10 September 2025

Letter of the week: Into the darkness

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Tanjil Rashid’s essay on mass deportation (Cover Story, 5 September) is very powerful. He is right to trace Nigel Farage’s ideas to Enoch Powell, but even Powell only called for the “voluntary repatriation” of immigrants. Likewise, while Farage is building on Conservative and Labour enthusiasm for deportation, both have restricted it to individuals whose asylum claims are rejected or who have been convicted of crimes. The “mass” approach, breaking the link between rights and process, is what takes us fully into the darkness that Rashid diagnoses. He is right to link it to the plans for forced removal in Gaza; the idea betrays the same genocidal mentality, in which masses stigmatised for their ethnicity have their lives uprooted and ruined. We allow these ideas into the political mainstream at our peril.
Martin Shaw, emeritus professor, University of Sussex

Shaking liberal complacency

Tanjil Rashid’s encounter with an asylum seeker was illuminating (Cover Story, 5 September). I too have interacted with such people, helping them with their English. They were all men of different ages, and it was an enjoyable and positive experience. As is the human condition, they all had hopes and aspirations. They all came from the usual countries: of Sudan, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Rashid is correct that this country does indeed need their skills, youth and can-do attitude. Until we drop the fallacious idea that all immigrants are criminals who want to dismantle our society piece by piece, hostility towards them will continue. If only there was out-of-the-box thinking regarding safe, legal routes and a holistic approach, instead of a condemnatory one and blanket deportation, which is divisive and doesn’t distinguish between the refugee and the criminal.
Judith A Daniels, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Alongside a photo of “England flag-wavers”, Tanjil Rashid writes that “Britishness was a composite identity, formed in the aftermath of the union of England and Scotland”, and extended to “the myriad nationalities that would be absorbed (and invented) by the British empire”. This leads him to observe that “Scots are only more British than Indians by a mere 50 years”. Perhaps a more telling (and less Anglocentric) conclusion would have been that, by this line of argument, the English too are only more British than Indians by a mere 50 years.
Kenneth Ruthven, Cambridge

Tanjil Rashid’s article was brilliant. As long as the Labour Party bends to this policy, they will never benefit from my vote, let alone membership, ever again.
John Goodman, Liverpool

The New Statesman has featured many notable cover illustrations over the past few years but none as memorable or as terrifying as last week’s depiction of deportees shuffling into the maw of a government Globemaster in the dead of night. The image has shaken my liberal complacency. I suspect, and hope, many New Statesman readers have felt the same.
Colin Richards, Spark Bridge, Cumbria

Harsh truths

I found Andrew Marr’s focus on “population density” (The NS Essay, 5 September) curious, because it is low in Britain’s towns and cities. The most densely populated areas of London have less than half the population density of the densest areas of Paris or New York. Barcelona, Lyon and Turin are all more densely populated than Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds. The population of most of our cities hollowed out after the Second World War. London’s population today is only a little more than it was in 1939, and it took Birmingham until 2021 for its population to surpass its previous population peak of 1951.

If anything, most of Britain’s cities are not densely populated enough. There is a clear link between population density and prosperity, as the urban economist Edward Glaeser and others have shown. The problem is a lack of infrastructure. So, while I don’t disagree with Marr that the left should “talk candidly about population density”, it should not be yet another occasion to scapegoat migrants for the failure of successive governments to build the housing and infrastructure that is holding back our country.
Robin Tyne, Glasgow

Andrew Marr’s essay was bang on: thoughtful, incisive and challenging. I found his sentiments simultaneously depressing and inspiring – the beginning of a real blueprint for change. Then I read Becky Barnicoat’s cartoon lampooning Keir Starmer (Outside the Box, 5 September) for his lack of vision, and realised what an uphill battle the moderate left faces.
Gerard McElwee, via email

Andrew Marr’s article told a number of harsh truths that the left cannot ignore. The arrival of millions of newcomers over a matter of years – the “Boriswave” – had no democratic mandate and was bound to create material and cultural ruptures. A Danish approach to limitation and integration is an obvious way forward for social democrats on these shores.
Dan Wright, London SE11

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