helmsford, england
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In Epping, a small town on the leafy outskirts of London, social media was abuzz with calls for local men to “wear a mask” and bring their “outrage”. There was further trouble relating to the Bell Hotel, one of dozens of hotels that housed asylum seekers in the UK. Epping residents were furious after an Ethiopian national staying there was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a woman and a 14-year-old schoolgirl. A protest organized online on July 17 quickly turned violent. One man also hit police with a bottle. others with fists. Four men later pleaded guilty to violent disorder. Others are awaiting trial.
The protests were reminiscent of the racist riots that rocked Britain in the summer of 2024. In the riot, men set fire to a hotel where asylum seekers were staying while it was occupied. For Ola Minihane, a mother of three from Epping, the day’s events were a “PR disaster”. Wanting to show that the protesters were not “racist thugs” but a “terrified community”, she took to WhatsApp to call for new tactics. At the next protest, men should stay home, women should be “front and center” and wear pink. The uniforms were of great quality. “It spread everywhere. It was even on the news,” Minihane told CNN.
Thus began a grassroots movement called “Pink Lady.” Its members have been demonstrating across the country to warn of the dangers illegal immigration poses to women and girls. Although not overtly partisan, Mr Minihane said almost all of them planned to vote for Reform Britain, a populist party on illegal immigration that has promised mass deportations if elected and has led the ruling Labor Party in opinion polls for months.
Minihane estimates that there may only be a few thousand Pink Ladies across the UK, but the movement’s growth shows that issues once championed by the male-dominated far right now have support from a wider swath of the population.
These recruits turned out en masse on a dreary Saturday in November in Chelmsford, a small city a short drive from Epping. Pink Lady’s message is dark – Britain is “under attack” and “invaded” – but its members are cheerful and brightly dressed. About 200 women wearing pink ponchos, pink berets and pink leggings gathered in front of City Hall in the pouring rain. They waved pink flags, dressed their dogs in pink coats and lit pink flares.
Minihane said the typical Pink Lady is a white, middle-aged mother. Mr Minihane said he likely voted to leave the EU in 2016 to “stop illegal immigration”, but now sees “the situation getting worse” with neither Labor nor the Conservative Party able to control the situation. I hear about attacks on women by migrants on X and the new right-wing broadcaster GB News, and I fear for the safety of my children. With reforms, this woman finally saw a political party that took her concerns seriously, she added.
“I’ve been trying to create a movement that says, ‘You can come. You have a voice,'” Minihane said. Pink Lady’s campaign has grown into a multi-level marketing plan, with some done through Facebook and WhatsApp, but mostly through word of mouth, she said.
Minihane suggests that new recruits are attracted to that personal approach and think, “I’m doing my part for King and my country. I’m not wearing a mask, I’m not being aggressive. And I’m with other nice women, so I can’t be racist.” Asked by CNN about her perception that Pink Lady repeats far-right rhetoric, Minihane replied, “Why am I an extremist? I’m just a mother who worked all her life, raised three children, and lives in the suburbs.”
Some signs in Chelmsford reflect that sentiment, reading: “I’m not a racist. I’m a concerned mother.” An important part of Pink Lady’s message is that these things can be mutually exclusive.
But advocacy groups are not convinced. “The far right has long used the cause of ending violence against women and girls to promote racist, white supremacist policies,” said Andrea Simon, director of the Coalition to End Violence Against Women.
One color not on display at Chelmsford is turquoise, the color of right-wing populist Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. Mr Minihane is Epping Forest’s Reform Party vice-chairman and may stand as the party’s candidate in the next parliamentary election, but there is no formal working relationship between the party and the Pink Lady.
Mr Farage’s political message is often seen as reddish or stereotypically masculine. A book about Britain’s efforts to leave the European Union called him one of the “Brexit villains”. He is often photographed with a pint of beer in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth.
And perhaps as a result, Farage’s message has traditionally resonated more with men than women. In the 2015 general election, his then-leader, the British Independence Party, won 14% of the male vote and 12% of the female vote. In 2024, the reformist vote was even more skewed, winning 13% of the female vote compared to 17% of the male vote. All five members of Parliament (MPs) elected from the Reform Party last year were men.
But almost 18 months later, Reform looks like a different party. In a by-election in May, Sarah Pochin was added to the parliament and Andrea Jenkins was elected local mayor, both defectors from the moribund Conservative party. Speaking after May’s results, Mr Farage said: “I know some people think I have a women’s problem, but that’s not true.”
James Mummerdoch, a former Reform MP and now an independent, said at the time: “We’ve added new fuel to the rocket engine: girl power.”
Mr Mummerdoch, who was briefly jailed in 2006 after pleading guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend, with the judge saying he kicked her multiple times, may have been a curious messenger, Britain’s The Times reported, but polls show he was right. According to British polling agency More in Common, as of July 2024, there were 1.4 men supporting reform for every woman, but by September this year, the number had fallen to about 1.2 men. The Reform Party currently has slightly more female support than Labor, which it says is partly due to its “recent focus on women’s safety”.
The party insists there was no internal discussion about spotlighting women in its campaign. Spokeswoman Ann Widecombe told CNN that the reforms focus only on “merit” and not gender. But at the party’s annual conference in September, women were far more visible than in previous years.
Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councilor who was jailed last year after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred after calling on X to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers, was interviewed on stage about her time as a “political prisoner”. (She was wearing pink.) Jenkins, now Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, took to the stage in a sequined suit and sang a song he had written.
“We’ve seen ‘Blair babes’ and ‘Cameron babes’,” she said earlier in the summer, referring to former prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron. “I’m proud to be one of Farage’s mares.”
Part of the public fear about the safety of women and girls is related to historic child sex abuse scandals in several British towns between the late 1990s and early 2010s. The scandal involved children being abused by groups of Asian and Pakistani men. A 2025 independent report found that there had been a “collective failure to address the issue of ethnicity in gang grooming”, leaving both victims of abuse and the wider British Asian community vilified by gang crime a disappointment.
The grooming gang scandal has cast a long shadow over Britain’s immigration debate, fueling public anger over successive governments’ use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers. At a Pink Lady protest in Chelmsford last month, one speaker said: “The crime coming out of these hotels is insane.”
However, this claim cannot be supported by hard data. The government does not publish detailed statistics on crimes committed by asylum seekers or other population groups. This statistical black hole fuels wild speculation.
For many of the protesters, a general sense of illegality, not borne out by England and Wales’ official crime statistics, which have largely declined over the past decade, had congealed into a specific fear of immigration.
Some felt that the apparent extreme threat required an extreme response. “We need to get the military involved, we’re being invaded!” said Laura, one of Chelmsford’s Pink Ladies, who declined to give her last name. That was a common refrain. Christopher Ellis, 78, told CNN he wants the navy to be deployed in the English Channel to stop migrants arriving in small boats from France, and the military to take to the streets of major cities to stop “woke leftists” protesting about it.
The focus on high-profile cases, such as the Epping sexual assault, obscures the more mundane fact that most violence against women is committed within the home, by people who know the victim. Minihane had little to say about this other than, “We have our own motherfuckers. … We don’t need to bring in more every day.”
A highlight of the Chelmsford protest was a vigil for five women who Minihane said were “murdered at the hands of the scourge of illegal immigration” by men “put in by the government”. Two of the suspects charged in the five cases are British nationals. When asked by CNN to back up his claim that these men “shouldn’t have been here,” Minihane said he didn’t feel the need to explain.
“We will no longer be the sacrificial lambs for your multicultural nonsense,” Minihane told the crowd in a message to the government.
