DAVID THOMPSON: Not Reading The Room.

From the Stage pages of the Guardian, a reminder of which concerns – and by extension which citizens – simply don’t matter:

A compelling drama about refugees living in Britain could be one way to defuse the rising anger and anti-migrant sentiment in the UK, according to the award-winning actor Jonathan Pryce, who said great TV or film could “open up” the issue.

As if the issue weren’t already foremost in a great many minds, perhaps due to unhappy first-hand experience. Note, too, the conflation of migrants and refugees. As if those arriving in vast numbers, welcome or otherwise, legally or not, were some homogenous mass of human sorrow, and thus, rather conveniently, impossible to refuse.

Read the whole thing. As a young man, Pryce was the star of one of the very best films about living in a hellish dystopian society:

Apparently, he doesn’t realize that’s what he’s promoting these days, despite Old Blighty’s myriad attacks on free speech. As Thompson writes of England in 2025, “at the moment we’re way past the point at which the alarm started flashing. And the longer that friction continues, and the more that the concerns of the natives are dismissed or denounced or made taboo, the uglier the pushback is likely to be.”