One recent afternoon I visited the Bell Hotel in the small town of Epping, in Essex, where as many as 140 male asylum seekers haven been located by the Home Office without prior consultation with the district council. I spoke to one of them, Awel, who is 24 and from a village near Assela in central Ethiopia, which he said was a “very bad place”. He left the village, where he worked as a mechanic, in February, determined to start a new life in Britain, and took two months to reach northern France after travelling through Italy. “I’m an asylum seeker, Sir,” he said, and apologised for his English, which was hesitant but comprehensible.

Axel is tall, thin and cheerily resilient. We walked together for a while after he slipped out of the Bell, one of an estimated 200 so-called asylum hotels still open (the government has closed 200). The access to the entrance was blocked by security fencing after pro and anti-migrant protestors clashed with police outside the run-down hotel last weekend.

It was a warm afternoon, but Awel was wearing a grey hoodie pulled over his head, as if he did not want to be identified. Large headphones dangled around his neck, and he was holding an iPhone and plastic bottle of lemonade. He told me he had paid 1500 euros to cross the Channel on a small boat; the journey had taken six hours, and he arrived in England on 28 April. Two days later, he was moved to the Bell Hotel. “We have nothing to do here,” he said.

I asked him about the recent protests, which began after an Ethiopian asylum seeker staying at the hotel was arrested and charged with the sexual assault of a schoolgirl on the high street. The protests, initially led by families peacefully demanding safety for their children, became violent after the arrival of organised far-right agitators and anti-fascist counterdemonstrators. What happened was “just democracy”, Axel reflected, with a nervous chuckle.

Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, had a different opinion: what happened in Epping was part of a wider trend of societal breakdown and he warned of “civil disobedience on a vast scale”.

I know Epping well. In the 1980s I had friends who lived in the town and spent much of my late adolescence there. Back then it was a prosperous urban village at the end of the Central Line on the Underground, surrounded by ancient woodland, once used as hunting grounds by Henry VIII and, more recently, or so we were told, by East End gangsters to dump bodies. Winston Churchill was the local MP from 1924 to 1945. It was quiet, even refined, and you could reach the West End of London by tube in 45 minutes. My parents, who lived ten miles away in Harlow new town, particularly liked the stylish, family-owned shops on the high street. Today the high street has lost much of its distinctive former character and the smart independent shops have been replaced by ubiquitous chain stores, but it is recognisably the town I used to know, only somehow shabbier, like much of the country.

When I spoke to local people on the hight street they uniformly expressed their unhappiness about what was happening at the Bell Hotel but did not want to “appear racist”. “Something had been brewing for weeks,” one woman said. Another middle-aged woman, who lives on a private gated estate near the Bell, said: “I hate it. It makes me feel very uneasy. It’s not lit at night and there are so many bored men in there. We’ve had to put up with this for four years. Even after the arrest men from the hotel were following and taking pictures of young women on the high street.”

A year after widespread rioting broke out in some of the poorest parts of England following the murderous attack by Axel Rudakubana on schoolgirls at a dance class in Southport, the Epping protests have commanded national attention because they reveal something fundamental about what George Orwell called the social atmosphere of the country. Something is rotten in the state of Britain – our rivers are full of excrement, a quarter of the working age population is classified disabled, public debt stands at 100 per cent of GDP, shoplifting is at a record high, trust in politicians is at an all-time low, according to recent polling from More in Common – and Sir Keir Starmer is struggling to respond. He cannot define the purpose of his government. He cannot tell a convincing story about what he wants for the country. His low-toned, technocratic style, constant U-turning and mixed messaging have emboldened Reform UK, which deals in a form of protest politics and voodoo economics but, even with only four MPs, resoundingly won the May local elections.

The prime minister and senior cabinet colleagues have been monitoring events in Epping with foreboding: they sense how widespread the mood of mass disaffection is in the country and know they appear helpless to halt the ceaseless flow of undocumented migrants into Britain. Starmer wants to smash the people smuggling gangs and purports to lead a security government but no state that cannot control its borders can consider itself secure.

Above all else, Labour ministers seem afraid.

On a visit to Wigan in May, I spoke to Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary and a local MP. She had a stark message to convey: the north of England was so tense it could “go up in flames”, she said. She cited unrest over asylum hotels and the housing crisis more generally.

“Rents have got higher and higher and so more and more houses have been turned into HMOs [houses of multiple occupancy] because that’s the only thing that people can afford,” she told me. “But on top of that, we’ve also had Serco buying up asylum accommodation, very concentrated in particular postcodes, even particular streets, because they go for the places that are cheapest. And obviously that’s caused serious problems because you’ve then got several families in accommodation that’s only meant for one.”

A “settled community” had been “unsettled” by a new “transient community”, she said. “It’s a double whammy because not only is the community changed beyond recognition, without people having any control over it, but it’s also that the prices that your kids are now paying for housing have become ever higher.”

I recalled Nandy’s sombre warning of a nation “going up in flames” when Chris Whitbread, the Conservative leader of Epping Forest District Council, described Epping as a “powder keg”. He was not exaggerating, and on Thursday the council voted unanimously to urge the government to close the Bell Hotel. Before then, at a meeting of the cabinet on Tuesday, Angela Rayner, responding to the protests, lamented the effect mass immigration and stagnant living standards were having on society.

But it’s not enough simply to analyse or bemoan the problem. If the alternative to asylum hotels - the government wants to close them all by 2029 - is shunting migrants into HMOs as in Wigan and elsewhere, more unrest will follow. Farage is wrong to speak of mass civil disobedience, but if violent disorder is breaking out even in a “settled community” like Epping, it can happen anywhere, at any time. Epping, sadly, is a microcosm of Starmer’s Britain.