BBC Newsnight introduced Zoe Gardner as a “ migration and asylum researcher ” to discuss the High Court ruling that the Bell Hotel in Epping cannot house migrants. Gardner is a long-standing lefty pro-asylum activist, not some neutral boffin. Unsurprisingly, she told the programme:

“It’s absolutely the wrong way for this to have gone. And the result, which is that people are being moved out of a hotel where there were violent racist protests taking place week in week out. But for it to happen in this way, what an enormous humiliation for the government, a huge failure. And what they’ve done is fuelled the flames of this hate lit.”

What Newsnight failed to mention is Gardner’s lengthy activist CV. Gardner has consistently branded demonstrations against asylum hotels as a “well-or

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