Camp Of The Saints

The findings of a year-long undercover investigation into a violent migrant-smuggling gang were published by BBC News on 5 August – and, as a result, one person has now been arrested in Birmingham.

Here, one of our reporters who assumed a false identity and posed as a migrant, describes how he met one of the gang’s senior members in a secret forest hideout.

I am walking towards the forest near Dunkirk, thinking about the battery in my pocket. I’ve hidden the wires under two T-shirts, but is anything still showing? Is my secret camera working? Is it pointing at the right angle? I have, at most, three hours of battery life left, and I need to get to the smuggler’s secret camp, meet him, and get out safely.

“We are not happy with these men in this hotel because we fear for our children,” Orla Minihane tells me. “If that makes me far right then so be it.”

Orla has lived near Epping since she was a child and describes herself as a “very boring woman who has worked in the City of London for 25 years”. Last year she joined Reform UK and hopes to stand as a local candidate for the party.

On a busy road leading to the Essex town, The Bell Hotel, now fortified, is one of more than 200 across the country where the government houses asylum seekers.

The BBC is as bad as CBC.

It has become a depressing pattern. In London this week, a Pakistani asylum seeker was charged with allegedly raping an eight-year-old girl. It follows two Afghan asylum seekers being charged in connection with the rape of a 12-year-old in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and the alleged attempted kidnapping of a 10-year-old in Stockport, Greater Manchester by a Sudanese migrant. There are now near-daily reports of men seeking asylum in Britain accused of depraved sexual crimes.

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks, tracking the recent anti-asylum hotel protests across the country, from Epping to Canary Wharf, from Norwich all the way down to the south coast in Waterlooville, I’ve been right in the thick of the story that is gripping the country.

Last year, I was in the middle of another news story too, when I covered the outbreak of the violence at Southport that then spread out into what, quite frankly, ended up being race riots. I remember being only a few yards away from police vans loudly beeping out their last breath as they burnt down to the ground, while young lads on the opposite side of me threw bricks and other missiles directly at a mosque, and proceeded to smash up a local corner shop. Later on I was subject to violence from the crowd myself.

NEW: Women and children marched today to the Britannia Hotel to oppose it

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— GB Politics (@GBPolitcs) August 3, 2025

England is at tipping point pic.twitter.com/wI7sAiAhxu

— HJB News (@HJB_News__) August 3, 2025

A BBC investigation has exposed the French and UK operations of a powerful and violent smuggling gang taking people across the English Channel in small boats.

A reporter, posing as a migrant wanting to cross, helped us gain unprecedented access to the smugglers’ notorious forest hideout in northern France – an area plagued by armed battles between rival gangs.

Secret filming at a major UK railway station also captured associates of the gang collecting cash payments to secure migrant places on illegal Channel crossings.

The alleged crimes of illegal migrants must not be swept under the carpet.

They still don’t get it. Even after the grooming-gangs scandal, covered up for the sake of multiculturalism, even after the Southport riots, fuelled by the information vacuum left after those horrific murders, British police appear desperate to follow the same failed playbook. Namely, inflaming community tensions in the name of easing them, and treating the public with contempt.

Britain’s newspapers are filled almost daily with stories of horrific crimes carried out by illegal migrants. Yet the Labour government—much like the Conservative administration that preceded it—continually refuses to take decisive action, opting instead to tinker around the edges of the issue at hand.

Ministers said on Saturday they are preparing new plans which would see those who advertise Channel crossings or fake passports on social media face up to five years in prison. A nice side measure, perhaps, but nowhere near significant enough to effect any change on its own.