How Our Politicians Created an ‘Island of Strangers’ So They Don’t Have to Make Our Lives Any Better

Talking tough on immigration is a cynical, simplistic ruse that sidesteps the real reasons people feel estranged in their lives and keeps everyone alienated, writes Hardeep Matharu

Photo: Tim Gainey/PA Images/Alamy

The Non-Solution to Life’s Struggles

‘Today, I feel like I’ve woken up a stranger in this country’. I was discussing the “shock vote” for Brexit with another remainer on the afternoon after the EU Referendum. Immediately described by the commentariat as a “protest”, one newspaper noted that, after years of people ‘waking up and feeling like strangers in their own country’, those who voted to leave had finally demanded to be heard.

That was the last reference to British estrangement I remember, before Keir Starmer’s recent speech on the need to stop the UK becoming an “island of strangers”.

In 2016, the Brexit vote launched a frenzied analysis of the problems that had led to it. They have all been consistently ignored since.

While tackling immigration was a prominent reason, the analysis was that who was coming to the UK and why was a secondary problem brexiters landed on when looking for answers to many others: industry had declined, the nature of work had changed, economic inequality was continuing to rise, town centres went neglected, public services of all kinds were stretched, insecurity pervaded, the very fabric of community had frayed.

Boris Johnson paid political lip-service to this with his promise of a ‘levelling up’ that didn’t materialise. The hard Brexit Britain ended up with on his watch was merely a psychic victory: the ‘will of the people’ prevailed, but their lot hadn’t actually improved. Brexit, the pandemic, a cost of living crisis, Liz Truss’ mini budget, and public services that never recovered from austerity have meant things are only getting harder.

And there are no solutions: only immigration.

Tackling immigration was a solution before Brexit. Tackling immigration is now a solution after Brexit. In highlighting it so prominently, Starmer has joined a long line of politicians using it to distract from the absence of any more tangible fixes to complex issues – aided by a media that interrogates none of the deeper questions this is meant to avoid.

His suggestion that immigration is a key reason why we risk becoming an “island of strangers” is a cynical ploy: a hyper-real solution for people’s discontent, when those in power know it’s more complicated than that.

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“I think Nigel Farage is trying to speak the truth but I don’t trust any of them anyway,” one resident of Dartford told this newspaper on a visit to the town just days after it elected three new Reform UK councillors in May’s local elections. “I’ve heard it off everybody else. He’s going to do this, he’s going to do that, whatever.”

Nothing, indeed, changes – except for the certainty that immigration is both the cause of and solution to life’s struggles; a key reason why people should be dissatisfied, why their lives don’t seem to be improving.

By trying to convince us of this, while doing nothing about any of the systemic issues causing people’s daily struggles, politicians like Starmer are both the creators and sustainers of this “island of strangers” – a place not only of supposedly ‘alien foreigners’, but a land of Brits alienated from themselves and from a political system of no use for their troubles.

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Alienated from the Truth

Beyond the political rhetoric and nativist undertones – designed to appeal to those residents in Dartford now opting for Nigel Farage’s Reform – the reality is too big and complicated to confront: everything has changed, and that change has impacted people in different ways, while things continue to shift all around us, imperceptibly and then as if all at once.

We are estranged and it is an estrangement – from our society, from our communities, from ourselves – that politicians like Starmer reinforce by refusing to address the things that really make this true.

How often do we hear any politician talk about what it is to be a citizen, exist as a human being, in the 21st Century? A life in which the pillars that people structured their lives around just a few generations previously, no longer exist – and the impact these societal and political forces have on our psychological and emotional lives? Insecure work and housing. Communities devoid of communal support.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman termed it “liquid modernity”, while psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote of a society in which the individual “is neurotic because he is alienated”. Immigration aside, there is isolation and loneliness everywhere.

For others, modern life has brought opportunities that didn’t feel possible even for their parents. Travel, education, exploration. But the endless choice and tech-driven options for image-creation and self-hate come with an atomisation of their own. A constant stream of comparisons and insecurity within. The mental health crises in our younger generations are just one manifestation of this.

Identity and belonging and community in the modern world are undergoing redefinition in new and complex ways, but nowhere is this talked about in our political culture beyond set-piece announcements around ‘integration’.

How do we define ourselves if the ways in which we have always understood ourselves are no longer what they were? How do we develop real self-knowledge in a world where the front-facing camera on a smartphone allows us to create any version of ourselves to upload to social media?

What is it that we collectively ascribe meaning to anymore? And where is the humanity in our social collective life, where we can recognise that to be human is to grapple with the need to see ourselves reflected in the world around us and in each other – and that this recognition and connection is inherently difficult to find in the way we live today?

While there may be political conversations to be had about immigration, they are rarely had honestly or with humanness. Truly getting ‘tough on immigration’ would acknowledge that immigrants can be scapegoats for our own discontent. That other failings which are hard to address can be projected onto them. That living with difference is, by its nature, challenging. That ‘dealing with’ immigration is complex, given its economic and social dimensions. And that no controls on immigration alone will materially, or even psychically, improve anyone’s lives.

While Starmer announced that English language requirements for all immigrants will be raised “to promote integration”, to take one example, there was no mention of the resources this requires and the cuts to ESOL classes that have happened in recent years. My mother, an Indian immigrant to the UK, didn’t speak English until I was a teenager and I saw how much her life changed when she did. She became a civil servant working with people receiving benefits at the job centre, interacting with those from all walks of life.

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But framing this in terms of ‘integration’ – with all its political overtones – isn’t necessarily helpful, even if it’s true that English transformed my mum’s ability to take a more active role in her life in the UK. She didn’t stop being any less Indian or become ‘more British’ as a result, and I’m not sure she felt like a ‘stranger’ in this country before. But when a human conversation about living together, and with difference, becomes a political flashpoint about assimilation, there is little to be learned.

Our lives are the problem but no one can help us with them: not politically, not materially, not psychologically, or spiritually. Left without adequate outlets to express our upsets, people look for vessels into which their more toxic versions can be poured. Populist leaders know it and encourage this.

By vowing to tackle our “island of strangers” through tougher immigration, Keir Starmer is keeping us all trapped on it – by not offering any solutions to the real reasons that explain our estrangement.

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A Violent Atomisation

At the heart of our atomised world is tech and social media. It has transformed all our lives but neither our politicians nor our journalists frame conversations around this as the information revolution we are living through, which has led to both greater interconnectedness and profound polarisation.

Patrick Hurley, the Labour MP for Southport, was willing to connect the dots when he observed that the “atomisation” which has come to define our society in the past few decades goes a long way to explaining the violent riots that took place in his town following the murder of schoolchildren attending a dance class last July.

“I think that atomisation manifested itself in Southport in a way I hadn’t expected,” he said at a recent festival on connection at the Royal Society of Arts in London, days after Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech.

The “communities of interest” that too many people are now turning to online are not able to offer “informal interventions in real life” (‘IRL’) that would prevent people’s feelings from erupting in dangerous ways, Hurley said – contrasting the online disinformation that fuelled people to turn up and attack a mosque in Southport with a woman who gathered up the teddy bears left at the vigil for the young victims of the killings every evening and returned them in the morning so they wouldn’t get dirty overnight.

“We need to live in the moment as much as possible and get off social media as it’s just toxic,” he said. “We need to build real-life communities. The real important thing is the point of connection.”

Luke Tryl, executive director of the think tank and polling organisation More In Common UK – established after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right extremist just days before the EU Referendum – spoke alongside Hurley, observing that it was a mistake by Starmer to limit the reasons for his “island of strangers” to immigration when a wider “dislocation” is the issue.

There is a “bigger conversation to have”, he said, beyond whether Starmer is “being Enoch Powell”.

According to More In Common’s research, conducted in the weeks before the Prime Minister’s immigration speech, 44% of Brits polled said they ‘sometimes feel like strangers in their own country’, while 50% said they ‘feel disconnected from society around them’. Seven in 10 said they think someone can be British regardless of their ethnic background.

“While the PM’s speech was related to immigration, our focus groups and polling find that challenges to social cohesion are far wider and deeper – driven by the cost of living, social media and technology, and the lingering impact of the pandemic”, according to a recent briefing by the think tank.

“The sense of disconnect Starmer referred to is not shared evenly, with a pernicious divide emerging between the wealthier and those who are less financially secure and the graduate class and those with fewer formal qualifications”.

Those who voted for Reform in last year’s General Election are “by far the most likely voter group” to say they feel like strangers in their own country, More In Common found – and the least likely group to say that most people can be trusted.

“The alienation Britons feel is undoubtedly connected to a broader sense that the country isn’t working”, the think tank’s briefing stated. “In focus groups, many cite closed shops on the high street and the loss of community facilities as visible symptoms of a broken system”.

Speaking at the RSA festival, Tryl recalled a memorable response from a crane driver in a focus group in Dudley who told him that, since the pandemic, he and his colleagues no longer ate lunch together and it was something he thought had had an impact.

“We can’t build a cohesive society when people have turned away from each other like that,” Tryl said. “We have a society turning inward… from our research, a lot of people feel it… We need people rooted in place because you can’t build a cohesive society from this dislocation.”

But rootedness can mean different things to different people: one person’s concept of ‘community’ is not necessarily another’s. And it doesn’t have to be one or the other – a citizen of the world or a citizen of nowhere, as Theresa May once put it. What about those who want to embrace both? Or neither framing?

For Hurley, while big cities have been regenerated and given more devolved powers, the same needs to happen with towns across the country – so people whose rootedness is to be found at the local level actually feel their areas and lives are cared about. In the end, this benefits everybody.

It’s urgently time for conversations about how our society is changing to stop consisting of political flashpoints focusing only on immigration, integration, identity politics, and ‘culture wars’ – to consider the real, complex questions that are easier to avoid with simplicity and surface-level slogans.

Defeating populism can only happen if more appealing solutions are presented to people; if they feel they are being heard and see the reality of their lives actually being improved. By refusing to engage with the bigger, more difficult, questions of why people are unhappy with their lives, our politicians are the ones that have created an “island of strangers” – and keep us trapped on it every time they claim that being tough on ‘foreigners’ will provide a solution.

Immigrants are the scapegoats they need. Everyone else just needs some humanity and help. Otherwise, we will remain strangers in a strange land – foreign to ourselves and to each other.

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Hardeep Matharu is the Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times