Wednesday 2 November 2022 10:34 PM Lifeboat crew on training course gets shown the door by bosses to make way for ... trends now
A lifeboat crew on a training course was kicked out of a hotel midway through their stay to make way for homeless migrants.
Four members of the RNLI were turfed out of the three-star hotel in Hoylake, Merseyside, without notice on Tuesday.
They came back to find their bags packed and left in the foyer after taking part in a hovercraft training session on nearby mudflats.
A source said: ‘The irony is off the scale. These migrants were picked up in the Channel by members of Border Force and volunteers from the RNLI. Now some of those volunteers, literally on a course to improve the ways they can save lives at sea, have been kicked out of their hotel by the very people they’re training to rescue.’
The migrants were driven to the hotel from the crisis-hit overcrowded Manston asylum processing facility in Kent, more than 300 miles away.
The RNLI crew members – one volunteer and three staff – are now staying in a different hotel eight miles away in Liverpool.
Four members of the RNLI were turfed out of the three-star hotel in Hoylake, Merseyside, without notice on Tuesday
The Hoylake hotel is the latest to be identified to house asylum seekers. Sources said councillors were ‘left in the dark’ about the plans.
It is understood that the local authority was notified on Monday that the premises, which has more than 50 rooms, had been commissioned by the Home Office and government contractor Serco to house migrants.
It comes amid chaotic scenes across the country as immigration staff desperately try to find accommodation for the thousands of migrants crossing the Channel every week.
Jenni Halliday, Serco’s contract director for asylum accommodation services, said: ‘With the significant increases in the number of people arriving in the UK we have been faced with no alternative but to temporarily accommodate some asylum seekers in hotels. These hotels are only used as a last resort.’
Elsewhere, women fleeing domestic abuse could be next to find themselves displaced after a High Court ruling yesterday.
A judge suspended an injunction which had prevented a hotel from housing asylum seekers.
They came back to find their bags packed and left in the foyer after taking part in a hovercraft training session on nearby mudflats
The migrants were driven to the hotel from the crisis-hit overcrowded Manston asylum processing facility in Kent, more than 300 miles away
The court heard that Stoke-on-Trent City Council opposed the Home Office’s plan to book all 88 rooms in the historic North Stafford Hotel because it was a breach of planning rules and prevented the council from using it for vulnerable locals.
The council wrote to the Home Office in September expressing its concerns at the plan.
‘In addition to this, it was the location used by the city council to accommodate low risk homeless families with children and women fleeing domestic abuse, who will now be displaced as this arrangement has been ended by the hotel as a direct result of the Home Office proposal,’ the letter read.
The judge, Mr Justice Linden, refused to extend the injunction until a final hearing, which is expected to take place in December, meaning the hotel can be used to house migrants immediately.
In his ruling, he said: ‘I take into account the perspective of the citizens of Stoke-on-Trent but hope they would appreciate the potential suffering of the asylum seekers is no small matter when one considers the circumstances in which they have come.’
The city was one of four local authorities to take legal action against hotels being block-booked for migrants.
A council spokesman said: ‘We are obviously disappointed that we were unsuccessful in seeking a continuance of the interim injunction to restrain the use of a local hotel as a hostel by accommodating asylum seekers.
‘The city has a long tradition of supporting asylum seekers, having been an asylum dispersal area over three decades.’
Listen to the woke BBC and you’d think voters want our borders flung open
By Matt Goodwin
If you have listened to the BBC this week, then you might be under the impression that much of the country want to see our borders flung open.
On its flagship Today programme on Radio 4 yesterday, listeners heard an interview with a migrant who had been housed at Manston processing centre in Kent in which the living conditions were described by the reporter as akin to a ‘prison camp’.
‘We can’t go to the toilet, we can’t take a shower... we don’t have any clothes,’ the man claimed, talking about the suffering he has endured.
There is no doubt that Manston is failing as it faces an overwhelming surge in arrivals. But what was lacking in that Today item was any sense of perspective. No discussion of the impact that the 40,000-odd asylum seekers who have crossed the Channel this year have on our already overstretched resources.
Another BBC politics show this week described the intensifying migrant crisis as a ‘culture war’, as if wanting controlled borders is a confected issue not worthy of serious attention.
If you have listened to the BBC this week, then you might be under the impression that much of the country want to see our borders flung open
Yet the BBC’s virtue signallers have actually got it all wrong. New polling by my firm People Polling shows that 60 per cent of people think the Government has lost control of
