‘You can shout but they don’t listen’ – Inside the simmering anger after the riots
The rat man from the council has just turned up. He is back at James and Oscar’s home laying more poison that the rats keep eating.
“I woke up the other night at three in the morning and one was biting my nose,” James says.
It’s the stuff of nightmares but it has become James and Oscar’s everyday struggle. A nearby building has the words “rat city” daubed on one of the walls.
“There was a fire next door,” Oscar explains.
“The rats came out of there and now there’s problems with them in the drains.”
He showed us around their overgrown garden. “It’s like a rats’ playground” he says, thoroughly fed up with it all.
The pair are friends and neighbours – and invited us in to discuss the riots that erupted across the UK in early August, including in their home city of Hull.
They were there on the fringes of the trouble but not, they tell us, directly involved.
It was a “kick back”, James tells us, over the UK’s failed immigration policies.
When Keir Starmer described the riots as “far-right thuggery” James believes he failed to grasp what was happening.
“I have seen people crying in doorways… they are cold, and they are hungry…who is helping the English-born people?” has asks.
“What I am not is a racist person… I just look at the pain in people’s eyes sometimes and you think, ‘What the hell? What is going on?’
“Their (migrants’) problems are getting solved but nobody is solving the problem of the people who are living on the streets.”
James and Oscar are angry that migrants stay in hotels while people around them struggle
Neither Oscar nor James work due to poor health and spend their days watching YouTube channels dedicated to investigating Britain’s immigration problems.
They are both angry about immigration, really angry.
While they ultimately blame the government they resent the way asylum seekers are put into hotels while their claims are processed.
“Get rid of them, I just think it is wrong,” Oscar says.
“I ain’t got a problem with being in other people’s countries and I haven’t got a problem with them being in mine.
“But when it’s taking away all our necessary needs – hospitals, dentists, hotels… housing. It is just pfft…” He throws his arms up in the air in despair.
Riot police had to defend a hotel housing migrants in the city
The pair watched as rioters surrounded a hotel next to the station in Hull on 3 August.
It’s currently home to dozens of predominantly young men waiting to hear if they will be allowed to stay.
James acknowledges there was appalling racism that day and says he has sympathy for genuine asylum seekers.
“I don’t think everybody thinks like me and goes, ‘God bless them, they’ve got problems too’,” he says.
“They have been through hell, they have been through warzones but… people felt a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, like, you know, people living on the streets, who are not getting looked after.“
Oscar later takes us to meet Donna – who sits outside a nearby shop with a sign that reads “JOB WANTED”.
She used to run her own cleaning business but after the death of her daughter in a car accident her life fell apart. Last November she also lost her partner.
Donna used to run a cleaning business but now sleeps in an underpass
For the past two and half years, Donna has been homeless. She purposefully hides herself away under a road bridge most nights so nobody can attack her.
“Where I am it’s so dark that nobody is going to be able to see me,” she says.
“Every time you think you are getting back up… there is something or someone who kicks you back down again.
“England is the place that has got a big sign for people that says ‘Freebies’, come in and we’ll get you in a hotel – that is the way it comes across to people.”
Donna says there’s always ‘something or someone who kicks you back down again’
“They (the government) want to sort their own problems out first and this is one of them,” says Donna, gesturing to the gloomy underpass she calls her bedroom.
It’s a problem they see most days at a community interest company called Adapt Resettlement further along Anlaby Road.
Every day, Danny and Lisa lead a small team dedicated to trying to get a roof over people’s heads.
“If you’ve got drug problems, mental health problems, even just living on the street, it’s a war every day for them,” says Danny.
“They can pitch up somewhere when a gang of kids will go and kick the tents, will kick their head in, it is a war daily for them.
Danny (left) says it’s incorrect to say all those caught up in the trouble are racist
“So, I get what they’re saying, that they (asylum seekers) are fleeing wars, but ours are fighting in a daily war,” adds Danny.
“Not everybody was in that riot for the same reason. There will have been people in that riot because they are homeless, they haven’t had help.
“But that doesn’t make them racist. They just wanted to get their point across.”
Danny has served time for violent offences in the past – and has also been homeless himself. He pins the blame for the riots squarely at the door of politicians.
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Aftermath of unrest and looting in Hull
“The government laid the bomb. And it’s just exploded,” he says.
“It is down to the government to sort it… The only way that they will do it, in my eyes, is that they give them equal opportunities.
“If they’re going to allow them in then so be it. But please look after ours as well. Otherwise, it’ll just continue, and it will.”
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We joined Danny’s final home visit of the day, where we meet Carl.
‘There’s a lot of tension in the air, there is a lot of aggression,’ says Carl
He’s trying to stabilise his life, improve his health and eat better, but needs ongoing support.
He’s finally got a roof over his head thanks to the project.
“You can shout so loud can’t you and they don’t listen,” Carl tells us.
“It is just one of those things it boils over sometimes.
“There’s a lot of tension in the air, there is a lot of aggression and a lot of animosity.”
The police and courts have clamped down hard on those who were involved in the riots on 3 August. Earlier this month the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “There is no place for such appalling, senseless violence on our streets, and this government is determined to stamp out the scourge of serious violence wherever it is found.”
Meanwhile, the anger, animosity, and jealousy that helped fuel them still exists.
The roots of the riots run deep.
Ramesh lives in fear every day. A police siren is enough to alarm him.
He’s one of up to 400,000 visa overstayers in the UK, one lawyer we spoke to believes.
It’s only an estimate because the Home Office has stopped collecting figures – which were unreliable in the first place.
Britain is being laughed at, one man told us, “because they know it’s a soft country”.
‘Ramesh’ came to the UK from India
We meet Ramesh (not his real name) at a Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, where he goes for food and support.
He insists he can’t return to India where he claims he was involved in political activism.
Ramesh says he came to the UK on a student visa in 2023, but it was cancelled when he failed to continue his studies after being involved in a serious accident.
He tells us he is doing cash-in-hand work for people who he knows through the community where he is living and is currently working on a house extension where he gets paid as little as £50 for nine hours labouring.
“It’s very difficult for me to live in the UK without my Indian or Pakistani community – also because there are a lot of Pakistani people who give me work in their houses for cleaning and for household things,” he adds.
‘What will become of people like us?’
Anike has lived in limbo for 12 years.
Now living in Greater Manchester, she came to the UK from Nigeria when her sister Esther was diagnosed with a brain tumour – she had a multi-entry visa but was supposed to leave after three months.
Esther had serious complications from brain surgery and says she is reliant on her sister for care.
Immigration officials are in touch with her because she has to digitally sign in every month.
Anike has had seven failed applications for leave to remain on compassionate grounds refused but is now desperate to have her status settled – afraid of the shifting public mood over migration.
“Everybody is thinking ‘what will become of people like us?'” she adds.
‘It’s a shambles’
The government can’t say with any degree of accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
But piecing together multiple accounts from community leaders and lawyers the picture we’ve built is stark.
Immigration lawyer Harjap Singh Bhangal told us he believed there could be several hundred thousand visa overstayers currently in Britain.
He says: “At this time, there’s definitely in excess of about 200,000 people overstaying in the UK. It might even be closer to 300,000, it could even be 400,000.”
Asked what evidence he has for this he replies: “Every day I see at least one overstayer, any immigration lawyers like me see overstayers and that is the bulk of the work for immigration lawyers.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked.”
The number of those who are overstaying visas and working cash in hand is also virtually impossible to measure.
‘They know Britain is a soft country’
“They’re laughing at us because they know Britain is a soft country, where you won’t be picked up easily,” says the local man we’ve arranged to meet as part of our investigation.
We’re in Kingsbury in northwest London – an area which people say has been transformed over the past five years as post-Brexit visa opportunities opened up for people coming from South Asia.
‘Mini-Mumbai’
The man we’re talking to lives in the community and helps with events here. He doesn’t want to be identified but raises serious questions about visa abuse.
“Since the last five years, a huge amount of people have come in this country on this visiting visa, and they come with one thing in mind – to overstay and work in cash,” he says.
“This area is easy to live in because they know they can survive. It looks like as if you are walking through mini-Mumbai.”
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‘The system is more than broken’
‘It’s taxpayers who are paying’
And he claims economic migrants are regularly arriving – who’ve paid strangers to pretend they’re a friend or relative in order to obtain a visitor visa to get to Britain.
He says: “I’ve come across so many people who have come this way into this country. It’s widespread. When I talk to these people, they literally tell me, ‘Oh, someone is coming tomorrow, day after tomorrow, someone is coming’.
“Because they’re hidden they may not be claiming benefits, but they can access emergency healthcare and their children can go to school.
“And who is paying for it? It’s the taxpayers who are paying for all this,” says the man we’ve met in north London.
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A Home Office spokesperson said: “We will not tolerate any abuse of our immigration system and anyone found to be breaking the rules will be liable to have enforcement action taken against them.
“In the first year of this government, we have returned 35,000 people with no right to be here – a 13% rise compared to the previous year.
“Arrests and raids for illegal working have soared to their highest levels since records began, up 63% and 51%.”
The government can’t say with accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
Sky News has spoken to immigration lawyers about the numbers, and one believes there could be as many as 400,000 living across the country.
Harjap Singh Bhangal described the situation as a “shambles”.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked,” he told Sky’s Lisa Holland.
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The visa overstayers in ‘soft’ Britain
Why doesn’t the government know?
The Home Office used to gather data on visa overstayers by effectively checking a list of passport numbers associated with visas against a list of passport numbers of people leaving the UK, taken from airlines and other international travel providers.
If there was a passport number match in the arrivals and departures part of their database, that person was recorded to have left when they should have. If there wasn’t, they were a potential overstayer.
They stopped producing the figures because a combination of Brexit and COVID added complications that made the Home Office conclude they wouldn’t be able to get to a reliable number using the same method.
It’s now four and a half years since EU citizens had freedom of movement to the UK revoked, and more than three and a half years since pandemic-era travel restrictions ended.
And yet we are still waiting to see what a new method might look like.
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The old method wasn’t perfect. If someone changed their passport while in the UK, for example, or if the airline or individual entered the number wrong when they were leaving, there wouldn’t be a match.
The Home Office regarded the statistics as likely overestimating the true number of overstayers, and the Office for National Statistics designated the figures as “experimental” rather than “official” statistics, meaning the conclusions should be treated with caution. But they were a reasonable best guess.
With all that in mind, between April 2016 and March 2020 upwards of 250,000 people were flagged as potential overstayers, equivalent to 63,000 per year.
That’s more than the 190,000 people who are recorded to have arrived in the UK on small boats since 2018.
It represents 3.5% of the seven million visas that expired over that period, so at least 96.5% of people left when they should.
Other Home Office data reveals that more than 13 million visas were issued between 2020 and the end of June 2025, including a record 3.4 million in 2023.
But what we don’t know is how many have expired, which means it’s difficult for us to even guess how many people might have overstayed.
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