weeks a large number of local residents has demonstrated against the new influx, attracting opportunist non-local elements to join in, promoting a hate-filled agenda which pollutes sincere local concerns.
There is in contrast a large amount of sympathy in that community for these young men, who are here only to seek safety after fleeing repression or worse and who are being involuntarily placed in the camp. A large group, such as Crowborough Unity, exists to support and care for the newcomers, with no wish to confront nor be confronted by objectors. This contrast in objectives should not be seen nor presented as a conflict, though there have been vile instances of hate-speech and threats from a minority towards those who wish the newcomers well.
The divergence of views and reasons for it will no doubt continue in and around Crowborough but they did not start there. It is not just about Sussex.
Growing hostility to immigration
The warning signs were there from 2015. The grudging nature of the Cameron government’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis foreshadowed growing hostility to immigration, though at a time when the economy was reliant on hundreds of thousands of European workers. Syrians with darker skins and a very different culture were harder for some to welcome or more obvious than more familiar Europeans. The campaign for Brexit and the decade since encouraged xenophobia and enabled a new focus on border control.
As subsequent administrations moved ever further Right, immigration, erroneously exemplified by the growing arrival of asylum seekers in small boats, became media-magnified as the priority policy issue, first of the Farage tendency and subsequently of Tories and Labour. It had not been so before and actually made little impact on the lives of most communities, except where public services provision failed to match needs changed by newcomers.
Labour seems set on outdoing the Right in harshness
The Starmer regime has consistently distanced itself from Labour’s previous more humanitarian attitude towards refugees and asylum seekers, as it seems set on matching or outdoing in harshness the increasingly hostile rhetoric of Conservative and Reform mouthpieces. Labour’s only efforts to counter growing racism seem to have concerned anti-semitism, whilst immune to the appalling treatment meted out under their watch to desperate people seeking sanctuary.
Instead of halting the traffic of small boats crossing the Channel by registering asylum applications in France, Starmer’s Labour set about an expensive but fruitless attempt to inhibit smuggling, with little or no concern whatsoever for the well-being of thousands of desperate people seeking help.
Under pressure from Right-wing attacks over the use of hotels for housing unprocessed asylum seekers, instead of investing in effective and rapid processing to establish entitlement, enabling those who could to become tax-paying workers, the government opted to move hundreds into equally costly ‘concentration camps’, numbers bound to concern local residents about capacity in local services.
Differing values but no cause for conflict
Public response to this failure of leadership has developed into binary but not opposing extremes, with sympathisers offering care and practical support while concerned residents and opportunist racists protest vociferously against imagined horrors. Differing values but no cause for conflict.
Crowborough is just the latest manifestation of this divergence, with hundreds of activists opposing the policy, targeting the victims rather than those responsible, while groups like Crowborough Unity try to make them as comfortable as possible.
Local and national leaders have much to answer for, in the example they set and policies they adopt. What is happening here is the outcome of years of political bigotry, xenophobia and appeasement, ignoring the concerns of most, including local residents. The activism on display is not a clash of right versus wrong nor Right versus Left but apparent hate versus humanity.
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