Fear of outsiders is the defining issue of our times

The Guardian — Culture has reported on “Fear of outsiders is the defining issue of our times,” presenting it as the central development in the source material available for this brief.

Fear of outsiders is the defining issue of our times. The report also notes that But is it actually our own selves we’re scared of? And could art hold the answers? Here, the British Art Show’s curator details why he’s exploring our deepest dreams and nightmares One of the moral low points of Keir Starmer’s tenure at Downing Street was his “island of strangers” speech, with its rhetorical echoes of Enoch Powell and dispiriting description of a nation fractured by difference. following widespread criticism, Starmer recanted his words, if not the sentiment behind them. Yet his choice of language was a reminder of how the idea of the stranger – representing immigration, but also wider, more inchoate anxieties about otherness and difference – holds such a potent place in Britain today. In fact, from masked anti-migrant protesters on the south coast to xenophobic riots over the summer, from politicians vowing to stop the boats to immigration polling as the No 1 concern among UK voters, it’s probably true to say that fear of the stranger is the totemic issue of our times.

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