BBC Newsnight “Migration Researcher” Guest is Radical Pro-Asylum Campaigner – Guido Fawkes

BBC Newsnight “Migration Researcher” Guest is Radical Pro-Asylum Campaigner

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-organised movement” driven by “racism and disinformation” that’s been “validated by the press and politicians.” Some of her more eyebrow-raising tweets include:

Robert Jenrick attending this last weekend’s racist protest was a red line, and it is absolutely correct that the hotel be shut down. It was clearly unsafe for asylum seekers to continue to be housed there.

Frankly it was only a matter of time until someone was lynched.

— Zoe Gardner (@ZoeJardiniere) August 19, 2025

Yvette Cooper on #r4today echoing Trump’s racist characterisation of asylum seekers as criminals & specifically rapists.

We are on such a dangerous path towards the same deranged, fascistic nightmare as they are seeing in the US – all justified by hatred of migrants & refugees.

— Zoe Gardner (@ZoeJardiniere) April 29, 2025

She has long campaigned for open borders and also organised protests when JD Vance visited the Cotswolds earlier this month.Guido doubts the BBC would call a guest campaigning against asylum hotels a mere “researcher”. They’d be introduced as an “activist” quick enough…