MP calls for Wigan hotel to stop housing Afghan asylum-seekers after an incident involving a 12 year-old schoolgirl.
The British Movement has been running a campaign over recent months against Home Office policy of housing illegal immigrants and refugees in hotels close to shopping centres, housing estates and schools. This policy has led to many accusations of sexual harassment by locals against the mainly young, male, asylum seekers.
The latest allegations to come to light, again involving a notorious budget hotel chain (which we have featured many times on this site), is the Britannia Hotel in Standish, near Wigan. The hotel has a long track-record when it comes to upsetting local residents.
Several parents from the Standish area have told the local paper that they are stopping their daughters from going out because groups of men have allegedly been filming their PE lessons at the local high school, winking and passing comments at them in the street and, in one instance, surrounding a 12-year-old and filming her.
Security has been stepped up and Wigan Council said it had been made aware of the Standish issues and was liaising with both the Home Office and Serco, the firm managing asylum-seekers at the Wigan hotel.
The mother of the 12-year-old girl who was surrounded and filmed by a group of men says she is now terrified to go anywhere other than school. Vikki Boyle said her daughter and many other girls in the Standish area are staying home rather than going to the park, shops or anywhere else on foot because of this incident and others in which young girls have received unwanted attention from strangers.
The girl’s mother was quoted as saying: “But we’ve been keeping our daughters in all summer holiday because of these men who are hanging around in Standish and at the school. That evening she persuaded us to let her go to Aldi with a friend.
“They were on their way back and then the friend peeled off to go home leaving our daughter to make the last bit of the trip home on her own.
“She was coming down The Line when she saw around 10 men standing in a row, all looking at her. She got in a panic and did not know what to do.
“As she got closer one of them started filming her with his phone. He said ‘stop!’ and they circled round her so she could not get away. They said, ‘come with us’ and she started crying.
“Then she spotted a man she knew by sight – now we know he is called Ross Pilkington because he had become a bit of a local hero because of all this – and she managed to duck between two of the men and run towards Ross who was with his little boy and dog and they escorted her home.”
Some of the same men have been spotted watching girls taking part in sporting activities at Standish High School and bothering pupils outside the school gates at home time, prompting the school to put out a “stranger danger” warning, and there has been high-profile policing outside the school in recent weeks.
Local Wigan MP Lisa Nandy, from the immigrant-obsessed Labour Party, seems more concerned with the welfare of the Afghans than the local children. This is hardly surprising as she used to work as a senior policy adviser at The Children’s Society from 2005 until 2010, where she specialised in issues facing young refugees.
Nandy was born in Manchester on 9 August 1979, the daughter of Louise (née Byers) and Dipak Nandy. Her maternal grandfather, Frank Byers was a Liberal MP who held many offices in the Liberal Party, later being created a life peer.
She has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Wigan since 2010. She stood as a candidate in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election coming in third place with 16.3% of the vote, behind Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey. During her time at University she featured in a student magazine that covered sexual relationships and drug use.
On the situation at the hotel, Nandy said she was appalled that the Britannia Hotel in Standish was being used to accommodate vulnerable asylum-seekers again, several years after both the Home Office and services operator Serco accepted that it was completely unsuitable for the purpose, and had done so with no notice or consultation with the police, council, herself or the local community.
This is not the first time this hotel has hit the headlines. Back in November 2015, locals created a Facebook group titled ‘No More Economic Migrants in Britannia Hotel’. It had more than 2,000 members.
Angry villagers campaigned to evict 70 asylum-seekers from the hotel after becoming fed-up with a constant stream of arrivals. Hundreds of immigrants from Somalia, Syria and Iraq had been brought to the Britannia Hotel, amid claims that petty crime and theft have increased in the area since the asylum-seekers’ arrival, an accusation that was dismissed by police.
Other articles regarding the Britannia Hotel chain can be found here and here.
Top Image: Wigan Pier. Ben Sutherland from Catford, London, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Middle Image: Hotel website.
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