Strangers & Neighbours

Despite Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” and Reform UK candidates telling voters it “takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody British”, Britain remains a remarkably diverse but cohesive society. So why are government ministers making statements on immigration that would have been considered far-right a decade ago?

Why is the asylum system still used as a political theatre of cruelty while communities bear the cost of a decade of austerity, closed services, and real wages below 2008 levels in nearly two-thirds of UK local authorities?

Whatever the origins of this new extremism – the institutionalisation of Islamophobia as policy, the racialisation of crime, or the far right’s offer of belonging to people that mainstream politics abandoned – Byline Times also covers the on-the-ground successes of actual communities.