The New Statesman

Hello, I'm Tom McTagg and this is the New Statesman podcast.

Today we're tackling one of the most defining and divisive questions of our time,

who gets to belong in Britain?

In the past year, the conversation around immigration in Britain across the political spectrum has become increasingly radical.

As Tangil Rashid, the New Statesman Culture Editor, writes for this week's cover story,

We are no longer in an age of migration.

We have been propelled into something altogether new, an age of deportation.

Britain is shifting from being a country of migration to a

country focused on expulsion. Tangel joins me now. Hello. Tanger, you begin the piece with

quite an extraordinary and touching anecdote. I wondered if you could start by just sharing that

with listeners. Yeah, it was a, it was a strange and beautiful moment, actually, that's always stayed with me.

I was cycling through East London one day, where my family lives, a place called Ilford.

And I was cycling through, and my tyre punctured.

And I had to, you know, abandon ship. And I was cycling through and my tyre punctured. And I had to, you know,

abandoned ship and I parked my bike, locked it on a very quiet residential street, left it there,

went about my business, came back and the front wheel was missing. And I was sort of standing there, just sort of cursing because, well, anyone who's a cyclist in London knows that these things happen, you know.

And your assumption would be someone's nicked part of your bike. And I was standing there sort of, you know, really angry, you know, cursing sort of crime-ridden streets. And then a door

opened behind me and a man was standing there and he said, don't worry. And in his hand was my

front wheel, which he'd taken upon himself to repair. He'd sort of just seen that the tire was punctured. So he just

sort of removed the wheel, fixed the puncture. And, you know, he sort of reassembled my bike.

And we got talking and it turned out that he was an asylum seeker in just one of these

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