Community leader Sacha Bedding warns the country stands on the brink once more, after major disorder in Epping this week. Ros Wynne-Jones visits the town to speak to residents – and hears how community power could be the answer
Sacha Bedding, a community leader on the Dyke House estate in Hartlepool, has a claim to fame he wishes he didn’t. Last May, he told a charity conference ‘I predict a riot’.
“I said if something doesn’t change there will be civil disorder in this country – it’s inevitable,” the Wharton Trust CEO remembers. “I felt we were just waiting for it. A result of the pressures that people are living under, added to a lack of control over their lives.”
Last summer, after riots in Southport following the horrific murder of three little girls at a dance studio, Hartlepool was the second town to catch alight. During a long and shocking night of disorder on July 31, shops were smashed, a police car was set on fire, and bricks and bottles thrown at officers. The youngest person arrested was just 11 years old.
One year on from the disturbances, and now recovering from cancer, Sacha warns that the country stands on the brink once more. “It’s happening again,” he says. “The same murmurings. The same disempowerment, disillusionment and lack of hope.” Yesterday– almost exactly a year to the day of riots breaking out in his town – Sacha delivered a letter to Downing Street with a stark warning. It is signed by 300 leaders who work in communities like his up and down the country and is supported by the We’re Right Here campaign for community power.
“Unless we can address the feelings of alienation and powerlessness which are becoming endemic, and close the gap between politics and our communities,” Sacha’s letter says, “I worry that the civil disorder that plagued the streets of my town, Hartlepool, and many others last year will be repeated.”
READ MORE: ‘I was surrounded by Southport attack rioters – my wife and I thought we’d be killed’
At a run-down hotel on the edge of Epping this week, where housing estates give way to rolling fields, two police officers were guarding a temporary metal fence in the rain. Despite the fact it appeared people seeking asylum at the Bell Hotel were being moved out, Far Right leader Tommy Robinson has said he will join protests at the affluent market town this coming Sunday, urging “thousands of patriots” to attend. “The world will hear the lion roar” in Epping, Robinson claims.
When I asked one of the hotel’s near neighbours if he was worried about the risk of fire to his property, he nodded conspiratorially. “A fire might solve a few problems,” he said.
As the anniversary of the 2024 riots approaches next week, pockets of disorder have followed riots in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. This week saw unrest in genteel Diss in Norfolk, protests in London’s Canary Wharf, as well as in Epping. Fanning the flames, this week Far Right Reform leader Nigel Farage warned of “societal collapse”.
The disorder in Epping came after 38-year-old Bell Hotel resident Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, was charged with three counts of sexual assault. In the biggest disturbances since last August, police officers were attacked, and two hotel workers were hospitalised in the aftermath.
Locals inside the Bell and other local asylum hotels said people inside – many of whom have fled violent persecution in war-torn countries – had been left “terrified” and retraumatised. “It’s hard to imagine how frightened people are,” one said.
An elderly lady on the estate behind the hotel also told me she found the protesters frightening. “They’re not Epping people,” she said. “There was a woman told us she’d come all the way from Scotland. Imagine that.” Local family butchers, Church’s, have been selling Epping’s famous sausages since 1888. “This town is the last place for this type of thing,” one of the butchers says. “But women and young girls feel uncomfortable. Teenagers have been followed into shops. My daughter was approached in Marks’s.”
The anti-fascist group HOPE not Hate say the area has been targeted by dedicated Far-Right activists centring on the Bell Hotel since at least 2020 and active in local Facebook groups. Known activists from groups like Homeland, Britain First, and so-called ‘Migrant Hunters’ are exploiting genuinely-felt local fears.
In Bradford, community leader Josiah Suic, 40, is worried enough to have signed Sacha’s letter. “There is a simmering undercurrent,” says the CEO of the Rooted In charity. “While last year’s riots may have faded from the headlines, the frustration hasn’t. It feels like we’re in the quiet before the storm.”
There is a buzz about Bradford from the City of Culture celebrations, but Josiah – who traces his roots to Serbia, Malaysia, Germany and Austria – fears they have further alienated many of the people in his community of Allerton and Lower Grange. “I traverse a pile of different cultures, but some native Bradfordians feel like theirs is the only culture not being celebrated,” he says.
Places like Bradford, he says, have never had a ‘change management process’. “Pubs are mosques, hotels have been requisitioned. Things that are familiar have gone while there’s been this decline in the local economy. It’s a toxic combination. We have to get away from conversations in dark corners. When we are silent, we are retreating into our individual echo chambers.”
In an independent coffee shop in Epping, selling flat whites for just under £4, a well-dressed woman is holding court. “They think we don’t know what’s going on,” she says. “Just like with Covid.” Her anger at the frightened people being evacuated from the Bell Hotel drifted effortlessly into an anti-vax monologue via a riff on Turkish barber shops.
In Hartlepool, Sacha says “it would only take a small thing – even an allegation at this point – to spark civil disruption, a riot, a protest.” He adds: “People have very little so their question is does that person have more than me – and do they have something that means can’t have something? The algorithm is telling us all what we want to hear.”
His is no longer a lone voice. During the Cabinet’s final meeting before recess, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner spoke in stark terms of how Labour must deliver in office to avoid repeat of the riots. And the Prime Minister demanded ministers act to repair “fraying” Britain. Knocking on his front door at Downing Street yesterday, 300 community leaders want more – meaningful power devolved to communities to reconnect them.
“The Government has a real opportunity with the upcoming English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill to give community organisations that are doing the work to bring people together across lines of division, a real voice in local decision making,” says Sacha. “We can be part of the solution.
“When people feel ignored, neglected, and shut out, frustration builds—and history shows us the terrible consequences,” Sacha says. “In order to fix the foundations of our democracy, we must act boldly and do things differently. That means putting real power and real resources in the hands of local people. Not promises. Not gestures. Real Power.”
Josiah’s prescription is simple. “My message to the Prime Minister is, projects like ours need long-term funding,” he says. “Listen to us. You run a country, we love a community.”