An Island of Strangers

In response to Keir Starmer

We are an Island of Strangers

A beautiful, fractured island of joyful and hopeless strangers.

An island where strangers shop for groceries, and the short strangers ask the tall strangers if they wouldn’t mind just grabbing that box of tissues from the top shelf. And when the strangers have paid for their shopping, they place a few tins of beans in the basket for other strangers who struggle to pay for their own groceries. Strangers who are happy to help.

We are an Island of Strangers.

An island where strangers walk green and pleasant hills and hard granite cliffs, and when those strangers fall and twist their ankle, or lose their way in the enveloping dark, strangers arrive—wearing boots and bright jackets, with ropes and harnesses, foil blankets, energy bars and walkie talkies. Strangers who rescue.

We are an Island of Strangers.

An island where strangers—in the midst of a pandemic—would arrange food drops for their infected neighbours. Strangers who care.

We are an Island of Strangers.

An island where strangers put on breakfast clubs for children whose parents aren’t paid enough to feed them properly. Strangers who feed.

We are an Island of Strangers.

An island where we don’t all know the names of our neighbours—not because we don’t speak the language, or don’t get their culture—but because we’re too busy being worked to the bone just to survive, and we’ve had to move house for the 5th time in three years because our landlord decided to put the rent up again. We are strangers who struggle.

We are an Island of Strangers.

An island where strangers leave notes on motorway bridges for strangers contemplating ending it all, saying “somebody cares about you—I care about you—please seek help”. We are strangers who want you to live.

We are an Island of Strangers.

A tiny, prosperous island of exhausted and overworked strangers.

An island where strangers decide that their profit margins are more important than their workers' pay packets. They get their HR business partners and their PR consultants to deliver the news, in perfect English. Strangers who exploit.

We are an Island of Strangers.

An island where strangers who own arms companies and who are probably registered (for tax reasons) on a very different, more tropical island, delight in the news of war, so that they can sell more bombs and see their share prices skyrocket. Strangers who profit.

We are an Island of Strangers.

Tired and torn by a million tiny traumas, and a fair few bigger ones. All doing our best to get by in a broken and uncaring world, but too often drained of the energy and short of the time we need to really look after ourselves, or each other. But we are strangers who try nonetheless.

We are an Island of Strangers.

An island where strangers at the end of their tether can swallow the myths and the lies and assume the absolute worst in others. Where desperate people arriving on dinghies are somehow the enemy, when deep down we must know that the strangers making the really big decisions that affect us are the decorated billionaires arriving on megayachts. These are the strangers who lobby and corrupt, and then lounge on the deck, laughing into their cocktails as we fight amongst ourselves for scraps.

There is an island of strangers in Westminster. Most of them have never known the bonds that strangers can form. Yet these strangest of strangers, with their tailored suits and their private educations and their think-tank takes on life, take it upon themselves to tell us what community means, to tell us who is deserving of the name “Citizen”. They are strangers that rule, and we do not need lessons from them about the meaning of community.

We are an Island of Strangers.

An island of strangers who desperately need to get up off our knees and demand a better life. Not just better compared to others we’ve managed to push aside or clamber over. Better than anything on offer from those who seek to keep us in our place, or who tell us to just keep calm and carry on while the world burns around us and the rich get ever richer and the powerful get ever more powerful, and we get nothing. We are an island of strangers who desperately need to re-learn the meaning of resistance and solidarity. We are strangers, together.

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