I recently visited a friend who has gone to live in a nursing home in Ceredigion. I immediately fell in love with the home. The staff were just wonderful, very professional in their dealings with the residents but fun and caring. According to the Labour Government being a carer in a nursing home is a low-skilled job. I beg to differ. I’ve worked in residential homes myself and in people’s own homes. The responsibility is huge.

The staff at this particular home is very diverse. They all speak English but amongst them are Welsh speakers, needed as residents with dementia who are Welsh language first will cope better when conversing in Welsh.

Like the home, any visit to a hospital or surgery will bring you into contact with doctors and nurses from all over the world. Our NHS would fall apart without them. My only concern is that we take such professionals from countries where they may be needed more than in the UK. How would we cope if our waiting lists were even longer than they already are! Our universities too are places where diversity is welcome and a positive thing, not only for the income they bring but because we learn from different cultures. It widens our perspective.

I migrated to the UK 50 years ago. I came to marry a British man, already spoke English, and was willing to do any job, including fruit picking, before starting university 13 years later. Funnily enough, when I was still in the Netherlands, I became friends with young British people who wanted to spend some time there and they funded themselves by working in the canning factories which was horrible work. So much for British people not wanting to carry out certain jobs!

Living in Ceredigion, I’m friends with people from every continent of the world (except Antarctica). Like me, they have settled here, are integrated and work hard. I think diversity helps to make Ceredigion such a wonderful county.

During the Brexit campaign in 2016 I spent a lot of time on street corners talking to people. I was part of a group from all political parties except the Brexit Party. Or did they still call themselves UKIP then? Ceredigion became known as the most pro-Europe constituency and those of us campaigning to remain in the EU were proud of that. Yet, many people who stopped to discuss, expressed feelings that were unpleasant to me, some of them were pretty denigrating with comments such as ‘you should go home.’

Home is where my husband is, where my children, grandchildren and friends live, here in the UK. I explored the issue of home in my first book entitled Home? I needed to come to terms with the Brexit vote. I was grieving. People like me with passports from EU countries outside the UK didn’t get a vote, even though the outcome affected us badly. Not being allowed to vote hurt. At the time I’d been working and volunteering, paying taxes and NI for 41 years, yet I felt unwanted and not valued. Twice I went to London for the big demonstrations to demand a second referendum and it felt good to be among a million people who wanted the same. But in the end, I had to learn to get on with my life in Brexit Britain.

Keir Starmer’s warning that the UK risks ‘becoming an island of strangers’ is not only hurtful to people like myself, his language is downright dangerous. His comments are cheap and the Labour Party’s bending to Reform’s rhetoric is nasty. Quite frankly, I’m disgusted by them.