Jenni Daiches writes about her sense of alienation from the Labour party after Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech (Letters, 22 May). My father fought with the British Indian army in Burma and Singapore as a young officer during the second world war. He even got a mention in the king’s dispatches. He elected to stay in the Pakistan army after partition in 1947. I graduated from university in Pakistan and arrived in the UK in 1972 for further studies, and eventually became a UK citizen, as legislation then allowed – a course that many people from that part of the world were encouraged to follow.
I joined the Labour party, lived in Finchley, London, and endeavoured to make this country my home. And now Keir Starmer uses such inconsiderate and ill-thought-through language that I have never felt so estranged in my own country.
