We need more of Braverman’s truth bombs on immigration

THE 91-room Westone Manor Hotel is situated in the heart of a middle-class housing estate in Northampton. Often used for weddings, it offers free wifi, easy access to Weston Favell Shopping Centre and schools, and parking. Former guests have included the Beatles and various F1 drivers due to the hotel's proximity to Silverstone.

Now it is fully booked for the next eight months because it will be home to some of many thousands from Tirana, Damascus or Kinshasa who steal into our country by the day. The 'one to two per cent' of the entire male population of Albania – around 10,000 men – who have arrived on small boats this year alone have to be found somewhere to live, after all.

The hotel, based on a stain-glassed manor house built in 1914 by a shoe magnate, claims to have 'retained peace and tranquillity', but whether the injection of young, unemployed migrants from culturally divergent regions will help or hinder this idyll remains to be seen.

Those living nearby are naturally concerned. A locals' message board is awash with complaints: people afraid of groups of young men loitering on their garden wall, afraid too of saying anything lest they be accused of being an intolerant bigot or incur a recent arrival's ingratitude. They worry about the value of their homes falling; rumours of property deals falling through are already circulating.

Northampton's local paper relates the abrupt cancellation of a wedding next year at the hotel, citing a 'mysterious eight-month block booking'. This peculiar obfuscation – the article goes on to quote a Home Office spokesman saying it was to house refugees – is typical. You look in vain for local media concern at the prospect of a medium-sized hotel in the middle of suburbia becoming a migrant holding facility.

The Westone Manor is just one of several establishments in the area which are now off-limits to locals. The Holiday Inn three miles away is not accepting bookings (apart from His Majesty's Government's) until August 2023. Its 'delectable selection of Indian and modern European dishes at the Brasserie', the 'laid-back lounge' and the Fitness Centre are all booked out for the foreseeable. The same goes for the 'Egyptian cotton bed sheets' at the Holiday Inn in Flore, another 14 miles away.

The 111-bed Ibis in Crick, Northamptonshire, is not taking any bookings in 2023. Police have recently had to 'take action' following complaints of 'incidents', according to a strikingly uninformative article in the local press. Crick is not a big place. According to the last census its population was 1,886. Of fighting age men in the village, residents of the Ibis surely make a large proportion.

All of this to cost to us of £6.8million per day – and growing. Just under 1,000 illegal migrants crossed the channel this last Sunday alone, and the total so far this year is close to 40,000. This is in addition to nearly a quarter of a million refugees who arrived by more orthodox routes last year.

They will all have to be put up somewhere: most likely in a hotel near you, or in the very same hotel as you – with you picking up the tab.

What is happening is nothing short of a national humiliation. The government has no intention of stopping the human tidal wave. The new Prime Minister’s best offer is to agree a ‘target’ for the number of boats crossing the Channel with Monsieur Macron.

It’s a bad Blairite joke. Immigration officials will be rewarded for meeting spurious targets (it will not be set at nought) as well for the number they manage to process whatever the outcome. The winners as now remain the migrants and the industry they furbish. The losers? You don’t have to be told.

Facilities such as the detention centre in Manston, Kent, are holding over double the number of arrivals it was designed to house. The only solution is to buy more hotel space. Already, the Home Secretary is being criticised for not doing just that, with 'allies of Priti Patel' claiming Suella Braverman has brought the Home Office 'into disrepute' (no mean feat) by allowing the overcrowding to reach such an extent. As ever, those in power are resolutely focused on the symptoms and not the cause of this unfolding catastrophe.

Who knows how long Braverman will survive at the Home Office? Almost alone in Westminster and Whitehall she keeps dropping truth bombs, referring to the influx correctly as an 'invasion' and refusing to parrot the patent lie that everyone reaching our southern shore is a refugee in distress. This leads to accusations of ‘fuelling far-right extremism’.

But however much the government would like to, there is no denying that as the nation grows poorer, we are feeding and housing Albanian and other criminals who rightly see the UK as a soft target.

Will people continue to tolerate the burden? A man recently petrol-bombed a Home Office migrant centre. A terrible thing to do, and one which will make the frank discussion needed all the harder. But it is a possible portent of things to come. Every sign points the same way – a problem running completely out of control.

If Braverman is not allowed to get a grip something will snap. It will not be pretty when it does.