A summer of anti-asylum protests in Thetford, Norfolk, culminated in a march from the town to RAF Barnham, a military base in Suffolk earmarked to house up to 1,250 asylum seekers. The campaign has lasted the whole summer, with demonstrations every Sunday at 2pm since the first protest in June 2026, alongside nights of violent disorder in early August.
Protesters march to RAF Barnham
The two-mile march from Thetford's market square to RAF Barnham was billed as a community event, with a flyer declaring: "Everyone welcome: families, friends, dogs. Including the media." Banners lined the square, the largest reading: "Thetford and Barnham says no to asylum seekers."
Most protesters were from Norfolk or Suffolk. Their reasoning varied, but many said it came down to numbers, questioning how the site could house 1,250 people when the nearest village has a population of only 600. Some said the country can't afford to keep housing asylum seekers as they wait to be processed, or that there are too many coming in, or that "we don't know who they are." Asylum seekers were referred to by some as "boat people" and "invaders."
At a protest the week before the march, one attendee suggested people may be being sent intentionally from Iran. "They say that they are sending some of the terrorists over to the UK and we have no idea who comes off the boats," protester David Goulty said. "There's no control on who comes into the country."
Government U-turn on military bases
In opposition, Labour criticised the Conservative policy of housing asylum seekers on military bases. But in October last year, now in government, it changed tack. The sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by a resident of the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex, had prompted months of angry local protests against the housing of asylum seekers in hotels. Keir Starmer announced that military bases would be used once again.
Labour was explicit about the reason for the U-turn: "We know that communities don't want asylum seekers housed in hotels, and neither does the government, and that's why we are determined to fix the mess that we've inherited by getting a grip of the issue and committing to close every single asylum hotel, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds."
The Home Office is now actively working to expand or open five sites, two of which are already active. MDP Wethersfield, a former RAF airfield in Essex, houses 800 asylum seekers, but could increase its capacity to more than 1,200. Crowborough training camp in East Sussex plans to increase its numbers from 350 to 540; a volunteer vigilante patrol group has been set up in the area to "protect" locals from migrants. Three large military sites are being readied with a reported capacity of 1,250 each: MOD Bicester in Oxfordshire; RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire; and RAF Barnham.
Violent disorder in early August
At the start of this month, the addresses of some houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) used to house asylum seekers in Thetford were leaked. This led to crowds of vigilantes targeting the properties on 4, 5 and 6 August. During the second night of unrest, hundreds of people descended on a terrace house on Clover Way in the 70s-built Fairfields estate. Some threw rocks and eggs, smashing an upstairs window, while others attempted to get inside. During these days of disorder, police officers were spat at, while one was hit by a rock and another was bitten. According to police, some of the vigilantes even entered a property and forced out a resident, stealing their mobile phone.
More than 20 people were arrested on suspicion of a variety of offences, including racially aggravated public order, inciting racial hatred and conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary, as well as possession of cocaine with intent to supply, possession of cannabis and driving without insurance.
On the day of the march, the house that was once home to asylum seekers was still identifiable by dried yolk on the windows, almost three weeks after the eggs were thrown. A neighbour said she had to flee to a friend's house over the road on the night the crowds came. John Finch, 91, said the people who sold the house that was besieged were initially going to sell it to a family, but they were gazumped by a company, which offered more money. On the night the protesters arrived, the crowds stood on his flowerbeds and trampled his plants. He saw the melee out of his window, but decided to go to bed. "I slept through it," he said. He was in the RAF police branch that served in Cyprus when Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots started firing at each other. "I've seen worse."
Local context and integration history
Thetford has a history of integration. In 1903, it elected the first black mayor in the UK, Allan Glaisyer Minns, who was born in the Bahamas and had trained as a doctor at Guy's hospital in London. There is an established Portuguese community, which moved here in their hundreds in the 2000s, after big East Anglian agribusinesses, including the turkey giant Bernard Matthews, set up recruitment offices in the country. There is a statue of Duleep Singh, the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, who was exiled to Britain from Punjab and became a favourite of Queen Victoria, living in Elveden Hall, just over the Suffolk border.
Anwar Noor, 63, an ice-cream vendor who came to Thetford from Kenya in the 1980s and worked in the Thermos factory for 17 years before being made redundant, said he can understand why people are angry. "You probably noticed as you walked through the town how many shops are closed, post offices gone. All the banks are gone. You can see the centre hollowing out." He said he has never experienced racism in Thetford, but believes that blaming asylum seekers is "all wrong. We're all in the same boat."
Thetford was also the location for much of the classic sitcom Dad's Army, including external shots of the episode that ends with the show's most famous joke: "Don't tell 'em, Pike!" The Guildhall on the market square was often used as a backdrop.
Protests continue despite disorder fading
After the three nights of violent disorder, the unrest fizzled out, but the anti-asylum protests continued. The first protest against the use of RAF Barnham was in June 2026. Now, every Sunday, they happen like clockwork at 2pm. At the protest camp, Clinton Warner, who grew up across the road from the site, said a contract worker tasked with servicing the sewers on the RAF Barnham site gave him a tipoff about the plan. "They were asked to recommission it, so the contractors knew about it seemingly before the councillors," he said. "We put it online."
RAF Barnham has been used in many ways over the years. It has been a logistics hub for the RAF, and during the second world war it was a mustard gas and munitions storage facility. After the war, it was commissioned by Churchill to store nuclear bombs. Warner remembers being warned: "Do not remove wildlife from these ponds, do not pick the lilies, do not remove the flowers, leave everything, because it's all hazardous."
The use of sites such as Barnham to house asylum seekers isn't only controversial with concerned residents. Two years ago, the UK parliament's home affairs select committee wrote that the use of large military sites to house asylum claimants had "generally proved more costly to deliver than hotel accommodation" because of the cost of refurbishing them; they are often in a poor state of repair.
Nuni Jorgensen, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said: "In policy discourse, there's this concern about how some asylum accommodation can function as a pull factor. Politicians often say hotels can work as a pull factor because people imagine that these are fancy hotels and that's why they come to the UK. But the evidence that we have on that is not very clear." Jorgensen added that there is a lot of evidence showing that larger sites negatively affect asylum seekers' wellbeing. Hotels, she said, "have been linked to very poor mental-health outcomes among residents", as the conditions are often cramped and unclean and isolate them from the community. Dispersal to neighbourhood HMOs has, historically, been the Home Office's preferred option. "They tend to be cheaper than hotels. They tend to produce the best wellbeing outcomes for asylum seekers. The problem is that they are very hard to find in some areas."
Along with the volunteer vigilante patrol group in Crowborough, a village near RAF Bicester has voted symbolically to leave the UK over the policy. Human rights campaigners say the sites amount to a form of "open-prison camp", while Reform UK likens them to holiday camps.
Organisers and political context
Terry Curtis, 40, one of the protest movement's organisers, was present at the HMO protests in early August but left "when things escalated … because it's not what we're here for". He said the police were heavy-handed in their tactics; he mentioned that a woman on a mobility scooter was pepper-sprayed. Curtis moved to Thetford from south London when he was 15 and still supports Millwall. In the 1950s, the town's population was 5,000. By the end of the 1960s, due to overspill from the capital, it had more than tripled to 17,000. The Abbey estate, opened in 1968, is today the poorest area of Thetford and was one of the locations of the violent protests in early August. Regeneration plans announced in 2019 were scrapped by Reform UK when they took over Norfolk county council in May.
Curtis said he knows what it's like to go through hard times: "I've been homeless myself … I've been in hostels." The movement isn't affiliated with any political party, he said, though local Reform UK politicians mingle with the protesters each week, including the councillor Scott Hussey, a former Sun journalist. The rise of Reform, and Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain, in East Anglia has put the wind in the sails of such movements. Reform UK now runs the county councils in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, while Restore-backed candidates swept all 10 contested seats they stood for in the May 2026 local elections.
"I feel like we've got more inequality than we have equality these days," said Curtis. "Everybody should be treated the same. And, unfortunately, we're not. Everything's going up. Prices are going up. Taxes are going up. But, yeah, people are able to come over here, you know, on boats, seek asylum and then get a home, get a house, get what they want – fed, gas, electric, all paid for by the government, which is inadvertently [sic] the taxpayers. Personally, I think we should close the borders to everybody. Get our own country sorted first."
MP's opposition to Barnham plan
Terry Jermy, the Labour MP for South West Norfolk, which includes Thetford, strongly opposes the use of Barnham. He shot up the ranks of local politics, from town councillor in 2008 to mayor in 2016, before giving Liz Truss her Portillo moment in 2024. After the HMO attacks, Jermy said the violence was "scaring and terrifying people who live in Thetford, particularly people from minority ethnic communities who are contacting me terrified that they are going to be misidentified as an asylum seeker and attacked".
Jermy said he can see why the hotels policy had to change – "it's not a good use of taxpayers' money" – and isn't against the use of military bases in principle. But he strongly opposes the use of Barnham. "I get branded a hypocrite when I say that Barnham's not appropriate," he said. "But if you've been to Barnham [the village rather than the military base], you will see that it's relatively small. It's in the middle of nowhere and it's going to cost the government a fortune to put in the sewage and electricity and everything else that's needed to make it work. I suspect, once they've done their calculations, they will realise that the cost-benefit rules it out."
He pointed out that Barnham was only ever an overflow base for Honnington, a much bigger base nearby. Barnham has been empty for a long time and Jermy said a lot of the buildings are in a state of disrepair, "so new modular units will have to be built" to accommodate people. He also criticised the Home Office's language. "In the official government factsheet about Barnham, they referred to the people due to be based there as 'illegal migrants'. They are asylum seekers. They are waiting to be processed."
Jermy said most people don't understand the difference between refugee, asylum seeker and economic migrant, and that there's a lot of work to do to educate people about that and to talk more positively about immigration. He doesn't blame local residents for being angry. "These people have been failed," he said. "They've been failed by decades in which people don't shop in town centres any more and manufacturing is on the decline. And the vast majority of jobs locally are minimum wage. Our schools are rubbish and our healthcare system is rubbish. They're going to be grumpy and they're looking for somebody to blame. And rather than us, as a Labour government, articulating, actually, that it's greed and austerity that are driving this, a lot of the language that we have used, trying to out-Reform Reform, has aided and abetted a lot of those concerns."
The march itself
At 1.30pm on Sunday, the march from Thetford to Barnham began. A group of women assembled behind the main banner. The protesters moved past a golden statue of Thomas Paine, the Thetford-born autodidact, founding father of the US and author of Rights of Man. Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World drifted out of a speaker on wheels, followed by Vera Lynn's The White Cliffs of Dover. A horse-drawn hearse, crewed by three funeral directors in traditional garb, arrived carrying a cardboard coffin with "DEMOCRACY" written on its side.
The turnout of around 130 people told its own story. Although the march was billed as a community event, it hadn't attracted a big crowd. One of the main chants as the protesters walked out of town was: "Deport, deport, deport the fucking lot." As the crowd crossed the border from Norfolk to Suffolk, a young man set off a flare attached to a St George's flag, then escaped on a motorbike to more cheers.
Jean Glasdale, 73, who had come from just outside Bury St Edmunds, said: "I want them to deport them. I want to be able to walk safely. I mean, they're not just raping children, they're raping pensioners like me. I want to feel safe in my own country." After the march reached Barnham, male speaker after male speaker from Reform UK and smaller fringe parties followed each other on to the small stage with ever greater claims about what rape statistics suggest about migrant behaviour.
A 38-year-old woman who lives near RAF Barnham and was on the protest with her small children said she was full of fear about the threat posed by asylum seekers, and thought they should be held in detention offshore: "The safety of people is paramount. If they're off from the main island – you know, if they're off, say, Shetland or wherever – it's another barrier and it's another bit of protection for us."
Curtis denied the presence of the far right. "No, there's no far right," he said. "It doesn't matter whether you're left or right wing. This is not what it's about. It's just about the community – all the communities getting together to feel safe. You know, everybody's concerned for the safety of the whole area. Because the people that are going to be put here are going to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want."
Vron Ware, author of Return of a Native, said of the exploitation of these primal fears of rape by "others" and "invaders": "It's been going on since for ever." In the 1980s, Ware was the editor of the anti-fascist publication Searchlight. "I've got a poster of an old fascist march in the 70s where someone's got a placard that says: '75% of rapings are done by immigrants.' It's just a trope that never goes away."
After the march, Curtis seemed a little disappointed with the turnout and said he was going to take some time out from organising, which has taken its toll. Jermy wasn't at the march because, although he agrees that Barnham should not be used to house asylum seekers, the protests have attracted gestures of support from not only Reform UK and Restore, but also the far-right party Britain First. During the protests at RAF Barnham, said Jermy, "there have been speeches on the stage which have basically been outright racist and disgusting and my presence would be seen as condoning that behaviour".
