Nesrine Malik

"[On the unsustained optimism at the time of the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018.] This new era did not dawn. But the prophecies of it are useful to revisit, because they should remind us that it didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. Because the country that Harry and Meghan married in was one that, just a few months before their wedding, declared Paulette Wilson, who had lived in Britain for 50 years, "removable to Jamaica" and detained her in Yarl's Wood. The Windrush scandal was also "modern" Britain."

"It is because Britain was breaking that Brexit happened in the first place. It was a necessary, phantom new road to prosperity when all other roads had reached a dead end. In that sense, it has been a success. Because when it did happen, the shock was so huge that it diverted attention away from all the reasons that it had come about in the first place. To those who opposed Brexit, leaving the EU was not only a political event, it was an emotional and cultural one too: a physical wrenching from a liberal fraternity, perpetrated by liars and charlatans and maybe even shady foreign influence. The feelings Brexit inspires are understandably strong. But they are also broadly wasted when their purpose is merely to reverse Brexit, to fixate on Brexit as a uniquely calamitous event that is bringing about Britain’s decline, rather than a secondary cause of that decline."

"Over the past decade, almost 22 million people have been displaced every year by weather-related events. The projection is even more staggering. By 2050, the forecast is that 1.2 billion people will join the ranks of climate migrants, most of them from the countries with the lowest capacity to deal with the fallout from global heating. They will not all be fleeing a fire or a flood. The climate crisis is not about a single photogenic weather event. The climate crisis is war, it is poverty, it is radicalisation, it is the disappearance of the habitat families have lived in for generations, and it is the geopolitical and security fallout of collapsing ways of making a living. The result is a movement crudely summed up as a "refugee crisis" – a description that makes a constant churn of displacement sound like an exotic temporary phenomenon that will abate, or can be quarantined to other countries, if only the barriers are raised high enough."