By Simon Crane
For years, the Green Party has lectured Britain about compassion. “Refugees welcome here,” they proclaim from conference stages and campaign flyers. And few relish that moral spotlight more than Rachel Millward, the party’s Deputy Leader.
But the moment the Home Office proposed housing around 600 asylum seekers at Crowborough Army Camp (right there in Millward’s own patch of East Sussex), her proud humanitarianism shrank with astonishing speed. Suddenly, she wasn’t waving the welcome banner. Suddenly, she wasn’t preaching solidarity.
Suddenly, she was demanding that the plan be scrapped.
It is textbook hypocrisy: compassion in theory, resistance in practice.
Government Railroads Communities
Let’s acknowledge the obvious:
The Home Office does have a long, disgraced history of bulldozing refugee accommodation into towns with almost zero consultation. They have done it across the political map, Tory councils, Labour councils, independents, rural districts, and coastal towns. It’s sloppy, unfair, and disrespectful.
But Millward does not get a moral free pass because the Government is incompetent.
Every community blind sided by the Home Office has raised the same issues she’s raising now:
- scale
- suddenness
- strain on services
- lack of support
- poor planning
Yet when they say this, the Greens routinely dismiss it as scaremongering, prejudice, or a dog-whistle to the far right.
This is where Millward’s position becomes truly indefensible.
Her objection is “Just Process”
Millward insists her objection is purely procedural, “not against refugees,” just against the way the Government handled it.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
When ordinary residents or non-Green politicians raise the same objections in other towns, they are often labelled intolerant, reactionary, or outright racist.
When anyone to the right of Theresa May says:
- “This site is too big.”
- “The Government didn’t consult us.”
- “Our services can’t cope.”
- “We’re worried about risks,”
…the Greens rarely treat that as a nuanced, process-based critique.
Instead, they condemn it as hostility toward migrants.
But when Rachel Millward says all those things suddenly, it’s “for the well-being of the asylum seekers.”
She has built her political brand on moral purity, yet the minute the asylum challenge lands where she lives, she adopts the same language she would normally attack others for.
This double standard is impossible to ignore.
Too many, too sudden, too risky, too difficult.
Rachel Millward’s objection to the Crowborough accommodation plan exposes a brutal political truth:
It’s easy to virtue-signal about refugees when the responsibility falls on someone else’s street.
It’s far harder to uphold those values when the Home Office finally picks your constituency, your residents, and your local services.
It is, however, pertinent to add that being seen to be anti migrant hotel may very well be a vote-winner for her. Gavin Newlands, the former MP for Erskine, saw his vote share fall off a cliff for siding with the hotel.
The Home Office is guilty of arrogance and mismanagement, but Millward is guilty of hypocrisy.
While she insists her stance is about “process,” millions of people have been condemned, shamed, and lectured for voicing the very same concerns.
And until she confronts that contradiction, her moral authority on asylum is little more than branding.
