- Panorama: Why I Joined a Riot will be broadcast tonight on BBC One at 8pm
A rioter jailed for attacking a Rotherham asylum hotel has refused to apologise to the migrants inside in a BBC documentary marking a year on from the civil disorder sparked by the Southport murders.
Ross Hart, 30, attacked a police van and air conditioning units at the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers on August 4 last year because he was so angry about the number of people arriving in the UK illegally in small boats.
‘No way am I apologising to immigrants. Not on this planet’, he said in a documentary being broadcast tonight. He also refused to condemn the rioters who set fire to the hotel but insisted he did not want anyone killed, just moved away.
The hotel was home to around 200 asylum seekers and it was smashed up and set alight by a mob chanting ‘burn it down’.
Hart was jailed for two years and ten months having pleaded guilty to violent disorder – but has been released early on licence.
He has taken part in a BBC Panorama documentary featuring three people imprisoned after riots swept the country last summer.
While two rioters said they regretted taking part, Hart was unrepentant because he believed ‘something had to be done’.
He said: ‘All these migrants coming over, they get the hotels, they get their food. They get everything they need to get set up. That comes out of taxpayers’ money.
‘People are sick of it. They are being pushed to the back of the queue. Left to go without’.
He added: ‘I didn’t want them to die. But I wanted them gone. Enough is enough’.
The rioter didn’t take part in the arson attack on the hotel but said: ‘At that time basically, the only thing people cared about then were making sure they left that hotel. Long story short: get them out’.
Hart was shown a sickening social media posts he put up saying ‘Sink the lot dirty rats’ with a picture of migrants in a dinghy.
‘There’s nowt racist about that. To me, there’s nowt wrong with that, what I’ve put there’, he said.
‘You’re the first person that I’ve met that disagrees with me. And I’m being deadly serious’, he told the BBC reporter.
Hart then admitted there was ‘no way on earth’ he would apologise to the migrants in the hotel on the night of the riot.
The rioting followed the murders of Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, by Axel Rudakubana at a Southport summer holiday club.
A 12-year-old boy has described to the BBC how his mother took him to a riot in Tamworth and she ended up in jail herself.
Amy Hodgkinson-Hedgecox says she has ‘massive regret’ over the decisions she made that night and was a ‘bad parent’ for taking her son Brady with her to a migrant hotel.
She said: ‘Brady said to me. “Can we go? Can we go? I know one is happening in Tamworth. My friends are going and I want to go down”.
‘I said absolutely not’, she said.
But Brady told Panorama: ‘She finally gave in when I asked her like 100 times’.
Hodgkinson-Hedgecox, 38, was jailed for two years and three months after pleading guilty to violent disorder.
She is out of prison but is on a curfew and is wearing an electronic tag.
She said: ‘I was really frustrated. Everyone has an opinion but they are not making their lives easy for themselves when it comes to what they are doing to young girls in our town.
‘I was just shouting to the police, like, how would you like it if your child has been videoed by them? There’s a level where you should be sticking up for us as well as them.
‘I was frustrated, I was really frustrated’.
She claims that migrants had been filming girls in a nearby park.
‘I do think it is true. I’m not a racist at all’, she said.
Her son Brady says he feels deep guilt for begging his mum to go to the riot.
‘The violence was bad. They went too far. It made me feel upset but also guilty because I’m the reason she [his mother] went to prison’.
His mother, who can’t leave the house between 7pm and 7am said: ‘He said to me “I’m sorry” and I said you’ve nothing to be sorry about. I have exposed you to something I shouldn’t have. It’s bad parenting’.
She added: ‘Social media has got a lot to answer for and personally, do I think it’s gonna happen again? Yeah, absolutely I do.
‘Would I attend? No, definitely not. Do I believe everything that I read on social media now? No. I really, really don’t’.
A self-styled paedophile hunter from Leeds was jailed for eight months for racially abusing pro-Palestinian protesters after telling police he was only chanting ‘Who the f*** is Allan?’.
Phil Hoban, 48, was a prominent figure in an anti-immigration demonstration in Leeds on Saturday, August 3, last year.
He told Panorama he regretted what he did after serving four months in jail.
‘What hurt most was that I was labelled a racist’, he said.
‘Now I’ve sobered up and now I think about what I did. Now I know it was wrong. At the time I didn’t think I was nowt wrong’.
He was filmed apologising to a Muslim man outside his local mosque.
‘I mean it from the bottom of my heart’, he said.
Father-of-three Hoban is the founder of Predator Exposure — a group which set up sting operations against men who made contact with fake profiles of teenage girls they set up online.
He claims more and more people they catch are now immigrants.
‘Most of the people we were catching were outside hotels. We don’t know if we’re letting rapists and murderers in. We don’t know who these people are’, he said.
Southport Imam Ibrahim Hussein’s mosque in Southport was attacked in the riots.
He described having to lock himself in a room with eight other people as the building was attacked.
They have installed 20 new CCTV cameras and put metal bars in the windows. He claims the mosque has been attacked repeatedly, as have cars parked outside.
But he says he forgives the rioters because ‘we are all sinners’
‘It is a scary time when you are labelled for what you believe’, he said.
- Panorama: Why I Joined a Riot will be broadcast tonight on BBC One at 8pm.
