Your Cover Story by Miles Ellingham and Jack Jeffery (10 October) has given me cause to reflect upon the language used by our politicians in relation to immigration. Rather than othering immigrants, we should look sympathetically towards those willing to undertake dangerous journeys to the UK. In their resolve to reach our shores, they show a humbling belief in Great Britain that should shame those performative “patriots” who think patriotism is demonstrated by affixing a Union Flag to a lamp post.
Working in the road transport industry, I work with Afghan, Indian, Iraqi, Pakistani, Somalian, Sudanese and Syrian migrants. Despite language barriers, we endeavour via hand gestures and large amounts of goodwill to communicate and understand each other. Working with them has immensely enriched my life.
The language surrounding immigration has become toxic. Progressives must make the argument that the right wing offers nothing to improve or enrich our society. Immigrants are not a threat to the UK. However, the hate propagated by the Conservative and Reform parties is a clear and present danger to a Britain that has always historically been home to the migrant.
Philip O’Rourke, Thornbury, South Gloucestershire
The fog of assumptions
The latest cover image was impossible to ignore, as the migrants it pictures could be any one of us in today’s volatile world (Cover Story, 10 October). The correspondents break through the fog of assumptions, by giving us a real sense of what migrants experience on a human level: a terrified migrant child in the hands of what may be a smuggler, or the recent case of a mother and her young child who both drowned when crossing the channel.
The article is a reminder that in many cases, migrants are fleeing war zones, persecution and violent, uninhabitable hellscapes. This raises the question: how does the international community begin to help such countries become less perilous and more stable, restoring universal ethics and moral value systems, so that migrants aren’t faced with the dire prospect of leaving their homeland in the first place?
Oliver Albuquerque, London SE24
The Home Office is said to be outraged at the way the system is being exploited by various kinds of migrants. So it intends to examine the operation of the modern slavery legislation, the operation of parts of the European Convention on Human Rights and the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. What may have brought about this outrage on the part of the Home Secretary and her department is that every day this summer there has been a stream of reports in the media of people coming to the UK by small boats from northern France to the shores of the UK.
The impression created by these reports is that there is an army of “them” over there waiting to come to the UK, to sponge off the welfare state and the NHS, and jump the housing queue – and then, to add insult to injury, rape our women and eat our swans.
However, it is not just the media that is responsible for this impression. Politicians have stirred a boiling pot when they should have been trying to reduce its temperature. They tell us they are going to smash the gangs of people smugglers. They promise much but seldom deliver. The boats still come.
Perhaps if the UK and other countries in Europe asked refugees why they risk everything to reach their shores, as well as spending large sums of money to do so, they might develop a clearer understanding of how to deal with this matter. The refugee crisis affects all Europe. It will only be dealt with effectively if European countries work in concert when dealing with it.
Refugees are human beings. They should be treated as people with feelings, not as statistics. If we had to deal with the traumas with which some of them have had to cope, how would we have reacted or behaved?
Richard Dargan, Old Coulsdon, Surrey
Well done to the New Statesman on its cover story by Miles Ellingham and Jack Jeffery last week. Such a long-form, nuanced approach to what is happening on the ground in northern France is still, sadly, rare. Setting out that “a person can be both in need of work and fleeing for their life” exemplifies the fact that two things can be true at the same time. The usual hostile questions raised by the likes of Reform and GB News were well covered and addressed head on. For someone who has made volunteer trips to Calais/Dunkirk over the years, it was really heartening to read and restored my faith in good journalism.
Danny Daly, London SE20
A telling off for Ofsted
In all its reactions to criticism in recent years, Ofsted has never acknowledged the need for system reform involving a fresh way of thinking about, and enacting, school inspection. Martyn Oliver continues in that well-trodden path of denial (Interview, 10 October). Despite the relatively minor changes he has instigated, he remains a prisoner of Ofsted’s own 30-plus years mindset. That mindset is a severe threat to the well-being of both the inspected and those who inspect. Ofsted needs radical reform, not tinkering with words or grades.
Colin Richards, former Ofsted inspector, Spark Bridge, Cumbria
Pippa Bailey’s interview with Martyn Oliver revealed his belief that the inspection framework is “an inevitable and vital part” of delivering public services. It is neither. Ofsted’s top-down, punitive approach is a direct consequence of Thatcherism. Her fundamental project was to reconceptualise the welfare state from a collective public benefit to private goods sold to individual customers in a marketplace. We know how this went generally (water, anyone?). But education, though not sold off wholesale, also suffered. Finland, Estonia, Ontario and Singapore – four very different jurisdictions – all consistently appear above England in international comparisons. None has an accountability system remotely like ours and their educationalists would rightly be horrified by the brutality exhibited here.
Alan Parker, Croydon
Well done, Will Dunn
I presume you paid Will Dunn handsomely for this weeks Sketch (10 October). Being made to sit through a televised Tory conference is bad enough, but when the broadcaster is GB News that’s just torture. I hope, like most modern workplaces, you have some kind of well-being arrangements to support staff through difficult times.
Rob Grew, Birmingham
Always a fun read, Will Dunn has absolutely outdone himself in his “review” of Nick Clegg’s whining (The Sketch, 24 September). But my, what material he had. Clegg’s career is a masterclass in the school of “I have values. If you don’t like them, I have others.” I wish Clegg would shut up. Not only would this please those of us who have had no hope for anything he does since 2010, it would also allow him more brown-nosing time in Silicon Valley and at the Tony Blair Institute, where it seems he’d be the perfect fit.
Marie Donnelly, Sunderland Tyne and Wear
Liberty isn’t licence
Hannah Barnes says of the pro-Palestine protests by university students on the 7 October: “It would have been nice if they could have considered those murdered by Hamas for just one day, before going back to criticising Israel. But I still defend their right to speak and protest as they wish” (Lines of Dissent, 10 October). This seems to me an overly generous view. Having this right does not exempt them from behaving decently. By way of a simple example, if I like singing in the street, which so far as I know is legal, it is not unreasonable to expect that I will choose not to sing in the middle of the night when others might be sleeping.
Philip Hughes, Wrexham, North Wales
Middle-aged-male matters
The review of How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) (The New Society, 10 October) does not do justice to late-middle-age Partridge. I have watched all six episodes and the later ones are better, particularly the “in nature” one, which is moving in its depiction of Alan unwilling to face his girlfriend’s duplicity. Steve Coogan captures the melancholy of late-middle-aged men whose careers have disintegrated into lowly pick-’n’-mix hack work. Next I want Alan to confront the male autistic traits that have undermined his broadcasting career.
Peter Boon, London E11
Driving manual
Your correspondent Martin Skerritt wondered what was wrong with semaphore indicators on cars (Letters, 10 October). When I passed my test we were still taught to wind down the window and stick out an arm, and if turning left rotate one’s arm in an anti-clockwise direction. If you were going straight ahead you were meant to make an utterly useless gesture inside the car. But, like Martin, I’m dead against progress.
Colin Challen, Scarborough
In charge/on charge
I wonder if other readers were as surprised as me to learn that your esteemed editor does not drive an electric car (Editor’s Note, 10 October). Join the gang, Tom, you won’t regret it, and you will be helping the planet survive a few more months.
Michael Fielding, Lancaster
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor