Solidarity built my town. Division won’t save it

Siân Summers-Rees, Chief Officer of City of Sanctuary UK

My first memory is of being on a sledge. I was very small. It was during the great snow of 1982, and my dad had loaded it with tins of food.

We went door to door through the snow, delivering to older neighbours in Caerau — an ex-mining town in Maesteg, one of the most deprived areas of Wales.

A few years later, I went with him again, this time delivering food to striking miners and their families.
I didn’t have the words for what I was witnessing then. I do now. It was solidarity. It was community. It was what Wales, at its best, has always been.

I grew up lucky, and I knew it. Both my parents had good jobs — my mum was a nurse and my dad a technician at the local paper mill. Before that, he’d worked in the docks in Cardiff as an engineer on ships, a life that brought him friends from across the world.

He didn’t use words like “equality” or “social justice”. He didn’t need to. His life expressed those values. He welcomed everyone, without question. And he would have been appalled — genuinely appalled — by the Wales some politicians are now trying to build.

Our neighbours in Caerau had very little. My grandfather — an ex-miner and union representative — spent his days helping people write letters to the council, untangle their finances, navigate systems that never seemed designed for them.

He taught me something I’ve never forgotten: systems matter, and some are built to keep certain people down.

I went to study law in Kent, convinced it was a route to justice. That belief didn’t last. Tutors told me to tone down my accent. A judge at a moot competition told me my arguments were good — it was just a shame I was Welsh.

And then I met Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s father, around the time of the Macpherson report. That meeting changed everything. The law, I realised, does not protect everyone equally. The systems I had trusted were not neutral. They were not innocent.

That realisation has shaped my life. It is why I have spent my career working with people seeking sanctuary, standing alongside those the system is stacked against.

Pressures

Now I am back in the town where I grew up. And my life is shaped by the same pressures so many Welsh families face.

I have a child with special educational needs. I care for my mother, who has disabilities. I watch friends — brilliant, capable women — forced out of work because the demands of caring for their children are overwhelming, and the support simply isn’t there.

People in my community cannot put food on the table. They cannot afford to heat their homes. They fight, exhausted, to have their children’s needs recognised by systems that no longer have the resources to respond. This is everyday life for many people in Wales. And it makes me furious.

But I know what is causing it. And it is not the refugee families who have come to rebuild their lives in towns like mine.

The reason people are struggling is not migration. It is that wealth has been hoarded, public services have been stripped back, and working-class communities like the one I grew up in have been systematically left behind.

This is not accidental. It is a choice — one that serves those with power, who benefit when we are encouraged to look at each other instead of at them.

Fear

The fear being stoked — of people who look different, speak differently, come from somewhere else — is corrosive. It shrinks our communities. It makes people wary of their own neighbours. And it is not new.

It is one of the oldest distraction techniques there is.

My father would have recognised it immediately. He worked alongside Somali sailors in the docks, welcomed people into his home, and understood — without ever using the language of politics — where the real lines were drawn.

Working-class Welsh communities have always been places people come to, and move through, in search of work and a better life. That is the history of the valleys. That is the history of the docks.

Welcome is not an abstract idea here. It is part of who we are.

And I am tired of watching politicians try to rewrite that story. To tell us our communities will be stronger if we turn inward, if we close ourselves off. They won’t be. They never have been.

Hope

What gives me hope is what has always given Wales hope: ordinary people showing up for each other. The quiet acts of solidarity I see every day — food shared, lifts given, support offered without question, across differences, to people who now call our town home.

My dad delivering food on that sledge.

That is the Wales I love. And it is still here, if we choose it.