As comic vows he'll keep mocking asylum hotel protesters

Romesh Ranganathan has called out racists who've threatened his family after he made jokes about asylum seeker hotel protesters.

The comic has revealed that his wife Leesa received online messages in the last week calling her 'inter-race breeding scum', alongside threats to 'gun down' her and the couple's three children.

Speaking on the Wolf & Owl podcast that he co-hosts with Tom Davis today, Ranganathan revealed that one of his sons has also been racially abused at school by another child and that he received complaints after mocking the protesters on the podcast.

Disclosing that his wife was 'remarkably relaxed' about the situation, he nevertheless reflected that these are 'worrying times'.

He said: 'What I would say to anybody who is worried about the rise of racism and all of this sentiment is that these things are being amplified and most people don't feel like that. It's easy to fall into a funk of thinking like that.

'I guess the main thing I wanted to address was people getting narky with me because I was taking the piss out of hotel protesters. You can look forward to a few more jokes like that. If you don't like it, if you want stuff that isn't like that, then listen to another podcast.'

There have been more than 3,000 protests outside asylum hotels in the UK this summer, with some attended by hundreds of protesters on both sides of the immigration debate.

Ranganathan, whose Sri Lankan Tamil parents came to the UK so his late father could study, added that he didn't think that people worried about immigrants were 'idiots at all. If you've got concerns about immigration, then that's valid. I've got my opinions on that but this is not a political podcast.

'What I would say is the reason I was taking the piss out of people protesting at hotels is because, if you have a concern about that, I want you to just be a bit empathetic and imagine that you've travelled from horrific circumstances. You've undergone a horrible journey to try and find some sort of respite from the horrific conditions that you're living in.

'Because the asylum process takes ages to process, you get put in a hotel. And contrary to what you might have heard people say, they're not being given incredible facilities and all of this shit right? A quick Google would debunk all that.

'If you are in a hotel, bunked up with a load of people and trying to find a better life for yourself while you get processed, and you have no idea what the outcome of that's going to be, you then see a load of people from that country waving their flags, shouting "get them out!" … I just think all it takes is a little bit of fucking human kindness to release that that is not a great thing to do.

'If you've got your concerns out immigration, fine. But that is not an empathetic and kind thing to do.'

Ranganathan added that he had watched specific protests outside the Copthorne Hotel in Cardiff and that he understands that 'it's a peaceful protest and they're saying, "We're not saying that all of these people are wrong".

'But you are saying that you don't want to help anyone in case some of them are wrong or whatever. It's bananas to me. And the idea that it's not racism. I don't want to get too deep into it but it is a close friend of racism.'

Elsewhere in the podcast, he also spoke about his forthcoming travelogue, which airs on Sky Max and streaming service Now on September 24.

Can't Knock The Hustle, which begins with a recording of the Ranganathan's latest stand-up show filmed at London's O2 Arena, will feature three follow-up episodes which seek to prove that travel broadens the mind.

The comic will be checking his theories about life, work, self-improvement and success with people in India, the US, South Korea and Canada, 'interrogating, unravelling and debunking his own material'.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 4 Sep 2025