No One Longs for Your Grey England

No one longs for your grey England when the streets are rich with life.

No one longs for your beige, lifeless food when tables are bursting with flavour.

No one wants your sunless skies and cold silence when the world’s children carry laughter in their pockets.

No one longs for your hollow sameness when difference is what gives us colour.

No one longs for your tired fear when joy itself refuses to be extinguished.

No one longs for your empty pride when real dignity is found in generosity.

We have always known this. We have always been shown this. Yet still, each generation pretends to forget.

We’ve Seen This Before

My grandparents and father came by boat. Yours might have too.

They arrived with hope and hunger, not just for food, but for dignity, for opportunity, for life itself. Their homes were hollowed by war, leaving nothing but absence in its aftermath.

And they were not welcomed. They were mocked. Called names. Told to “go back.” Their food was ridiculed, their accents sneered at.

Time, however, has a way of rewriting the story. The very people once vilified became absorbed into the “mainstream.” The food once called “donkey meat” now fills restaurants and family tables. The language once mocked now sounds familiar, often romanticised. What was once despised is now celebrated.

So why do we insist on repeating the cycle? Why do we cast suspicion on each new group that arrives, as though we have learnt nothing from our own past?

Consistently, it is refugees who carry the burden of being cast as “the other.” Families who have fled war, persecution, and violence. Children who have crossed seas alone, who arrive on foreign shores carrying both grief and courage. And unlike my grandparents, who eventually found acceptance, these children and families are met with systems designed not to welcome them but to keep them out.

The difference matters. My family came by boat by choice, for work and opportunity, driven by poverty but not persecution. Refugees arrive with no choice at all. Their journey is one of necessity, not opportunity.

And yet, if you strip it down to its simplest form, both stories are about the same thing: leaving one place in hope of another. Searching for safety. Searching for dignity and a better future. Searching for a life we all have an inherent right to.

For my family, the path to acceptance, though painful, was possible. They were stereotyped, mocked, and called names, yet, over time, their difference became easier to forget, their accents softened, and their skin allowed them to blend in.

What once marked them out as outsiders faded into the background until their presence no longer felt threatening to the majority.

Their journey to belonging, while difficult, was not impossible.

This is not the case for many refugees today. Their difference cannot be so easily disguised, nor their histories so easily rewritten. They are marked not just by culture but by skin, by faith, by language. Integration is made harder not by who they are, but by the way society insists on keeping them apart.

Yet their stories and presence should carry even greater weight for compassion. Stories that are born not of choice but out of necessity. Not of poverty but of persecution. Yet these are the very people most vilified, most dehumanised, told they are a burden when, in truth, they have carried more than most of us could ever imagine.

And how can we sit idly by when the images are everywhere, unavoidable: children under siege, families displaced, genocide broadcast in real time?

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, but never has it been so public, so documented, so visible. And still, borders are shut. Still, the slogans echo: 'go back to where you came from'. As though any of us, in their place, would not make the same journey.

The Families I Meet

As a Caseworker, I have worked intimately with newly arrived families, people who carry both loss and hope in equal measure. When I would enter their homes, I was met not with suspicion but with generosity. Tables were laid with tea, coffee, and food. Smiles stretched wide. Pride always filled the room. Even in scarcity, there was abundance. Even with so little, there was hospitality.

And yet, beyond their front door, these same families are met with suspicion. They are told they do not belong. Their culture is questioned, their worth debated.

The irony is stark: those who have the least often give the most.

The Children Who Survive

Then there are the unaccompanied asylum-seeking children I have worked with. Children who have survived the most treacherous of journeys. Children who have not been allowed to be children.  

Young people who have lost homes, families, and a sense of certainty, yet still arrive with resilience that outshines the rest of us. They carry joy in the smallest things. They share songs in languages I cannot speak, but can still feel. They play games that bridge every border. They laugh louder than the heaviness of their past. And still, beyond the walls of their laughter, they are met with fences, forms, and a constant reminder that they are not welcome.

To be in their presence is to understand abundance, not the kind measured in money, but in spirit. Gratitude, politeness, and an unshakable graciousness. They shine with a quiet brilliance that no hardship can extinguish.

Some have seen loved ones drown before their eyes. Some have crossed seas alone, stepped onto shores where the language is foreign, and the systems are impossible. They arrive knowing that the structures around them are not built to welcome them.

And yet, what do we offer them? Beige food. Lifeless housing. Cold bureaucratic suspicion. They are told they should be grateful. And they are. But gratitude should not mean invisibility.

The Futility of Hatred

We have lived this pattern before. Families like mine were once despised, and are now embraced. Once mocked, but now celebrated.

So why must each community of people suffer through the same cycle of prejudice before we can see their worth?

The truth is simple: if safety existed at home, they would not have left. They are not here to take. They are here because survival left them no other choice. And here lies the irony.....what exactly are we protecting?

These families did not leave colourless places. They left lands rich with tradition, with flavour, with history, with life, places they would never have chosen to leave if safety had been possible. They are not here to steal jobs or ride waves of benefits. They are here because survival demanded it, much like what we would do for our own families if faced with no other choice.

Our “tradition”? The old, dusty systems that uphold classism, the deference to a monarchy that serves no one but itself? We are clinging to shadows while turning our backs on life. We are fighting the wrong battle. Because the very thing we pour our hatred into, these people, their cultures, their presence, is the very thing that would enrich us, expand us, and maybe even set us free.

What we reject today, we often celebrate tomorrow. Yet in the meantime, entire generations are forced to carry the weight of our hatred and fear. Trying to heal, while still being wounded, trying to belong while still being told they do not, trying to live while constantly having to prove their right to exist.

If we truly wanted to close our borders, we would have to give up far more than we are willing to admit. The Turkish kebab on a Friday night. The flatbreads, rice dishes, and curries that fill our takeaways. The Japanese car in the driveway. The Indian spices in our cupboards. The Chinese-made phones in our hands. The Congolese rhythms that shape dance floors. The trainers made in Vietnam. The cotton T-shirts stitched in Bangladesh. The coffee beans we grind every morning, grown in Ethiopia or Sudan. None of it is purely ours. All of it was shaped elsewhere, carried to us by others. Our lives are stitched together by the very things we claim to reject, woven through with the richness of cultures and the brilliance of a collective, not just our own.

No one longs for grey England. Not when homes full of food, tea, and laughter tell us another story. Not when children who have seen the worst of humanity still manage to radiate its best.  

No one longs for grey England. What we long for is colour, connection, and the courage to welcome life when it arrives at our door.

We are lucky to know them. We are lucky to be reminded in their presence of what it means to live life itself.