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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.
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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.
“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.
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.
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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.
But framing this in terms of ‘integration’ – with all