Sir Thomas More to the Conservatives and Unionists Party and Reform UK Limited by Lawson Akhigbe

(Thomas Moore steps to the podium, his expression weary but resolute. He looks out at the angry politicians.)

Friends… neighbors… countrymen. I hear you. I hear the fear in your voices, the frustration. Times are hard. Work feels scarce. It’s easy to look at a family who just arrived, who speaks a different tongue or prays in a different way, and see them as the cause of your troubles.

You say, “They take our jobs.” You say, “They strain our services.” You say, “They don’t belong here.” And you demand we shut the gates and send them away.

But before you act on that anger, I beg you to stop. Stop and ask yourselves: What are we really saying? What are we becoming?

We are not a nation of walls, but of bridges. Our strength was never in our purity, but in our patchwork. My father was a craftsman. I’ve sat at tables with merchants from Flanders, scholars from Spain, and shipwrights from the Baltic. Their hands, their minds, their hopes—they didn’t weaken England; they built it.

Think of the stranger you want to expel. That is a man fleeing war his children did not start. That is a woman escaping poverty you cannot imagine, seeking a shred of dignity. They are not caricatures. They are us, a few chapters earlier in the story. They are the same desperate hope that once beat in the heart of your own grandfather, or in yours.

You believe the problem is them. But I tell you, the danger is here, in this hardening of our own hearts. When we measure a person’s worth by their accent, when we blame the newcomer for the failures of those in power, we do not save our country. We surrender its very soul.

We surrender compassion for suspicion. We trade community for tribe. We abandon the commandment to “love thy neighbor” and replace it with the whispered curse, “fear thy neighbor.”

So I admonish you, not as a politician, but as a fellow citizen: Do not be seduced by the simple, cruel lie that our unity depends on someone else’s exclusion. Building a better life is not a race where we must trip the runner beside us. It is a common project.

Let us direct our anger upward, at injustice, not sideways at its fellow victims. Let us demand fair wages and good housing for all who live and work here, not pit native-born against newcomer in a fight for scraps.

For if we succeed in slamming the door today, what have we won? A smaller, meaner, more fearful England. An island not of pride, but of prejudice.

I choose a harder, but nobler path. I choose an England that is a sanctuary, not a fortress. I choose to see the human being first.

I ask you to make that same choice.