In 2015 an article appeared in Britain's most widely read newspaper, The Sun, that opened with the following: ‘No, I don't care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don't care.’ The article went on to warn the reader to ‘make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches’, before proposing the solution: ‘Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.’ That such an article was published is staggering; that its appearing is not entirely incomprehensible is disturbing. While we may not be living in truly dark times just yet (though some, no doubt, are), we are living in increasingly hostile times. And the horizons are darkening.

In 2012 Theresa May, then a Home Secretary who would become Prime Minister of the UK four years later, made the following statement: ‘The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.’ That plan – far more ambitious than ‘illegal’ would suggest – has been a terrible success. Not only has May's policy created a hostile environment for pretty much anyone arriving on these shores, but the spirit of May's poisonous statement has spread its way through society. Whether it's refugees, immigrants, foreigners, ethnic minorities, the unemployed, the poor, the homeless, those who have a disability, Jews, Muslims, Travellers or the LGBTQI community, hostility to constructed ‘others’ increasingly defines Britain in 2020. Looking further afield – for example, Europe and the US– the sense that this hostility is threatening to engulf us all in truly dark times is difficult to resist.