Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer faced mounting pressure over the housing of illegal immigrants last night after 700 people were involved in angry clashes outside a migrant hotel in a Scots town.
Police had to call in reinforcements as local residents and anti-racism groups clashed in angry scenes that saw bottles and other objects thrown outside the hotel in Falkirk which can hold more than 50 asylum seekers.
Community tensions had reached fever pitch after Afghan asylum seeker Sadeq Nikzad, 29, – a former resident in the hotel – was jailed in June for raping a local 15-year-old schoolgirl.
Yesterday, one of Sir Keir’s own Labour MPs said he believed that migrants should be removed from Falkirk’s Cladhan Hotel.
Euan Stainbank, the MP for Falkirk, said: ‘These hotels don’t work for host communities or those who stay there and their use will be ended by this government.’
And a senior Tory MSP demanded Sir Keir’s government find an alternative way to house migrants as soon as possible – and said locals had ‘legitimate safety concerns for themselves and for their children’.
Yesterday’s demo is the first large-scale asylum hotel protest in Scotland following similar demonstrations in England, notably outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex.
Hundreds of Scots descended on a hotel accommodating migrants in Falkirk on Saturday
A large police presence separated two rival protests from those opposed to the asylum hotel and anti-racist demonstrators
Afghan asylum seeker Sadeq Nikzad, 29, was jailed in June for raping a local 15-year-old girl
Sir Keir Starmer is under new pressure over the housing of asylum seekers
On Friday, Epping Forest District Council managed to secure a temporary block on The Bell accepting any further asylum seekers due to an increase in community tensions.
If a judge rules in the council’s favour on Tuesday it could open the door to a flurry of similar applications to the courts to dismantle asylum hotels at a community level, including from Falkirk.
But last night Scottish Conservative Community Safety spokeswoman Sharon Dowey called for Labour to intervene as a priority.
She said: ‘Robust action is needed from Labour ministers if they’re serious about keeping Scots safe.
‘They can start by heeding the concerns of local communities and look into closing these hotels by delivering an alternative solution to housing asylum seekers.’
Recent Norstat polling suggests the vast majoity of voters in Scotland, 77 per cent, want immigration to either decrease or remain at current levels.
Protestors in Falkirk on Saturday held banners reading: ‘Enough is enough’ as well as: ‘Women and children first’
One placard read: ‘Stop the boats,’ in reference to illegal crossings made by asylum seekers in small boats
On the other side, Stand Up To Racism protestors attempted to drown out concerns from locals
The survey published in February 2025 appeared to mirror a UK-wide trend in voters seeing immigrantion as an issue of concern.
Ms Dowey believes this weekend’s protests ‘reflects the widespread outrage felt by those in the community’ following the rape conviction of Nikzad.
The migrant, who had entered the UK illegally on a small boat, subjected a vunerable 15-year-old to an ‘appalling, opportunistic attack’ in Falkirk in October 2023.
He was later handed a 12-year extended sentence at the High Court in Livingston.
The Afghani claimed he’d not been educated on ‘cultural’ differences and repeatedly shouted ‘liar’ at judge John Morris, KC.
Nikzad – who had uploaded a picture of himself onto his Facebook posing in one of the chairs inside the Cladhan Hotel – is due to be deported after serving his prison term.
Afghan asylum seeker Sadeq Nikzad, 29, who was jailed for raping a 15-year-old, was a resident at the Falkirk hotel
Exclusive pictures obtained by the Mail show Nikzad relaxing in the taxpayer-funded accommodation
The Cladhan Hotel in Falkirk is being used by the Home Office to temporarily house asylum seekers
Hundreds of people turned out to protest alongside Save Our Future and Our Kids’ Future outside the hotel yesterday, including Darren, a local father, who claimed he feared for the children’s safety in the area.
He said: ‘There are kids getting followed home and it all leads back to here. And it’s not just young lassies, it’s boys as well.’
Father-of-two Connor Graham took to a megaphone to tell protesters: ‘Here’s my message: We are not going away. We are not going to be intimidated into silence. And we are certainly not going to be written off as extremists.
‘We want a safer Falkirk… we want answers and we want action and we want the same thing every decent person should want, a community where our children can grow up safe.’
On the opposite side of the protests was Claire Love, a 42-year-old social worker from Bonnybridge, who joined Stand Up to Racism counter-protestors.
She told The Mail she feared there had been an ‘increase in racism, homophobia and xenophobia in recent times’.
A number of anti-racist protestors lined the streets outside the hotel which houses the migrants
Falkirk MP Mr Stainbank said the former Conservative Government was to blame for a ‘broken asylum system’ and insisted his party will get to grips with the issue.
Referencing the Tory scheme that aimed to send failed asylum seekers to Rwanda which Labour scrapped when it won power last year, he said: ‘We must fix the broken asylum system for communities such as Falkirk and those fleeing conflict across the world.
‘Refocusing resources away from Rwanda and onto processing will allow us to end the use of asylum hotels, which were set up by the Tories and many of their rebranded Reform colleagues.
‘This approach has already seen the asylum backlog reduced by over 59,000 by the start of 2025 compared to if we had kept the Tories broken system.
‘These hotels don’t work for host communities or those who stay there and their use will be ended by this government.’
A Home Office spokesperson said: ‘Since taking office, we have taken immediate action to fix the asylum system and have started closing down hotels and returning more than 35,000 people with no right to be here.
‘From over 400 asylum hotels open in summer 2023, costing almost £9 million a day, there are now fewer than 210, and we want them all closed by the end of this Parliament.
‘We will continue to work closely with community partners across the country, and discuss any concerns they have, as we look to fix this broken system together.’
