Anti-Immigration Protesters Mistakenly Confront Pakistan Under-19 Cricket Team
Anti-immigration protesters descended on a Portsmouth hotel believing they were confronting a new group of asylum seekers. They left minutes later, quietly, after discovering they had targeted the Pakistan Under-19 cricket team.
The mix-up, at the city’s Marriott Hotel, unfolded barely a day after Portsmouth had already been the stage for a febrile stand-off over migration. On Sunday, a large dinghy carrying an estimated 140 asylum seekers arrived at Eastney harbour, drawing a sizeable crowd and a black-clad vigilante group that tried to block surrounding streets to stop the new arrivals leaving the area.
Prime minister Andy Burnham’s spokesperson condemned what followed as “intimidating and thuggish behaviour”, and Burnham vowed to stop the “politics of poison seeping into our streets”. Police eventually broke up that protest in the early hours of Monday after securing a dispersal order and threatening arrests.
The anger did not simply evaporate with the dawn.
By Monday, images of a coach and a group of young Asian men outside the Marriott began circulating online, presented as supposed evidence of more asylum seekers being quietly housed in the city. The rumours were enough to bring protesters back out and to draw in George Madgwick, leader of the Reform UK group on Hampshire county council.
Madgwick later described, in a Facebook post since deleted, how quickly the narrative collapsed once he walked through the hotel doors.
According to his account, the manager told him the truth: the guests were members of Pakistan’s Under-19 cricket squad. The team coach then came out to speak to him directly and showed proof of their identity.
Madgwick wrote that he then went back outside to address the crowd of 40 to 50 people that had gathered. He told them they were not confronting asylum seekers but a touring cricket team. The reaction, he said, was immediate. The group accepted the explanation and dispersed within five minutes.
“I’m glad I could do my bit to help the situation and stop tensions rising,” he wrote, before turning his fire on ministers. “But the government need to understand why things like this happen. It’s not because the protestors and crowds are bad people. Local residents just want to protect the city they love in the best way they know how.”
Anti-racism campaigners saw something very different in the episode.
A spokesperson for Stand Up to Racism told the Portsmouth News: “Allowing racists to mobilise like this every time they become suspicious of any group of non-white people is extremely dangerous. It is racism in action and it has to stop.”
While the political argument raged, cricket’s authorities moved to protect the young players caught in the middle of a domestic culture war. The England and Wales Cricket Board contacted the Pakistan Cricket Board to check on the squad’s wellbeing and began reviewing security plans for the rest of the Under-19s’ tour.
On the field, Pakistan Under-19s have been involved in a tight, competitive series. They lost a four-day Test to England Under-19s last week by just 10 runs. This week they are back in action in a one-day match at Arundel, about 25 miles from Portsmouth, with a final ODI scheduled in Guildford on Saturday.
Pakistan’s senior men’s team is also in the country, locked into the third and final Test against England at Edgbaston. They came for cricket. They found themselves, briefly and through no fault of their own, at the centre of Britain’s bitter argument over who belongs.
