Taran N. Khan

I met Shah Muhammad Rais in Southall on a Friday afternoon in early August. It was the season of heat waves, the ‘season for remembering Afghanistan’, as Rais wryly put it, referring to the transient glut of news coverage of the country four years after the Taliban’s takeover. I had last seen Rais in Kabul over a decade ago, at his famous bookshop. He left Afghanistan in September 2021, arriving in the UK as an asylum seeker, living first at a Home Office hotel before being moved to his council flat in Southall.

Bibi Rabbiyah Khan told me that she worried about her children and grandchildren. Her family had moved to London in the 1960s, when she was eight years old, and she recalled her father joining efforts against racism. ‘At the time it was the National Front.’ The events of this summer, she said, are a wake up call for the community: to overcome divisions and fear, and draw on the support of interfaith groups, local authorities and anti-racism groups. ‘That's what saved London – people stood up. There’s a tree in the mosque courtyard that was donated by our Jewish brothers and sisters: it’s a testament to our need to come together.’

Across both campaigns, I found the swell of anger at the Tories undercut with disenchantment with Labour: ‘two sides of the same rusty coin’, Mohamad called them. ‘They are not reliable’, a 22-year-old teacher in Ilford said. ‘They are not true to their word.’