Hatred!
No doubt many of us have moments where the turn politics has taken in many parts of the world in recent times causes our soul to leap out of its skin and shake with rage, all the more so because some egregious action is being taken in our name, by people not so different from us, and we seem so utterly powerless, not just to stop them, but even to attract their attention for long enough to point out that, whilst the challenges that confront us are grave indeed, they prefer instead to dream up the wrong answers to the wrong problems. For me, migration is one such wrong problem; one to which hapless and mediocre politicians seem only able to provide the wrong answers.
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Take today (15th May, 2026), where the forty-six government members of the Council of Europe, including the UK, where I am from and grew up, issued an innocuous-sounding ‘political declaration’ agreeing that, in breach of international law and human rights conventions, ‘irregular migrants’ to Europe could be sent to (as yet unspecified, though there are numerous suggestions) third countries, that is to say, places these migrants neither come from nor desire to go. Soon perhaps, the UK or France will be paying Egypt or Montenegro to house migrants from Afghanistan, Eritrea, or Nigeria, having first violently removed them from their own territories, perhaps, in the good old US American but now apparently also British fashion, in chains, for profit, having first kept them in cages. (The last link is from 2019; none of this is new).
“Irregular” migration is a great misnomer, since there are few things on our planet these days more regular and inevitable than mass migration. Meanwhile, we are busy undermining the conditions for life on that planet with the rapidity characteristic of modernity in our execution, though not in our attempts at redress. More migrants from the places worst affected by planetary ecological destruction will ensue, towards the places on the whole the least affected (which is still far from nothing) and historically most responsible for it, places where birth rates have long been below the replacement rate and where ageing populations ought to welcome (and indeed, require) the creativity and diversity of intrepid and determined migrants. Our political leaders seem unwilling to even recognize what the actual problems they need to deal with are, and instead offer us the naked violence of the far right against vulnerable populations, dressed up in their finest legalese.
I read about this political declaration, and after those few seconds it took me to grapple with and recognize my feelings, the first word I found to describe them was “hatred”. And I have felt that many times of late, and still I find hatred a repugnant emotion, and yet I return to the intuition that, given the magnitude of what we are up against, hatred may be a necessary starting point, even as it can never be a method or an outcome.
I first came to this conclusion in December 2025, driven to fury by the latest announcement from the UK government regarding migration, where once again all the ingenuity and hard work of hundreds of civil servants was being harnessed to whisk up policies whose guiding value was one of sheer glee in cruelty, all so the latest incumbent of the UK’s most odious political office, that of Home Secretary, could appear ‘tough’ and ‘save’ the country from the extreme right by adopting the greater part of their demands. I wrote a long piece then, but discussions with the editor of a publication I like very much led to changes being proposed which I felt would have altered the character of the article for the worse, and so it went unpublished. The news it responded to is no longer news, but the problem and the dramatis personae remain the same. I post it here; if something in what I’ve written here has caught your eye, I think you will not be wasting your time by reading it.
