With police tape blocking its entrance, the Rotherham Holiday Inn Express remains a crime scene ten days on from anti-immigration riots. The hotel houses asylum seekers and was targeted in a wave of far-right protests that swept across England following the murder of three young girls in Southport on 29 July, and the spread of misinformation that falsely claimed the attacker was a recent migrant. Many in Rotherham look back on the violence in disgust, but some are still sympathetic to the grievances of those involved.
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00:30It was just massively more than we expected, more than we were led to believe.
00:45It was terrifying at times.
00:47When they were lighting the bin to push in through the door, when there are people inside,
00:52I mean, what's their intention there?
00:55That's not a protest.
00:56It's trying to burn a building down with people inside it.
01:26It was disgusting, like I say, it made me ashamed to be English.
01:36These people are coming out here to avoid persecution, to avoid all sorts of hardships
01:41and then they're coming here where they think they're going to be safe and then stuff like
01:45this is happening and it's going to be terrifying them all over again.
01:56They are thugs, what's going around and damaging things deliberately, but nobody's listening
02:09to their side of things.
02:11I think because they see what happens and what benefits they're getting and what they're
02:17not getting to us all that live here and work here and pay into the system, it's making
02:24them angry and it's making them like that because they don't want them here anymore
02:27because we can't look after us own.
02:31We're short of money here.