Welcome to Skegness? The resort that fears it's now better known for migrants ... trends now
A miserable March night in Skegness and snow is falling. Big soggy flakes lit by amusement arcade neon. The streets are horror-film deserted and the giant seafront bars have closed early, but Busters fun pub is hanging on. So is the old man on stage doing karaoke.
Clutching a microphone in one hand, he leans heavily on a stick with the other. Age – he’s 83 – has added a richness to the timbre of his voice and he’s already delighted his audience with Always On My Mind. Now he’s about to launch into Somebody Told Me by The Killers.
Next door, a poster outside the ex-servicemen’s club promises a Sunday afternoon’s entertainment in April with Bruce Jones, who used to play Les Battersby in Coronation Street. ‘We get all the big names,’ jokes a member. ‘Even out of season.’
Locals revel in the town’s tongue-in-cheek nickname, Skeg Vegas, and they need their sense of humour, now more than ever. For one thing, the town, though popular, keeps getting sniffy reviews.
But Skegness is used to this and remains defiantly unhip. The American writer Bill Bryson called it ‘the most traditional of any English seaside resort’.
The American writer Bill Bryson called Skegness ‘the most traditional of any English seaside resort’
Far more troubling is that, through no fault of its own, Skegness has come to exemplify our creaking immigration system: something it fears will keep holidaymakers away this summer – and see businesses go to the wall
Further along the seafront, opposite the Arnold Palmer Putting Course, you find the reason: a row of hotels and boarding houses crammed with hundreds of migrants
Far more troubling is that, through no fault of its own, it has come to exemplify our creaking immigration system: something it fears will keep holidaymakers away this summer – and see businesses go to the wall. Further along the seafront, opposite the Arnold Palmer Putting Course, you find the reason: a row of hotels and boarding houses crammed with hundreds of migrants.
Many of them, like the young man from Kurdistan drawing heavily on a cigarette outside, who says he crossed the Channel on a small boat, are in Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman’s crosshairs.
As The Mail on Sunday revealed last week, the Government has made it a priority to put a brake on the ‘human rights’ farce which allows migrants to resist deportation. Last year, it emerged that the Home Office was managing to process just four per cent of asylum claims from people who crossed the Channel in 2021.
For now, housing asylum seekers in hotels across the UK continues to cost taxpayers £5.6 million a day. Skegness hoteliers receive more than £10,000 a week to close their doors to tourists and house migrants instead. ‘Those owners who have accepted the Home Office money tend not to live in the area,’ says Ross Richardson, events manager at the Savoy hotel, which
