On Strangers
Bradford, archives, & Starmer's Powellist turn.
Hello and welcome to Friends in Common,
A few small bits of housekeeping before we get on with the main post this week, written by Joel in response to a dreamy trip to Bradford and a ghoulish set of pronouncements from the government about immigration controls.
We’ve been a bit slow in getting the piece we mentioned in our first post (about ‘friendlords’) together, but it is coming! Thanks to people who have sent testimonies or reflections, if you still want to do that there’s time - just sling us an email or voice note to: friendsincommonbook@gmail.com
We are going to be announcing the launch of the book very soon, with a little tour around the UK to celebrate. For now though, Pluto have offered all our subscribers 30% any pre-order via their site with the code: 'FRIENDS30'.
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Ok, here’s On Strangers:
Cities are places where strangers meet - Richard Sennet
I met a lot of strangers this weekend, back in Bradford, the city where I grew up. There were the revellers at 'Bassline Symphony', an event part of the 2025 City of Culture program that fused the hard, wobbling sound of bassline music with a full classical orchestra, all in the ornate setting of Bradford St George's Hall. Last time I'd been to the venue was for a victory lap gig by kings of the new wave of bassline: Bad Boy Chiller Crew, who I interviewed back in 2020. The crowd was similarly eclectic both times: grandparents with kids on their shoulders, middle aged ravers two-stepping at the back, gaggles of young kids mouthing the words to different raps. After such heady heights with BBCC, I wasn't sure what to expect from Bassline Symphony: a jarring gentrification of a music made for (good) car stereos? Some gimmicky strings strapped on top of a tune made on Fruity Loops in 2003? Some fun, nostalgic sing-alongs and an overpriced theatre bar?
To repeat an old Niche bassline tune back to my cynical self: 'Shut Up'. I couldn't have been more wrong. Bassline Symphony was one of the most incredible bits of musical curation I've seen in years. An initial hour of hi-intensity DJing and MCing, followed by three euphoric, beautifully and playfully arranged sets by legends of a scene that has so often been dismissed and ridiculed: TS7, DJ Q, Jamie Duggan. In Q’s words: “We really got Bassline with an Orchestra before GTA6!! Last night was amazing! I’m still gassed.”
Everything was held together by producer Tanya Vital, who came on mic throughout the night to describe the process of putting together the event - “people told me it was impossible! We've been working on this for four years!” - and pull together various strands: pointing out the overlooked contributions of women to the genre, decrying cuts to the arts and how working class kids get locked out, briefly eulogising members of the scene that had passed away. Part wedding, part funeral, part school reunion, part living archive. A parade of quite familiar strangers took to the stage throughout: singers and rappers I'd grown up listening to, hearing on £1 CDs from the corner-shop, seeing on posters for nights I was too young to go to – but had never seen live. Some, like Rapper T Dot, apparently had to be coaxed out of retirement, others had probably not performed outside the vocal-booth in years. Earlier on that night, some of us sat in the sun and watched kids play in the fountains of the Bradford City Park, some guys behind us live-streamed an afrobeats DJ set, some girls practiced a dance routine, and (in classic Bradford fashion) a couple of lads turned up on horse-and-carts to have beers outside Wetherspoons.
The next day, a group of us went to help with sorting and archiving at the Bradford Resource Centre (BRC). Housed in an old Quaker meeting house in Bradford's Little Germany area, BRC was a hub of radical politics that provided meeting space, a library and offices for a range of anti-racist, LGBTQ+, feminist, disability rights, and trade union groups, operating from 1979 up into the 2010s, as funding dried up and groups left the space. Since 2024 a group called Friends of Bradford Resource Centre have been trying to preserve the amazing archive left within the space, and get the building back into community use. As part of this, I've been working on a film and exhibition about BRC and the wider history of radical politics in Bradford with the artist Adam Lewis Jacob and youth film collective Toothless Films. Laura and I write in the book about how informal archives and what we call 'history from within' can offer 'the hand of friendship' across time, showing possibilities, strategies and personal stories that resonate in profound ways. Sorting and archiving at BRC has been an often beguiling experience of this sense of historical resonance. At various points in the cramped basement of the building we've stumbled across: a 1911 handwritten ledger from the Bradford Trades Council (including notes from the 1926 general strike!), a box of Polaroid photos from the 'Valid' & 'Mustn't Grumble' disabled theatre group, hand collaged- posters for the Bradford Women Against Pit Closures group, a 'Bradford Dykes' calendar from the late 1970s, lunch boxes, novelty mugs, a bag of old clocks (!). Sometimes, people related to the groups we encounter are there in the room with us, sorting things through too – and we laugh and remark about an irate letter from a councillor, or the doodles on the minutes of a boring meeting.
Other times, we come across people that are not so much friends, but strangers – characters and stories that are harder to place or catalogue, and often even more interesting for this reason. In the chaos and sheer quantity of the material there, it's quite nice to just sit with the opacity of these characters, rather than try to reveal or illuminate them. No doubt one day, in an archive somewhere, they will speak in a different way to a different person - but not right now. (Having said this, if you work for an archive or know people who do, we’re still looking for help submitting some of the collection - get in touch!)
This weekend we also found a bunch of sworn enemies: a file of 00s BNP leaflets buried in the files of an anti-fascist group that operated out of BRC. The iconography and language was so familiar, union jacks and bad Microsoft word art mixed into racist anti-migrant polemics that were scary in their vitriol but also somehow desperate: to be taken seriously, to will a political community into existence, to not get run out of town this time. What shocked me was just how familiar this content was in another way, foreshadowing the rhetoric of Reform & the Conservative Party obviously, but also of our current Labour Government. I'd understood this in an abstract way, charted on a history that stretched from Blair and Straw’s attacks on people in the asylum system, to Nick Griffin's Question Time appearance, into the latest ascendancies of the European Far Right and the brutal defeat of Corbynism, but it was another thing to hold this history in my hands, to see how mainstream it had become.
This feeling was ignited on Monday when Keir Starmer made what will surely now be known as his 'Island of Strangers' speech, announcing the new government White Paper on Immigration. The excellent Free Movement blog has a detailed summary of the paper’s contents, which essentially outline an intention to cut numbers of ‘legal migration’ through various measures including more demanding language requirements, changes to student visa rules, longer time periods before people can apply for settlement, and bans on people coming to the UK as care workers. Suffice to say it's a punitive, cowardly set of proposals aimed at somehow forcing Reform into retreat through mimicry and number-fudging. It shows how deeply the (actually quite recent) dominant framing of ‘legal’ vs ‘illegal’ migration has embedded itself into governance, with the White Paper on so-called ‘illegal’ migration (refugee law has always accounted for people crossing borders and making claims upon arrival) scheduled for “later this summer”.
However, it was Starmer’s speech about the White Paper, and particularly this phrase ‘island of strangers’, which has been a media focus since. To quote that section in full:
Let me put it this way: Nations depend on rules – fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not, but either way, they give shape to our values. They guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to one another. Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.
Within the characteristically dull supply-teacher-telling-you-off language of it all, the ‘island of strangers’ phrase cuts through. This is in part, as many pointed out, due to the direct resonance the phrase has with one from Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech:
But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
Starmer, and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, were quick to rebuff the comparison, or that there was anything deliberate about the semantic overlap. It seems pretty unbelievable that nobody in Starmer’s team would have noticed the similarities of this high-profile outlining of Labour Government intentions on immigration policy and one of the most famous political speeches of the last 50 years of British history on that very topic, but maybe Starmer really is that useless. He clearly has been bristling in the last few days over how focused people are on that phrase within the speech, something he shares with Powell, who preferred people to speak of his ‘Birmingham Speech’, rather than allusions he made to violent civil war and Roman rivers foaming with blood. The comparisons don’t end there: Starmer speaks of prior Tory ‘betrayal’, while Powell ends his speech stating that government inaction would be a ‘great betrayal’; both treat immigration as a threat to national identity, a source of conflict and social decay, both are animated by a sense of white victimhood and a nostalgic myth of historic homogeneity. Yesterday, Nigel Farage, who 11 years ago said he backed the ‘basic principle’ of Powell’s speech, praised Starmer in the Commons: “We at Reform, [...] very much enjoyed your speech on Monday, you seem to be learning a very great deal from us. Could I encourage you to go further, as a matter of national security?”
Of course we shouldn't be surprised, when the lines of racist nationalism, often amalgamated with a protectionist idea of ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, go so deep within the Labour Party (Powell quotes approvingly in his speech from then Labour MP John Stonehouse’s complaints about the Sikh community “maintain[ing] customs inappropriate in Britain,” by wearing turbans). But this does seem like a shift in tone, and from a government that currently faces no serious immediate threats from either opposing parties or their own backbench. More gallingly, many in the wider left have echoed Starmer’s framing in the last few months and in response to his speech, with everyone from Perry Anderson to Michael Walker on Novara Media using similar language to assert that ‘the numbers’ need to come down, and that people haven’t been ‘consulted’. As China Miéville writes in an LRB letter responding to Anderson’s piece:
Anderson says that voters have usually not been consulted about ‘either the arrival or the scale of labour from abroad’. But then, after decades of neoliberalism, what are voters usually consulted about? And on what policies do their opinions have an effect? There is no democratic mandate for almost anything: pouring shit into rivers; declining real wages; the financialisation of public goods; skyrocketing inequality; the destruction of the universities; the underfunding of hospitals; and so endlessly on. To demand that the left should concern itself with the lack of democratic accountability tout court would be welcome, if hardly innovative. But instead, it is only immigration that Anderson cites on this point.
Miéville goes on to articulate a succinct set of ‘socialist demands’ around immigration: “full labour and civic rights for migrants, full entitlement to benefits, unionisation across the economy, and an undoing of vulnerabilities that contribute to the super-exploitation of migrants.” Why have so many others on the left abdicated from articulating such a position? In trying to smash that Overton window, have they fallen through the other side?
Of course, plenty of people did call out Starmer’s rhetoric, often turning to the liberal language of welcoming, economic contribution and human rights. MP Nadia Whittome and journalists like Helena Horton and Neil Mackay instead drew on the idea of ‘friends’ and ‘neighbours’ to reject the framing of ‘strangers’. This helped illuminate, for me, what felt different about the tone of Starmer’s speech. In the phrase ‘an island of strangers’ Starmer captures (and misdiagnoses) real feelings of alienation and isolation felt by many. He argues that ‘strangers’ emerge from a lack of adherence to a ‘social contract’, in a thinly veiled defence of assimilationism. It is a phrase that implies, alongside demands that people ‘commit to integration, to learning our language’ - societal breakdown and a fear of replacement, in the far-right mould that Powell has done so much to shape. It is language that works to deny the possibility of a friendship or neighbourliness that is not refracted through the nation, whilst implying a deeper, whiter and homogenised relationality to the historic communities of the British Isles, one we know to be false.
Talk of friends, neighbours and ‘strangers’ also resonates with a very different episode that happened this week, four years ago: the Battle of Kenmure Street. As I argued in the LRB Blog a year after that day, it was a blurring of these concepts - friend--neighbour and the ‘unconditional support’ offered to strangers - that helped animate the politics of that day:
Decades of anti-racist and tenant organising across Glasgow provided not only material context but also key points of political principle. The idea of ‘unconditional support’ is central. Places like the Unity Centre share information, skills and resources without asking people to divulge their immigration status, to avoid the Home Office dividing line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants. In Kenmure Street we knew very little about the men in the van. Occasionally people in the crowd would ask for more information: ‘How do we know they’ve not done something wrong?’ To which the general response would be: ‘It doesn’t matter what they’ve done or who they are, nobody should be treated like this.’
What should be a fairly simple political principle is difficult to uphold in a system that encourages – and, through ‘hostile environment’ legislation, attempts to legally mandate – people to enact their own ‘good citizenship’ through the policing and naming of the ‘bad’. Yet at Kenmure better instincts prevailed. ‘These are our neighbours,’ we chanted, ‘let them go!’ Other terms of political kinship were also used – ‘friends’, ‘brothers’, ‘sisters’, the occasional ‘comrade’ – but it was the idea of the neighbour that seemed to anchor the protest, with its sense of commonality that still allows a certain anonymity. ‘I am lucky that my fate brought me to Glasgow,’ one of the men, Lakhvir Singh, said afterwards, ‘where the people come out to support one of their own.’
In rejecting Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ then, perhaps we should be careful not to reject the idea of strangers entirely. As the sociologist Richad Sennett argues, learning how to live with strangers is a key part of contemporary urban life, one we should meet by encouraging forms of cooperation that do not erase difference: “treating others as though they were strangers and forging a social bond upon that social distance”. Starmer’s phrase tells a story of an immemorial national fraternity in which ‘migration’ is just small sanitised chapter (1945-2025?) and demonstrating ‘integration’ means subjecting oneself to obscene levels of surveillance and scrutiny. The phrase works to exclude and demonise, but also, like all far-right politics, speaks to a certain fascinated need to probe, catalogue and contain. We should reject all aspects of Starmer’s ‘stranger’ then, but consider using Sennett’s formulation to turn the former against itself: to organise and struggle with people as strangers, without demanding a transparency or knowability to their stories and histories.
From the dancefloor, to the public square, to the archive; we can find ways to think with friends and strangers, sometimes together. As we try to build our anti-raids and anti-racist groups to be able to meet not just individual moments of immigration enforcement like Kenmure Street, but the whole racist system, we should hold these forms of political community in mind. We can reject Starmer’s attempt to construct an acceptable version of Enoch Powell, along with his dismissal of the comparison. We can advance unconditional practices of connection and support that acknowledge what has always been true: people will move, our real enemies are the ones who try to violently police and curtail this. We can find friends, and strangers, in this struggle, in our radical history, in the city that some joyless Tory MP said is ‘already an island of strangers’, sitting out in the sunshine.