10th September 2025

I’ve found myself needing to take a number of taxi journeys recently. Drivers have remarked on the weather (!), Bristol traffic, football club ownership and gym training regimes. More often though, they have initiated conversations about politics (the state of the country) or on immigration.

Prompted by what my driver was saying in one such conversation, I found myself making it clear that I’m not at all happy about the incredibly negative narrative around immigration that seems to be gaining ground at the moment.

It wasn’t until nearly the end of the journey that he told me he had moved to the UK from a very troubled part of the world as a teenager, leaving parents behind. Consequently he hadn’t been able to be with his mother when she had died. Very simply and briefly, he noted how hard it had all been. I could only guess that life would have been incredibly different for his wife and daughters in particular, if they were living now in the country of his birth.

He’d told me he pays his UK taxes, and I asked myself whether such a remark was symptomatic of being made to feel unwelcome in this country.

A quote from Henri Nouwen feels all too apt right now, and not just in this context: “For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved”.

May we find ways to reach out in love, friendship and welcome, to those who need it most.

Ruth Allen