Of course the council lost, it went into court pretending this was about bricks and zoning when everyone knows it is about frightened men, women and children caught between hostile headlines and a profiteering contractor. Planning control is important, but it has become the fig leaf worn by those who do not want to admit they simply dislike the presence of refugees in their town. The far right turns up outside the Bell Hotel with flags and flares, the tabloids shout about crime, and then respectable people start to repeat the slogans as if they were planning objections. A Labour government that believes in basic decency cannot allow a judge to treat that atmosphere as a reason to sweep human beings out of sight. Since 1948 this country has claimed to stand for internationalism and for the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from ships leaving a ruined Europe to those fleeing dictatorships in Chile, Syria or Afghanistan. If those words are to mean anything, you cannot evict people into nothingness because a spreadsheet in the council offices says the building is in the wrong use class. The real scandal is not that the hotel remains open, it is that after so many years of argument we still have people warehoused in such places at all.