In Epping, a small town on London’s leafy fringe, social media lit up with calls for local men to “mask up” and bring “rage.” There had been more trouble connected to the Bell Hotel, one of dozens of hotels in Britain used to house asylum seekers. An Ethiopian staying there had been arrested for the sexual assault of a woman and a 14-year-old schoolgirl, and Epping residents were incensed. Protests organized online for July 17 soon turned violent. Some men hit police with bottles; others with fists. Four men would later plead guilty to violent disorder; others await trial.

The protest recalled the racist riots that shook Britain in summer 2024, when men set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers while people were inside. For Orla Minihane, a mother of three from Epping, the day’s events were a “PR disaster.” Hoping to show that the protesters were not “racist thugs,” but “a community that’s scared,” she got on WhatsApp and called for new tactics: For the next protest, men should stay home, women should be “front and centre,” and they should wear pink. The uniform proved a masterstroke. “It went everywhere – all over the news,” Minihane told CNN.

So began the “Pink Ladies,” a grassroots movement whose members stage demonstrations across the country to warn of the dangers they say illegal migrants pose to women and girls. Although not explicitly partisan, Minihane said almost all of its members plan to vote for the populist Reform UK party, which campaigns on the issue of illegal immigration, has promised mass deportations if elected and has led the governing Labour Party in opinion polls for months.

There may only be a few thousand Pink Ladies across Britain, according to Minihane’s estimate, but the movement’s growth shows how issues championed by the hard right – once a predominantly male terrain – are now winning support from broader parts of the population.

The typical Pink Lady, said Minihane, is a white, middle-aged mother. She likely voted for Brexit in 2016 to “stop illegal migration,” but now sees “it’s gotten worse,” with neither Labour nor the Conservatives able to get things under control, Minihane said. On X and on GB News, an upstart right-wing broadcaster, she hears of attacks on women by migrants, and she worries for her children’s safety. In Reform, this woman sees – at long last – a party that takes her concerns seriously, she added.

“I’ve tried to create a movement where I say, ‘You can come. You do have a voice,’” said Minihane. The Pink Ladies campaign has grown like a multi-level marketing scheme, she said – partly over Facebook and WhatsApp, but mostly through word of mouth.

Minihane suggests new recruits are won over by that personal approach, thinking: “I’m doing my bit for King and country. I’m not wearing a mask; I’m not aggressive. And I can’t be a racist because I’m with all these other lovely women.” Asked by CNN about the perception that the Pink Ladies are repeating talking points of the far right, Minihane replied: “How am I extremist? I’m just a mom who’s worked her whole life, who’s bringing up three children, who lives in suburbia.”

Several signs in Chelmsford echoed that sentiment, reading: “I’m not racist – I’m a worried mother.” A key part of the Pink Ladies’ messaging is that these things can be mutually exclusive.

But advocacy groups aren’t convinced. “The far right has long exploited the cause of ending violence against women and girls to promote a racist, white supremacist agenda,” said Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women coalition.

One colour not on display in Chelmsford is turquoise – the colour of Reform UK, led by the right-wing populist Nigel Farage. Although Minihane is Reform’s vice-chair for Epping Forest and could stand as its candidate at the next parliamentary election, she says there is no formal collaboration between the party and the Pink Ladies.

Farage’s political messaging has often been seen as laddish, or stereotypically male. A book about Britain’s bid to leave the European Union dubbed him one of the “bad boys of Brexit.” He is often pictured with a pint of beer in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth.

But nearly 18 months on, Reform looks a different party. In May, it added Sarah Pochin as an MP in a by-election, and Andrea Jenkyns was elected as a regional mayor – both defectors from the increasingly moribund Conservative Party. “I know some people think I’ve got a woman problem, but it’s not true,” Farage said after May’s results.

“We now have a new fuel in our rocket engine: GIRL POWER,” James McMurdock, a former Reform MP who now sits as an independent, also said at the time.

McMurdock – who Britain’s Times newspaper reported was briefly jailed in 2006 after pleading guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend, with the judge saying he kicked her multiple times – may have been a curious messenger, but polls show he is correct. UK pollster More in Common says 1.4 men supported Reform for every woman in July 2024. By September this year, that had fallen to roughly 1.2 men. Reform now has a marginally more female supporter base than the Labour Party, it said, attributing this in part to Reform’s “recent focus on women’s safety.”

Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor who was jailed last year after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred after calling on X for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire, was interviewed on stage about her time as a “political prisoner.” (She wore pink.) Jenkyns, now the Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, took to the stage in a sequinned suit, singing a song she wrote herself.

“We’ve seen ‘Blair’s babes’ and ‘Cameron’s cuties,’” she said earlier in the summer, referring to the former prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron. “I’m proud to be one of Farage’s fillies.”

The grooming gang scandal casts a long shadow over Britain’s immigration debate and has fuelled public anger over the use by successive governments of hotels to house asylum seekers. “The crime emanating from these hotels is off the charts,” one speaker said at the Pink Ladies’ protest in Chelmsford last month.

But this claim can’t be backed up by hard data. The government does not publish detailed statistics about crimes committed by asylum seekers, nor by other demographic groups. This statistical black hole fuels wild speculation.

For many of the protesters, a general sense of lawlessness – not supported by official crime figures for England and Wales, which broadly show a decrease over the past decade – had coagulated into a specific fear of migrants.

Some felt the apparent extremity of the threat called for an extreme response. “They need to get the army involved - we are being invaded!” said Laura, one of the Pink Ladies in Chelmsford, who declined to give her last name. That was a common refrain. Christopher Ellis, 78, told CNN he wants the navy deployed in the English Channel, to stop migrants arriving by small boat from France, and the army deployed in the streets of major cities, to stop the “woke left” protesting about it.

The focus on high-profile cases like the sexual assaults in Epping has obscured the more mundane fact that most violence against women is committed in the home, by people known to the victims. Minihane had little to say about this, other than: “We have our own scumbags. … We do not need to bring in more every day.”

The centrepiece of the protest in Chelmsford was a vigil for five women Minihane said had been “murdered at the hands of an illegal migrant catastrophe” – by men “the government had let in.” Two of the suspects charged in the five cases are British nationals. When asked by CNN to back up her claim that those men “shouldn’t have been here,” Minihane said she did not feel the need to explain.

“We are not going to be sacrificial lambs to your multicultural nonsense anymore,” Minihane told the crowd, in a message directed at the government. (CNN)

• Local women wore pink to protest outside the Bell Hotel in Epping on August 8.

Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images

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