It was autumn, grey, a familiar British divide. “They’re pro-immigration,” a police officer standing on Whitehall told me, pointing to a chanting group organised by Stand Up to Racism.[…]“They’re anti-immigration.” He gestured at the opposite pavement, where a larger group of pink-clad women wrapped in Union Jacks danced to “I Will Survive” and occasionally gave the anti-racists the middle finger.[…]

This second group was the Pink Ladies, as they have been known since they formed in summer. They had organised this march – alongside their weekly protests in other parts of the country – to make the female case against illegal immigration, which they argue makes British women unsafe.[…]

Orla Minihane, a 50-year-old consultant from Essex and the unofficial leader of the Ladies, addressed the crowd. “Every country has their murderers and their rapists and their sex pests,” she said. “But not every country has open borders… They cannot speak English, they have drug problems and they are criminals. And they are waiting to come here.”[…]

Minihane believes the Pink Ladies have granted women the space to voice fears they thought they couldn’t discuss. “Last night, at my meeting, this woman said: ‘I know I’m paranoid, and I feel I can’t talk to anyone. I can’t talk to my family, they think I’m a lunatic.” Minihane said women tell her stories daily of asylum seekers spitting or masturbating at them, following them, lurking in the bushes. “And the thing is, even if they’re not doing anything sexually wrong, there’s still men sitting there drinking all day, intimidating people,” she said.[…]

Minihane told me she removes “any kind of racism” in the WhatsApp groups. I saw messages calling migrants “c***s” and “feral oversexed dirty inbreds”. “Iv [sic] just watched a scruffy looking Pakistani man… looking really shifty,” one woman wrote. “I followed him with the dogs.”[…]

A few feet away stood a woman whose body was painted pink, up to her chin, dressed in pink underwear and pink trainers, clutching a pink Union Jack. This was Sarah White, one of the original Epping protesters[…] “They don’t integrate,” she said. “They’re not evolved like us. They’ve not got the same views and the same morals.”