“Are they shouting hello?” “No, I think they’re shouting for help.”
It took us a few minutes to realise that the ever-so-friendly family waving at us from the sea shore were about to drown. Surprised by a fast incoming tide, the rocks they were standing on had become an island and the water was rising.
We called 999.
It was the first time I had seen a helicopter. The noise was immense as it hovered and then lowered and relowered a man on a rope until he had plucked each imperilled human into the hold.
It was all so perfunctory. As though they did this every day. Maybe they did.
What strikes me looking back is what they didn’t do.
They didn’t throw down armbands for the family to put on just in case. They didn’t drop planks of wood for a raft to be built. They didn’t jump into the water and swim around to show them how an escape could be made.
Of course they didn’t. It was a crisis. And they knew would what work. So they did it. Who would do otherwise? Surely all of us – faced with any sort of crisis – would focus 100% of our energy and resources on what is most likely to work? Wouldn’t we?
Does knife crime count as a crisis? Over 100 young people lost their lives in the last five years, so I think it should.
Maybe though – in this case – we don’t really know what works? No, that’s not the case – the evidence is pretty clear. If we want less children to die we need more mentoring, more therapy, more family support and more police in the areas where violence is high.
So surely that’s what we do. Isn’t it. We wouldn’t do unproven things here, would we? It’s a crisis.
Except we do.
Last year, the charity I lead – the Youth Endowment Fund – published new research that showed that three of the main methods we use to reduce youth violence are pretty much unproven. There is no clear evidence that putting police officers in schools, providing ‘bins’ for people to anonymously surrender knives or running anti knife-crime adverts saves any lives.
Despite this, over the last three years, this country has spent time and money on these three approaches. Maybe the country is just flash for cash at the moment?
But hang on, just because there is no evidence yet that these things save lives – that doesn’t mean case closed. Maybe they do work and we just don’t have the evidence yet.
That’s possible. There have not been really rigorous trials to see whether these things work. (The charity I lead is keen to conduct some just in case these are in fact great solutions.)
But – here’s the thing. There is also no rigorous evidence that throwing planks to make a raft with at people drowning at sea is a bad idea. But we don’t do it. Why not? Because we expect the coastguard to focus on stuff that’s known to work.
In a crisis, we expect the emergency services to do what works. We expect an ambulance to arrive with a defibrillator not a pot of leaches, a police car to pull up with handcuffs not a tickle stick and a helicopter to bring a winch not some planks.
Don’t the children at risk on streets deserve the same?
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If you want to know what works to save lives, the YEF Toolkit summarises 2000 trials. It’s as though Which Magazine have produced a magazine on how to reduce violence. www.youthendowmentfund.org.uk/toolkit
How has someone I never met became someone whose presence I miss? How has the loss of someone who never offered an opinion in public felt like the loss of someone who was on my side? How did one specific woman born on a specific day of a specific year in a specific place in a specific class come to represent the best of us and all of us?
I listened the day before yesterday to people talking about her on the radio. They described a woman that they knew – that they didn’t know. They spoke of losing a member of the family, a grandmother, a godmother. They described someone who somehow connected with us and connected us with our past, our present and with each other.
There are some wonderful stories of the Queen. My favourites have one thing in common: they show how she connected with people, how she reached across boundaries and how she had a rather wonderful sense of humour.
I love the story – 20 years old now – of when she hosted Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. At this time, it was illegal for the women of Saudi Arabia to drive and shameful for a man to be driven by a woman. As some of you may know, our queen was quite a driver.
Tourists walking on the Balmoral estate would describe being surprised by a fast moving, battered land rover bumping along the road towards them and then be even more surprised when they realised the driver was their monarch.
When Prince Abdullah came to visit the Queen invited him to Balmoral, where he was hosted with full honours. After lunch one day, the Queen asked her royal guest whether he would like a tour of the estate.
An initially hesitant Abdullah agreed. The royal Land Rovers were drawn up in front of the castle. As instructed, the Crown Prince climbed into the front seat of the front Land Rover, with his interpreter in the seat behind.
The driver’s door opened and in climbed not a man, but a woman. Abdullah – I assume – opened his mouth to protest. I presume he stopped him time when he realised he knew this woman. The Queen didn’t pause. She sat down, turned on the ignition and drove off at pace. Allegedly he intervened only to ask his interpreter if she would slow down a bit.
In 2011, no member of the Royal Family had formally visited the Irish Republic for 100 years. There had been no official visits since the country had become independent through armed struggle. In the period in between, thousands of lives had been lost in the troubles and the Queen’s dear friend Lord Mountbatten had himself been murdered by a terrorist attack. When it was announced that she would visit, it was news around the world. Everyone was watching. The potential for something to go wrong was immense. As a result those advising the Queen became even more cautious than normal. For example, when it was proposed that the Queen should start her speech with some words in Irish, this ‘crazy’ idea was immediately boycotted. What if she got it wrong? What if it was misunderstood? What if people thought it inappropriate? No, no, no.
But one person had other ideas. A week before the state visit, a former British diplomat went to see the Irish President, Mary McAleese. He pulled an old envelope from his jacket pocket and persuaded the president to jot down a few words in Irish. Reluctantly she did so, warning him that the idea had already been vetoed.
And so, as Elizabeth rose to her feet in Dublin Castle, the first British monarch to speak publicly in an independent Ireland, it had been established that her first three words should be simply: “President and friends”. She stuck to them but it sounded a little different from normal (watch for the ‘wow’ from the President of Ireland).
My favourite story though is the time that two people met her without knowing it was her. You might think ‘surely not’…
How was it she – a rich, landed, lady of the aristocracy born between the two world wars – connected with people who were so different from her and each other: A Saudi prince, the Irish people, two American tourists?
A colleague of mine once said that the key to leadership was this: ‘make sure people find you to be exactly the same person each time they meet you.
This is what the Queen was. Consistent. The same wave, the same look but above all the same decency, kindness and commitment to service.
Underpinning all of this was a very real faith. In her Christmas message eight years ago, she said this to us all. “For me, the life of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace is an inspiration and an anchor in my life. Christ’s example has taught me to seek to respect and value all people, of whatever faith or none.”
But it is not just her consistent decency that has seen some of us surprised by tears since Thursday. It is something else. Her constancy.
In a world full of change, she was always there. As Helen Lewis has pointed out she was six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe, three years older than Anne Frank, nine years older than Elvis Presley. She was older than nylon, around longer than Scotch tape. She pre-dated The Hobbit.
The Queen was Just. Always. There.
I go to church. Today, I was asked to speak on a story in the Bible called “the woman at the well”. It’s a great story. In it, Jesus heads back to see his family. To get there, he has to walk through a place called Samaria. Samaria is somewhere that Jews like Jesus generally avoid. Why? Because the Jews and the Samaritans really don’t get on. During his journey he meets a Samaritan woman who gives him a drink from the nearby well. The two get talking. (Again, an example of someone meeting royalty without knowing it.)
So, what do they talk about? They talk about ‘the holy place’. The place they each go to reflect on their faith and to remember who they are as people. For the Jews that place is the Temple of Jerusalem. For the Samaritans, it is the mountain of Gerizim.
These two places provide stability and reassurance. They are a constant, consistent presence in times of trouble and celebration. They bring and keep the people together.
The woman asks Jesus a question. It’s basically this one: Which is better – the mountain or the Temple?
And Jesus says something unexpected. He doesn’t diminish the value of either place.
No. Instead he says something else. He tells her that both of these ever-constants will pass. Neither the Temple nor the mountain will be here forever. They may seem constant but they are not.
But for Jesus this sad news is not bad news.
Jesus tells the woman that although the Mountain and the Temple may pass, the God that they worshipped on both will not. He is with them and will be with them.
This week, we have lost a constant in our lives.
She is gone.
But that which she represented has not. What we valued about the Queen remains constant. The values of authenticity, kindness and service remain in the way we choose to live, the way we choose to treat each other and the way in we connect with each other.
Breaking news. Labour’s-by-election-candidate-caught-in-scandal-shocker! I don’t like to gossip so this is just between you and me. Labour’s selected candidate for the Batley and Spen constituency, Kim Leadbeater, is friends with … (you won’t believe this) …. a Tory. I know. Disgusting.
How do I know this appalling smear is true? Yes, you guessed it, dear reader, I am in fact that Tory. Wow – it feels good to confess this appalling sin.
These despicable cross-party friendships are becoming increasingly rare. Large numbers of us – both here and in America – no longer have friends with a different political view. Two-thirds of committed conservatives in the US and half of committed liberals tell pollsters that they don’t have a single friend on ‘the other side’. Here in the UK, a fifth of Leave voters and a quarter of Remain voters don’t have a single friend who voted the other way.
We live in a puritan age. People don’t just ‘have a different opinion’, they have ‘unsafe opinions’. People are no longer ‘wrong’, they are ‘evil’. Today – after centuries of appalling race relations – nine in ten Americans say they would be perfectly happy if their child married someone of a different race. In comparison, only eight of ten Remainers would be happy if their child married a Brexiteer, only seven out of ten Republicans would be happy if their child married a Democrat and only half of Democrats would be happy if their child married a Republican.
Thing are no better online. A fifth of us have unfollowed or unfriended someone simply because we discovered they had a different political opinion.
If anyone has reason to fear where these divisions lead, it is Labour’s candidate. You might not have heard of Kim. You have heard of her sister. Her sister was the last but one MP for the area. Her name was Jo Cox. It will be the 5th anniversary of her death this month.
Jo is how I know Kim. I never met Jo but her belief that ‘we have more in common than that which divides us’ inspired me. After her murder, I joined a group of people committed to bridging some of these divides. In my second week on the job, Kim bounded into the office. Before I could warn her of my right-of-centre views, she had given me a massive hug. I have counted her as a friend ever since.
Jo’s murder was almost five years ago now. Since she died, our democracy has too often felt like a cultural battle. The opinion polls seem clear on who is winning that battle. It is less clear who is losing.
The obvious answer is the Labour Party. To say they are languishing in the polls feels overly positive. Labour’s voters fall into one of two groups: a working-class, older group and a younger, metropolitan, mostly graduate group. Both are pulling hard in opposite directions. Tony Blair once said that he wanted to make the Labour Party “the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole.” 25 years later, his mission seems complete. The Labour Party fully represents the country it seeks to serve. Just like the nation, it is totally divided.
Here’s the sad truth. The real loser from these divisions is all of us.
Democracy is about more than voting. It’s about more than mugging up on the manifestos. More than seeing your side win. Democracy is about compromise. It’s about seeing the other side’s point of view. Why? Because democracy only works if there is a ‘demos’ – a group of people who are prepared to compromise with each other.
On the other side of the Atlantic, compromise has become a dirty word. Democrats and Republicans are more like tribes than political parties. Unless we are careful we will end up the same way. That’s not the British way. Off twitter, the average Brit isn’t tribal. We don’t care who came up with an idea as long as it works. Our divisions threaten that. As America has shown, it’s much easier for a leader to convince their followers that half the country can’t be trusted, if their followers never meet half the country.
By her words, Jo Cox showed us that it doesn’t have to be this way. Our politics don’t have to divide us. By her friendship, Kim showed me she sees things the same way. That’s why this Tory will be cheering on his Labour friend on July 1st.
I can remember it easily: jumping up and down, beer spilling out of my glass, celebrating with strangers. If I close my eyes, I can see the pub unfolding as we walk in. We came early to get a good spot. We chatted, nestling the beer I thought we wouldn’t get served, watching the highlights of the previous match over our shoulders. I can feel the nervousness in my stomach before kick-off. Would we score? Could we stop them scoring? Would I get served another beer? I was sixteen: old enough to sneak into a pub and young enough to believe England could win the European Championship. It was all we talked about that summer. When we weren’t revising for our exams, we dreamt of England winning the trophy.
We weren’t the only ones. Media interest was intense. England had not hosted a major football tournament for thirty years. The tabloids were making up for lost time. Even the pop charts had surrendered, with the official England song camped at No. 1. Keen to escape the pressure, the England team departed on a pre-tournament tour of the Far East. Away from the media, the players would have a chance to get to know each other on the pitch with a couple of friendly games, and off the pitch with a couple of drinks. Except that it wasn’t just a couple of drinks.
Six days before the first game, the front page of the UK’s best-read newspaper told the world that the England team had drunk so much before flying home that they’d wrecked the plane. A bill had been sent to the team for damage caused to seats and TV screens. A day later, photos followed. Here were the players: drunk, swaying in a Hong Kong nightclub, their clothes covered in rips. The headline printed above a picture of the team’s most famous player, Paul Gascoigne, simply read: ‘DisgraceFOOL’. The rest of the media piled in. One newspaper printed photos of drunken England players next to convicted hooligans and asked its readers to spot which was which.
England’s opponents took a different approach. The Dutch had a superb team and were favourites to win. They’d reached the semi-finals at the last European Championships, and won the tournament before. That spring, the majority of their players had represented perennial Dutch Champions Ajax in the final of the biggest club competition in Europe. Unlike England, they had world-class players in nearly every position. Unlike England, their team preparations exuded confident professionalism – as this photo below, with their manager Guus Hiddink standing among them, suggests. As the match kicked off, my heart hoped for a draw, but my head feared a drubbing.
I still can’t listen to the commentary or watch England’s four goals without the hair standing up on the back of my neck. And what goals! It was a drubbing – but England were the ones handing it out. As we cheered every goal, the commentator caught the mood of a nation. ‘It gets better and better,’ he said. My friends and I left the pub that evening on top of the world.
How had it happened? It would be neat to say that it was down to English talent, ingenuity and guts. But the real story of that night was the Dutch. The explanation starts with that photo. Amid the sophistication, class and good food, is another story altogether – one that becomes clear when we spot the difference between the table at the back, on the left, and the other two.
The Dutch team was mostly White, with a small group of highly talented Black, Surinamese players. That group – Michael Reiziger, Edgar Davids, Patrick Kluivert and Clarence Seedorf – felt like members of a different team. Reiziger told the press: ‘The four of us form a separate group. We talk easily with each other, because we think the same way, come from the same culture, and make the same jokes.’ Before long, the Dutch press had a name for them – ‘the Cabal’ – and were reporting that the Cabal were not happy. They felt under-appreciated by a manager who thought they should talk less and listen more; undervalued by an Ajax team that had accidentally revealed that their White teammates were being paid up to six times more than them; and underused by tactics that left them watching more games than they played. Edgar Davids was a superb player, who dominated Ajax’s midfield. Unselected for the first game against Switzerland, he fumed from the bench and watched in amazement as another of ‘the Cabal’ was substituted off just a third of the way into the match. When the game ended in a draw, Davids exploded. Accosting a delighted Swiss journalist, he declared that the problem was the manager, Gus Hiddink, who was clearly in thrall to the older White players. The only solution was for him to ‘get his head out of players’ asses so he can see better’. That outburst sealed his fate. Hiddink immediately sent Davids home. The Dutch team fell apart. They had fractured well before the game against England.
Why wasn’t the English team similarly divided? It was no less diverse, being composed of Black and White players from different clubs on very different wages who just weeks before had been competing passionately against one another. For days since the aeroplane debacle, they’d faced relentless attacks from the English tabloid press, high on moral indignation; the disapproval of a public readying themselves for disappointment; and even the censure of Parliament, with some MPs demanding players’ resignations. But their booze-fuelled antics and the constant criticism that followed did not divide the England team. It brought it together. The players refused to identify who had caused the damage on the plane – despite it being down almost entirely to mercurial midfielder Paul Gascoigne. Instead, they all paid the bill and asked their spokesman to tell the press that they accepted ‘collective responsibility’. Years later, Teddy Sheringham, the scorer of the fourth England goal that night, told a reporter: ‘We had so much stick going into the Euros in 1996. All we did was make it work for us. There were no real divisions among the squad … the feeling was that we were one unit.’
What weakened the Dutch team wasn’t a lack of talent – they were more skilled than the English. It wasn’t their differences – the English were just as diverse. What the Dutch lacked was a moment that could overcome those differences; a shared experience that created a sense of being ‘us’. What started as a national scandal became a period of intense adversity that unified the team. In the words of England’s manager Terry Venables, it ‘made all the difference’.
You have just read the prologue of my new book Fractured. If you liked it, you’ll like the book. Find our more here.
Six years ago I started work on a book. At the time, Brexit was a typo and the worst thing Donald Trump had done was a bad cameo in Home Alone 2. The book was about our divisions and how to heal them. I finished it on the day the Capitol was stormed. That book was named Fractured. Today, Fractured was published.
I wrote Fractured as I am sick of no-one having any answers for how we heal our divisions. It simply sat in the ‘too tricky’ box. This is my answer. Let me know what you think ….
Half of Brits and 80% of Americans say that their country is seriously divided. They are right. Most of our friends (if you look carefully) are people ‘just like us’.
We tend to cluster with people of the same income, age, education level, race and politics. Half of graduates have no friends without degrees. Most pensioners know no-one under 35 (apart from grandchildren). A fifth of Leavers and a quarter of Remainers have no friends who voted the other way. Half of us have no friends from a different ethnic group. But our largest divide remains class. A British Barrister would have to invited 100 people round before inviting a single person who is unemployed. But why are we so divided?
Why is this? It is not because of something ‘out there’. It is something ‘in us’. We bias towards people who we think are ‘like us’. Academics call this homophily. I call it ‘People Like Me Syndrome’. We’ve always been like this. Birds of a feather do flock together.
There is nothing wrong with this – to some extent. Not everyone wants to listen to my love for the West Wing or why Teddy Sheringham’s pass to Shearer in Euro ’96 for the highlight of all human history.
But if ‘People Like Me Syndrome’ takes charge, our societies become divided and bad stuff happens. Rich kids use their networks to get the best jobs. Democracy is vulnerable to leaders who exploit division. We become more anxious and new ideas spread slower damaging the economy.
But the good news is that we have always found ways to contain ‘People Like Me Syndrome’. We have done it by creating institutions that connect us with people we didn’t choose to spend time with. Like what? Well, you can see these institutions throughout history. As nomadic foragers, we used rituals. As farmers, we relied on religious events, rites of passage and feast days. As factory workers, we had clubs and societies, mandatory schooling and the workplace. These institutions lack a name. I call them the Common Life.
Human history has been an ongoing fight between People Like Me Syndrome (pulling us apart) and the Common Life (putting us back together). So why are we dividing? We are dividing because the Common Life that brought our grandparents together is vanishing. We are much less likely to join clubs and societies, we now expect to choose schools for our children and the places that we work. The result? We end up surrounded with people ‘like us’.
Is this new? No. The foragers’ Common Life (of rituals) vanished when we became farmers. The farmers’ Common Life (religion & feast days) vanished when we became factory workers. Now, our grandparents’ Common Life (clubs, local schools & local workplaces) is vanishing. So what?
Well, the question we should have been asking all along is “Why is the Common Life that connected our grandparents declining?” The good news is we have an answer. The bad news is that the two villains of the piece are two things we Westerners really like: Choice and Change.
It was Choice that killed off the mandatory parts of the Common Life. We want to choose the school for our children and the place that we work. Of course we do. But the result is we are choosing who we spend time with. Which brings People Like Me Syndrome back in.
What about the voluntary parts of the Common Life? No-one was forced to join the club or society, attend the feast day or join in the animalistic ritual. To attract us in, these institutions had to perfectly fit the society of the day. But when society changes fast, the voluntary Common Lives doesn’t adapt. They change too slowly. Our world has changed fast over the last 75 years and our clubs and societies have not kept up. They have become less attractive. Every generation since 1950 is less likely to join.
So how do we fix our divisions? We will need a new Common Life. A new set of institutions that connect us with people we didn’t choose to mix with. People less ‘like us’.
So, what do we do? We have three options.
Option 1 is to do nothing: Just wait for a new Common Life to turn up. It will happen, but the last one took 100 years, the previous one 1000 years. This is the strategy of almost every Western nation. That’s fine but we should stop whining about our divisions.
Option 2 is to slow down the rate of change: Increase welfare, protect failing businesses, slow the movement of people, slow down technological change. To some extent – by accident – this is what the Nordics have done. A slower rate of change created space for clubs to adapt. The result is that people join clubs much like before. But I don’t think this is a credible option – just look at how much technological change is heading our way. So what is the final option?
The final option is to allow change but reduce choice. It is to require us to take part – at some point in our lives – in some activities that brings us together with people who we didn’t choose to spend time with, people less ‘like us’. There is a country that has taken this path. It is Singapore. It has been hugely open to change. But it has created spaces where people have to mix. Schools are more mixed, people have to do national service and even housing is allocated to achieve a mix. Of course, we are not Singapore! But that doesn’t mean a Western version of this is not possible. What might it look like?
It might mean a month of community service for school children as part of the national curriculum, 6 sessions for new parents on how their child’s brain develops where we meet other parents, a retirement programme that gets us involved in the local community when we stop working. Three new institutions to bond us together. Three institutions selected to be popular, worth doing for their own reasons but also – critically – able to bring us back together. A new mandatory Common Life.
You might think the idea of a mandatory Common Life is inconceivable. Fine but what’s the alternative? So far – when it comes to our divisions – we have brought warm words to a gun fight. Garden parties, British values, some money for charities. It’s never going to work.
Also, every single big political changes in history – from joining the EU to leaving it, from the NHS to the welfare state – started off as inconceivable. Until they became imaginable, plausible, likely and ultimately unavoidable.
The aim of my book is to start the journey from inconceivable to unavoidable for the idea of a mandatory common life. Whether you want to stop me or help me, don’t miss out on Fractured. It will change the way you see our world. https://t.co/1DHZWKEeN7?amp=1
Less than a month now until Fractured is available in bookshops. It was a complete thrill last week to find that the latest parcel to arrive at the Yates house wasn’t some loo roll, a bag of seed for the garden, of even a kitchen utensil. It was the publisher sending me real physical copies of Fractured for the first time. Amazing. Can’t wait for everyone to be able to get their hands on it 🙂
The shop was five minutes from my house. Single storey, 10 metres by 5, sandwiched between two side streets and the last in a line of shops. Oh, and it was cursed.
The first tenant wanted to sell high-end fashion. My mum and I drove past when we saw the sign. “Gone in 6 months”, we said. And it was. The curse was born.
A travel bookshop came and went. Then a body building store. And of course the mobility scooters. The curse ruled them all. They opened, suffered and died. Each time, like experienced soothsayers, we foresaw their doom. None of them was ever going to work in our neighbourhood. Until one day, a Dominos sign arrived. The curse was lifted. The shop is still there today.
We used to scratch our heads. If we – who knew nothing about retail – could tell in 5 seconds that a shop would never make it in our neighbourhood, why couldn’t the people opening the shops? They were meant to be the experts. How was this so obvious to us but so unobvious to them?
I thought about the cursed shop this week when the smartest people in football told us all about the European Super League. On day 1 it was unveiled. On day 2 it was reviled. On day 3, it was revealed to actually be an embarrassment-causing time bomb. On day 4, the bomb started ticking and blew up.
Here’s the 64 Billion dollar question. How on earth did the richest, most powerful people in football not see how stupendously unpopular their idea was. They had devised a competition that most clubs could never enter, that threatened 200 years of football history and that sent even more money to the richest clubs. Did they outsource their ‘good ideas budget’ to the BFG who then used his dream-catching web to collect the worst nightmares of football fans while they slept?
Had they not noticed the present British Government is attempting to gain a PhD in attacking European elites doing things that normal people take against?
It was like they were trying to rile everyone up. Was there a meeting where someone noticed that the players might be onside? “Don’t worry”, a PR team member piped up, “we’ll add a cap on salaries”. “Sorted. That’s everyone in the riotously opposed camp.”
The only thing that could have been less popular was if Britain’s entry in the 2021 Eurovision song contest had been Nigel Farage singing, ‘You’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for us.”
I could see it, every football fan could see it. I suspect even my mother – who actively turns off the sports news it’s not about tennis – could see it.
Why on earth couldn’t the owners of these huge clubs see it? I mean these people have made billions from football.
Exactly.
My mum and I never cursed those shops (though I like the idea that we did). We simply knew something that the retail experts didn’t. We knew the people who shopped there. Most of us just didn’t want to spend £300 on a dress, read a book about a place we couldn’t afford to visit or look like an also-run in the World’s Strongest Man. We did like pizza though.
Why are these football billionaires so ignorant about football? They aren’t. They are ignorant about people. It’s easy to be ignorant about people. Just don’t spend time with them.
Most of our ideas of what most people think come from the people we surround ourselves with. That’s why most rich people think they are about average in wealth and why most poor people think the same.
Our biggest divides aren’t about race. They are about wealth. If you’re a relatively rich person in the UK (say a doctor, a headteacher, a barrister) you would have to invite 100 friends around before you got to someone who is unemployed. It’s so easy for us to live in these bubbles. It can be seductively pleasant to do so. But it makes us seductively blind.
And if you are rich enough to own a £68m yacht (Liverpool’s owner), a £100m home in Kensington (Chelsea) or an entire country (Manchester City) then it’s probably fair to say that you don’t often have normal people round.
So, how did these rich successful people do something that every normal person knew was stupid. Simple. Because they don’t know any normal people.
On 17th April, they will put him in a box. And we will stop and slow and pay respects to a man we did not know.
They had put him in a box before, of course. A one year old refugee lying where fruit should have been, saved by a British warship, fleeing from home.
He would not find another home until his marriage. Asked what language he spoke at home, he had replied, “What do you mean, ‘at home’?”
We should not have known him. He did not seek our attention. But that marriage thrust it upon him. To a young woman he just called Lillibet.
His father dead, his mother sectioned, his own birthday ‘corrected’ due to a changing of the calendar. He was a man without roots. A man at sea. But Lillibet meant a home, a root to wrap around, a family. He would tell his mother-in-law, “Lilibet was the only thing in this world which is absolutely real to me.”
But why is this man real to us? We never knew him. His missed calls do not sit on your phone. His emails don’t wait in your inbox. He was never ‘about to pop round’.
The husband to another Elizabeth wondered the same. Walter Bagehot saw in the English constitution two parts – different in form and function. The first was the Commons, the Cabinet, the Prime Minister, the Civil Service. It’s job was ‘to govern’. Optimistically, he termed it ‘The Efficient’.
The Monarch was different. It was not part of ‘The Efficient’. No, Bagehot declared it, ‘The Dignified’. Its job was not to govern. It existed to ‘excite and preserve reverence’.
Reverence. Meaning “Profound, adoring, awed respect.” Is this what we felt this week when we heard of Philip’s passing. I don’t think so.
It may be how we feel about the Queen. She is – to many of us – more than just a person. People have opinions. She does not. People have emotions. She does not. She sits apart from us and yet is in service to us. And for it, most of us revere her.
But this is not how we feel about Philip.
He had opinions. He had emotions. And he showed them. He said the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong people. We heard him do it. He was impatient. He was rude.
He told a 13 year old boy who wanted to visit space that he was “too fat to be an astronaut”. He refused to stroke a koala bear while visiting Australia, “Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease.” He asked a Scottish driving instructor, “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?” At the end of a royal visit to Belize, as the Queen thanked their hosts on the quayside, he was heard to shout from the deck of the Britannia, “Yak, yak, yak; come on get a move on”.
Even the secret service – presumably reasonably good at watching their words – couldn’t help note in their statement of his death that his visits were “never dull”.
No Philip’s death does not move us because he was ‘The Dignified’. He was no blank canvas for us to project fears, hopes and aspirations onto. He was too flawed, too real and too human for that.
And yet we – who knew him not at all – are moved. And I have wondered why.
Until last night. As I packed up at the end of day of work, my wife said to me, “I just keep thinking of her sitting there without him.”
It is not in reverence that we feel Philip’s passing. It is not in awe. It is nothing to do with Bagehot’s vision of The Dignified.
The vision is much more human and simple. It is a vision of a woman sitting alone. A woman sitting without the man whose failings and fortitude have stayed steady beside her for 73 years of life.
We are moved by Philip’s death not because of a grand Dignified truth about the monarchy, but because of a small dignified truth about us all. That we are human. That we need one another. And this man was – in the end – another’s Consort. And now, he’s gone.
10 inkblots – mixed in form, colour and movement – are presented one by one. A single question is asked: “What do you see?”.
So, what do you see? A bird? A bat? A rib cage?
Know this. Your answer matters. We are not assessing your eyesight – we are assessing you. In America, custody battles are settled on your answer, medical diagnoses made, insurance claims declined. This is the Rorschach test.
We stare at the same image. The same flecks of paint, the same colours, the same blots. And yet, our mind forms different patterns, different images, different interpretations. Why?
Because we are different. We come to the inkblots carrying our own history, our own pains and our own joys. Like a particle changed by observation, the inkblot becomes loaded with ‘us’. It has no secrets to reveal but it gladly spills ours.
This week the UK government conducted the ultimate Rorschach test. It was called Report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, simply – after its Chair – the Sewell Report.
As news of the report spread, images coalesced in readers’ eyes. Strong vivid contrasting images. To many it was “poisonously patronising”. To others, “intelligent common sense”. Some saw it was “selected and distorted”. Others that it was “sensible and interesting”. Some knew it was “an insult”. Others, a “vital contribution”.
There is much to say about the report. But I will leave that to others. My eye is elsewhere. For the most interesting thing is never the inkblot, it is the image it creates inside each one of us. And amidst those divergent images, we can detect a truth about our country.
Many Black Britons see in the report a purposeful ignorance of the heavy weight of their lived experience. The daily weight of feeling watched, assessed, and typecast. The weight of telling their children how to behave around people who are meant to be there to protect them. The weight of preparing children for a world that will mark their CVs more harshly, discount their predicted grades more fiercely, and stop and search them more frequently. Many feel tired of an impossible choice: complain and be stereotyped; say nothing and feel complicit. Many are tired of speaking up and tired of sitting by. Tired of hoping and tired of having no hope. They do not need to read the report. They can see the image it forms. It is an image that mocks their experience.
Many White Britons are also tired. Tired of feeling in the wrong. Tired of hearing that they are privileged when they don’t see it in their pay packet. Tired of fearing judgement for the wrong word, the wrong thought, the wrong cause. This isn’t meant to happen to them, they feel. They shouldn’t be the baddie. They used to be the heart of the story of the country – they say – and now they feel pushed aside. They do not need to read the report either. They can also see the image clearly. An image of them no longer being blamed.
Let me not forget at least one more group. Those who are doing well. Those who always do well. We are careful to do well. We search for the right side of history and slide into it . We check our privilege but mostly no more than is needed. Enough to appear anti-racist. But rarely enough to cost us. Sometimes we reflect on how unique we are. For we alone are free of baggage. Though it was odd – we sometimes think, how other people seem to get knocked over when we turn around. We do not need to read the report. We can see the image clearly. It tells us to nod along and keep our head down. To return to our nice lives as far away from contentious things as possible.
The Sewell Report was news this week. But it was not the real news. No, the real news lay in those divergent images. And yet as the paint on the inkblots dries, there is one image we can all see . The image of our country more divided than united, more hurting than healing, more longing to be heard than able to listen to one another.
The Batley Protests ask a profound question about who we are. No-one seems to have noticed.
Batley Grammar School is locked down in the middle of a lockdown. Protestors gather around the gates. Asian British men standing in small groups. They stare at each other. They check their phones. They watch the nation’s media watching them.
The school is quiet, empty. Pupils stay at home. It is March 7th for them all over again. Laptops out, cameras off, teachers teaching into the void. Apart from one.
The press says he is in police protection. The headmaster says he is sorry. The Cabinet Minister says he shouldn’t be. The columnists say everything. All of if definitively. “The teacher was in the wrong”. “The headmaster is in the wrong”. “The protestors are in the wrong”. “This is everything that is wrong in modern Britain.” What on earth is actually going on?
The day was so normal, well ‘new’ normal. Children came to school. Lessons were taught. Masks were worn. Bells rang. Time slowed in a normal RE lesson on a normal day in a normal school as the teacher showed the class some images. Images of the Prophet Mohammed.
On twitter, someone must have offered a prize for the most blatantly obvious statement. I learn that ‘Britain is not part of the Middle East’, that ‘Sharia law isn’t the law of the land’ and ‘this isn’t Pakistan neither’ that ‘it isn’t illegal to blaspheme’. So much has changed this year, maybe I should be glad for these certainties.
Amidst the noise, there is the echo of an agreement. Everyone agrees that what Batley is about. It is about freedom. Our freedom. Your freedom. My freedom. The debate about Batley School is about our freedom to live in a free country doing things freely.
Except it really isn’t.
Here’s the thing about the things in those ‘blatantly obvious’ tweets. They are blatantly obvious. Britain isn’t in the Middle East. Sharia is not the law of the land. This indeed isn’t Pakistan. It isn’t illegal to blaspheme. Here’s another one. It never will be.
It’s not a debate if everyone agrees. It’s a rally.
Of course you can find some Brits who say they would like Sharia to be law. Of course there are some who claim they would like blasphemy to be illegal. But surely you don’t really believe that someone in power is listening to them?
There is more chance of a Boris Johnson banning Eurovision than banning blasphemy. We will see the US government ban guns before we see the UK government ban Mohammed’s image. Loudly demanding your right to produce the images of Mohammed is as mad as loudly demanding your right to sing Enya songs. No-one wants you to do it but no-ones planning to stop you. It is a fake battle against an non-existent threat. Fighting for this critical right allows us to feel brave and righteous while entirely missing the point.
Here’s the point. The debate around Batley isn’t a debate about freedom at all. It’s a debate about identity. It’s not about what we can and can’t do. It’s about who we are.
Imagine for a moment that the teacher hadn’t shown the class an image of Mohammed that day. Imagine instead that he had shown them a collection of remembrance day poppies. Ten, maybe twenty of them, resting together in a metal bowl, placed in front of the class. Let us imagine that, from his pocket, he had produced a box of matches. He took out a match, lit it, dropped it and set the poppies ablaze. Once the fire had gone out, he turned the bowl upside down and stamped on the ashes.
Or perhaps he hadn’t done this. Perhaps instead he had brought in an article from the 1950s America about race relations. He had read it aloud without noticing that in the third and firth paragraph was the n-word. He had not stopped but had read it out. He had then spent some time loudly discussing exactly how to pronounce the word.
Or maybe he did neither of these. Maybe he brought in a picture of the Queen and taught a lesson on republicanism. In the middle of the lesson, to illustrate his point in a way everyone would remember, he spat at the picture and ripped it in two. Or maybe he decided to act out Othello. To catch everyone’s attention, he arrived in class in blackface.
If he had done any of these four things, what would you expect to happen?
I think an apology would be pretty essential. If I was the Head I would probably make my own apology as well. I would likely suspend the teacher temporarily while I conducted a short investigation. This, of course, is exactly what has happened so far in Batley.
But hang on. I thought we lived in a free country! The teacher hasn’t broken the law. Why on earth should he apologise for burning poppies, using the n-word, spitting on the Queen or wearing blackface? But most of us think he should. We don’t think he should be fired. He definitely shouldn’t be arrested. But an apology feels like the right thing to do.
Why is this? He hasn’t actually hurt anyone. No-one was harmed by the poppy-fuelled fire. No-one got even a paper cut off the picture of the queen.
But this isn’t about harm. It is about the fact that some things feel to some of us – for want of a better word – ‘sacred’. In a way we can’t fully explain, these actions – burning poppies, using the n-word, abusing our head of state, wearing blackface – deface something that is sacred to us.
But who counts as ‘us’?
This is what Batley is really about.
All of us have things that are ‘sacred’ to us – from the queen to the flag, our race to our faith. The question is: whose sacred things matter and whose don’t?
When I was at school, if a teacher had read out the n-word or dressed up in blackface, no-one would have apologised. These things were not sacred to ‘us’. Today, that has changed. Some will see this as a sign of wearisome ‘wokeness’. I don’t agree. It is a sign of unity. A small recognition that ‘us’ includes Brits who are Black as much as anyone else.
The protests in Batley have provoked a pointless debate. Should it be illegal to show pictures of Mohammed. Of course it shouldn’t and it will never will be. They should be provoking a much more profound debate. Who are we and who gets to decide what is sacred and what isn’t?
