EDITORIAL

by Peter Jukes

The Kindness of Strangers

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” says Blanche DuBois, the tragic heroine of Tennessee Williams’ classic American play A Streetcar Named Desire.

Like other resonant phrases, people often forget the context. Blanche says this to two psychiatric nurses as she is about to be forcibly removed to what those days was called a ‘lunatic asylum’.

Words can take on a life of their own.

It is entirely plausible that Donald Trump, when he constantly compares US asylum seekers to serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, is confusing these two uses of the word ‘asylum’.

It could also be plausible that Keir Starmer’s advisors did not think through the various ramifications of what they meant when they coined the catchphrase “island of strangers” to warn of the dangers of unchecked immigration.

This is not the first time that a prime ministerial speechwriter has culled more brickbats than bouquets. Neither Margaret Thatcher, when she said “there is no such thing as society”, nor Theresa May, when she spoke of “citizens of nowhere”, probably realised how much these ideas would define their premierships.

But there may be reasons other than migration why people feel estranged in the UK today.

Our collective social life has been eviscerated by a combination, in recent years, of the pandemic and a rising reliance on digital social media.

Social atomisation is being driven by the death of our high streets, as retail and consumerism follow the same path of disruption and destruction of communities that occurred with the decline of heavy industry.

The loss of community people feel could also be a direct result of government policy, as so many public services – English language classes, after-school clubs, public libraries, the BBC’s investigative news output – are closed down.

Or possibly the rise of right-wing populism and the daily demonisation of foreigners after our abrupt exit from the EU has made many people feel like strangers in their own country.

And what is so wrong with strangers?

Isn’t dealing with them the essence of modern life, ever since we left the stifling familiarity of the clan or the village? Aren’t we always looking for kindness among people who aren’t kin?

The hit BBC TV series The Traitors, which will be returning with a celebrity version this year, is all about whether you can evaluate, trust, or work with strangers. Negotiating with those you don’t know is the essence of civic life. Civilisation derives from the idea of cities and the Greek word for city, polis, is the root of the word for politics.

In the modern world, Britain was one of the first countries to become a real “island of strangers” because of our rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the 19th Century during which a majority of the population moved from small towns and villages to big cities where – day in and day out – we had to meet and interact with people we didn’t know from Adam.

The civic acceptance of strangers runs through the lifeblood of Byline Times. I am the grandson of a refugee from the Armenian genocide. Our Editor-in-Chief, Hardeep Matharu, is the daughter of two immigrants – her mother from India and her father born in Kenya under the British Empire. Our Podcast Editor Adrian Goldberg is the son of one of the last Jewish children to escape Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport. The grandfather of our Political and Online Editor, Adam Bienkov, fled Poland and Hitler and enlisted in the British Army to fight him.

For these good reasons, we will always listen to outsiders.

Among them is a senior paediatric nurse I talked to the day after Starmer’s speech. She and her family had fled a massacre in Somalia and found refuge here when she was a young child. For the last three decades, the UK has provided security and opportunity to her and her three sisters, which they have repaid by working in healthcare and education. She frowned at the idea of an “island of strangers”. Far from it, she had found Britain to be “an island of kindness”.

It’s no secret that we at Byline Times also rely on the kindness of strangers, and so thank you for your constant encouragement and support.