On March 8,2023, professional boxer Ramla Ali sent a letter to UK prime minister Rishi Sunak. The text, which she shared publicly on her Instagram, read like more of a blow-by-blow takedown, with all the cool, detached ferocity of one of her fights: a barrage of sly jabs, nimble undercuts and sudden, devastating strikes. “Your legacy is already one that is marred by greed and selfishness,” Ali wrote. “[Your] plans are hurtful, cruel, immoral and ineffective and I will not stay silent on this matter.”
Ali was referring to the Conservative party’s widely condemned illegal migration bill, which - at the time of writing - is nearing the final stages of approval in parliament. If it becomes law, the UK would effectively be banning asylum, leaving refugees without even the most basic of human rights. Its passage has been accompanied by a creeping sense of foreboding in the country, a malignant shadow growing in the national psyche. Just weeks before Ali’s letter was written, for example, hundreds of violent far-right protesters in Knowsley, Merseyside - once the beating heart of UK leftism - threw missiles at a hotel that was housing asylum seekers. A few months earlier, a far-right terrorist threw petrol bombs into a migrant processing centre in Dover in an attempt to “obliterate Muslim children”. Meanwhile Sunak’s government has been ramping up the anti-migrant
