Witnessing Christianity in action at asylum hotels drawing fire in UK immigration debate

In 2022 the local branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul operating in a southern English town discovered that a hotel had been repurposed to accommodate asylum seekers. They decided to help.

The offer to help from the SVP was initially turned away and they were told that the hotel only had  formal relations with one charity: Care4Calais. Not deterred, Holder and several of the local SVP members joined Care4Calais and got to work.

Recently, I took up an offer to visit the local hotel being used to house asylum seekers in this market town in Berkshire, and met with Hilda Holder, the secretary of the local SVP branch and a formidable force for good in our world.

My visit occurred before the riots that followed the killings in Southport, though what I saw seems even more relevant given how such tensions continue and might even erupt into violence again.

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Most of the asylum seekers had arrived at the hotel in the Berkshire market town with literally nothing but the clothes they were wearing.

“It seems that the Home Office practice was to take everything off anybody who came on a small boat and replace it with a tracksuit and flip-flops,” Holder explains.

The SVP branch found itself clothing hundreds of asylum seekers, 93 of whom were children. Holder set up a free shop, which she proudly shows me and which is reminiscent of your local Oxfam. Other volunteers started English classes, as well as a children’s club and a games night.

After the tour, we made our way back to Holder’s house, accompanied by some of the residents of the hotel. Sitting down to cups of tea and sandwiches, I heard the breath-taking story of Mina Yaghoubi, an Iranian civil rights activist.

For over a decade, Yaghoubi has been fighting for women’s rights in a country where their rights are extremely limited. Iran forbids women to dance in public, attend sports fixtures, travel abroad without their husband’s permission, or to ride a bicycle.

As she began to share her story, we all listened with a mixture of shock and admiration.

Yaghoubi initially came to the attention of Iranian social media and authorities in 2022, in the wake of the Mahsa Amini protests. A video of her throwing a stone at a picture of the Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, went viral, propelling her into a life-changing set of circumstances.

After the video’s publication, she was intercepted by the police on her way to work. Her phone and car were taken, and she was questioned for three days before being placed in the solitary confinement area of a prison for forty days.

During her confinement, and in her frustration, she blurted out an insult aimed at the Ayatollah and was promptly thrown out of a two-story window by the prison officials. Waking up in the hospital and chained to her bed, she found herself with severe head injuries and in a desperate situation.

Thankfully, this seemingly hopeless situation also offered her a chance of release. A nurse tasked with caring for her bruised body also happened to be a family friend. The friend secretly called her family to let them know where she was. The family, many of whom are also resistors of the tyrannical theocracy, began a public campaign which resulted in her freedom.

The ordeal did not diminish Yaghoubi’s determination to advocate for women’s rights in the country. After recovering, she posted a video declaring her intention to continue campaigning regardless of the consequences.

Those consequences came swiftly, with the government confiscating all her possessions and sentencing her to 11 years in prison, including 124 hours of washing graves, and 85 lashes. Yaghoubi went into hiding and eventually crossed the northern Iranian border into Turkey.

After paying an exorbitant amount of money to a people smuggler for a fake passport, she arrived at Heathrow. Two days later, she reached Maidenhead, where she has been for over a year.

Reflecting on her initial experiences with the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, Yaghoubi becomes emotional and says: “Hilda cared for me, she gave me everything I needed. I only had one pair of clothes when I arrived.”

Holder is quick to deflect the praise, “Well, Mina is the same size as my daughter and the same age, so I just raided Katherine’s closet!”.

She adds: “Mina was a very sad case; when she first arrived, she was having nightmares and screaming in the night”

Yaghoubi says that “all the English people I have met have been so caring towards me and have been much kinder than the Iranians I have met here”.

Holder says she thinks this is likely because Iranian asylum seekers, even after escaping their country, fear the reach of the Iranian terror state and therefore see contact with Yaghoubi as something that could get them in trouble.

Yaghoubi recently embraced Christianity and has joined the local high Anglican church, along with about 20 other Iranians at her hotel (other asylum seekers have chosen to attend various other churches in town).

“When I first got to know the Church, I spent a lot of time learning about Jesus. I found it very interesting. From there, I made the decision to be baptised, and now I attend church every Sunday.”

Before I depart, I ask Yaghoubi about her aspirations for the future. “All I want from God is health, safety, and peace…and maybe a little money.”

Since my meeting with Yaghoubi, she has received leave to remain in the UK and has moved elsewhere in the country.

Asylum seekers and their accommodations have been in the British public consciousness for quite some time now. But the scenes of a Holiday Inn ablaze in Rotherham will be etched in our memories for years to come. The senseless violence directed at a group of people who have sought to escape violence was chilling.

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At the same time, Sir Keir Starmer seems keen to continue modern Labour’s tradition of being embarrassed by the white working class and is unlikely to do anything to ease tensions anytime soon.

Successive governments have done very little to ensure that communities feel they are being listened to by authorities. Arguably the most explicit and egregious case of this is exemplified by Rotherham where, among a population of 73,000, around 1,400 children were abused between 1997 and 2013, with the majority of the victims being white British girls aged 11 to 18, and the majority of perpetrators being men of Pakistani origin.

There is a depressing absurdity in the fact of a place designated to house migrants being attacked by the far-right extremist fringe of the UK’s white working class.

Both communities have been let down and ignored by a ruling elite, whether in Tehran or in Westminster, and one which pushes a self-serving ideology designed to make themselves feel morally superior rather than address the needs of others.

The cruel irony is that the struggle for both immigrants and natives is essentially the same: to be economically secure, to have a purpose, to be included.

No matter how complex the current immigration and asylum questions permeating political discourse, Christians must never sink into a state of inaction. We are not called to substitute personal responsibility with political ideology; rather, we are called to do things for others.

The Church must never miss an opportunity to embrace those in need with fraternal charity, as Hilda Holder does, as the Church of England priest who welcomed Yaghoubi does, and as many others do.

For it is within this fraternal charity that the fullness of the Christian faith is practised. As Pope Benedict XVI put so well in Deus Caritas Est: “The Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more than she can neglect the Sacraments and the Word.”

Just as ubi caritas, Deus ibi est – “where there is charity, God is” – holds true, so must ubi ecclesia, caritas ibi est – “where there is a Church, there is charity” – hold true too.

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Photo: Riot police officers face anti-migration protesters outside a Holiday Inn Express Hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham, England, UK, 4 August 2024 . (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.)

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