'Our country's ruined': Protesters on why they oppose asylum hotels

"It's an invasion," Dinah Bentley tells me, standing next to a cardboard cut-out of Nigel Farage.

The 78-year-old retired teacher says she "doesn't laud" the Reform MP, whose grinning likeness is a permanent fixture in her West Yorkshire conservatory, but he "says what I believe". "Everybody talks about migration, but our country's ruined," Dinah adds.

"They've ruined it." The "they" in her mind? People who have crossed into the UK on small boats. We have seen asylum hotel protests intensify over the summer and wanted to speak to the people who've joined them.

Over the coming weeks, we'll speak with counter-protesters too, but today, we meet Dinah, a grandmother of two who has joined those calling on asylum hotels to close. She was, like many of the protesters we met, initially sceptical to speak to a journalist.

Dinah says she "doesn't watch mainstream news" because of "media lies" over Brexit. Instead, she says she gets her news from social media.

It was on social media that Dinah learnt about a protest being organised outside a hotel in Wakefield, which has housed asylum seekers for several years. It was the first migration-related protest she had ever attended.

"We've put up with so much for so long and I think ordinary people now, they've decided it's no good sitting, doing nothing," Dinah says. After reading about a male asylum seeker being charged with a sexual assault in Epping, she says she is "fearful" for her granddaughters' safety.

"They're undocumented," she says, referring to those who have arrived in the UK on small boats. "We know nothing about them.

We don't know where they are wandering the streets. It's not right, is it?" She's also angry about the cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels.

I ask Dinah what she thinks about the government plan to close asylum hotels, stop illegal crossings and deport people who do not have a legal right to remain. "It's all talk, all talk.