Beyond Selidor

As one of my friends was saying on Facebook with this change of government, we have in an instant consigned the Rwanda deportation scheme to the garbage bin, and we have a government in office that doesn't want to scrap the Human Rights Act. That, alone, makes an immediate, material difference to some of the most vulnerable people living in this country, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this is refusing to accept reality.

As an immigrant myself, it has been incredibly psychologically damaging to have to live for nine years (they weren't really as bad about this under the coalition years) with a government that just constantly demonised immigration, legal or undocumented, as something inherently damaging and suspicious and talked about immigrants as this group of thieves and parasites depleting available public service resources and 'stealing' citizens' jobs. It wears you down, because it makes this discourse become the acceptable norm. I am hoping — given the scale of Labour's majority, and the fact that their votes have come from the left to the centre right — they don't have the same constant fear of being outflanked on the right by Farage and his gang, and don't feel the need to pander to such sentiments. Apart from anything else, competent centrist-to-centre-left government policymaking should hopefully lead to visible, tangible concrete changes to people's lives that make them less susceptible to blaming immigrants for everything broken in the country, and leech out a lot of poison from this kind of rhetoric.

And congratulations on your new MP!