by Nick Corble
Being an active participant in debate has never been easier – if you know how. My experience of becoming involved with social media has led me to the belief that these skills will only become more important as the limitations of the way we still conduct democracy become more apparent. Forget the twentieth or twenty-first century, our political system seems stuck in the nineteenth century. It is inevitable, in my view, that wider, digitally based, mechanisms will be used to help arrive at a sense of the collective will in the future. Not the only mechanism, but part of the mix. We are already seeing signs of this, albeit on a facile level, with a US President who interacts mainly through Twitter, where once his predecessors may have used TV broadcasts or radio fireside chats. If you are unhappy with the consequences of the policy and decisions that result, and choose to distance yourself from these new media, perhaps you are abdicating one of your responsibilities as a citizen? Social media are a work in progress. Soon, we’ll probably regard Twitter and their like as quaint, but make no mistake, they’ll be replaced by something else.
We are living in a transitional time when it comes to digital dialogue, but those who opted out of its early days will find it harder to join in later, when it’s more developed. Opting out also leaves the field open to others, possibly with agendas we disagree with. Social media lends itself to rapid view-shaping, a gift to populists. We all need to be vigilant, and we all need to participate.
Widening the lens out from social media, impressions gained during my walk helped crystallise a view that the coming generation is much more used to (‘comfortable with’ might be pushing it) living in a complex multi-dimensional, and, critically, value-driven world. This is a world of ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ rather than polarised, binary, distinctions. Even something as basic as gender, where for most of humankind the orthodoxy has been binary, they see as fluid. Their world is not one of left/right, black/white, Leave/Remain. To them, this is an antiquated way of looking at things. When they watch the generations above them operating like this they do so with growing distain or frustration. This cannot be a healthy thing.
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Enough on social media. It’s fair to say that the planning and execution of the walk itself, and the writing of this book, although challenging, used skills I already had. This is not to boast, simply a reflection of my life experiences so far. The greater challenge for me was more personal than practical. A natural introvert, with some learned extrovert skills (in other words, I am reasonably good at presenting a more sociable side of myself to the world), engaging with others and actively listening to what they have to say, involves an effort for me.
As such, the need to interact with others on the Diagonal Walking trail, to throw myself into crowded situations, and especially the need to proactively initiate contact so I could gain an appreciation of others’ thoughts, was, at times, tough. The book starts with a missed opportunity to initiate such an exchange, and it wasn’t an isolated incident. Many times, I’d walk away from a potential encounter annoyed with myself for letting the opportunity slip. I got better at it, and in that sense it got easier, but it was never easy.
Using Airbnbs helped. They proved an excellent way to meet and chat with people in their own homes, where they were going to feel most comfortable, and I used them whenever practicable. Incidentally, this new accommodation option is an excellent example of something that new technology and different values have made possible. This Baby Boomer was astounded by the levels of trust Airbnb owners vested in their clients: the leaving of keys under a mat and, in one instance, a single woman leaving her whole house to a stranger for the weekend.
A consideration of my various hosts gives a good indication of the cross-section of the sorts of people I was able to interact with in this way. They included people who were self-employed, working in the public services, working for corporations or retired. One was a working-from-home bookkeeper, another an HR manager for a large retailer. One ran a cattery, whilst another had just gone self-employed as an art procurer (it’s complicated). I also stayed with a retired teacher and an actress, and a man living on his own who was a Housing Support Worker for people with learning disabilities. Taken together, these provided a useful contribution to the cross-section of the population I wanted to engage with. On top of these, there were traditional B&B hosts and their helpers, as well as hotel receptionists, all of whom were happy to engage with the mad man with a large blue rucksack and a few pints of sweat ingrained into his T-shirt.
This leads me on to another reflection: how happy people were generally to talk, share their thoughts and have a conversation, although with the caveat that I usually needed to make the first move. Whether this is a particularly English thing, or just part of the human condition, I can’t say. As the walk went on, I appreciated these discussions more and more, and having them was a highlight of the whole experience. Furthermore, the people I met were almost universally polite, open and friendly.
Challenge can be positive, or it can be the opposite. On a handful of occasions during the walk the voice in my head started shouting: ‘You’re in trouble here, matey-boy.’ These were the occasions when the adrenaline kicked in. One of these involved angry cows, another when I became irreparably lost. One took place on the wide-open Wanstead Flats in East London when I thought I was about to be attacked, and yet another when a probably irrational, but nevertheless very real, fear took hold of me down a quiet tree-lined track in Kent. But these only constituted a handful of occasions, which wasn’t bad going for a walk of thirty-nine days.
The physical challenge posed by the walk came as a surprise. I was expecting it to be greater. I do not regard myself as particularly fit, but prior to the walk I went to the gym and asked the track-suited custodian to prepare a programme for me to set me up for the walk. I admit here that I largely ignored it, opting instead to build up muscle in my legs via the treadmill (where I was also able to watch daytime TV with a clear conscience).
The walk was tiring, of course it was, and the opportunity to flop on the bed for a couple of hours to write up notes and fiddle with social media was always welcome at the end of a day. But … the physical challenge was within my comfort zone. There were occasions when I would think to myself, ‘Why are you doing this?’, but there was only one answer to this question: ‘Because you asked to, you idiot.’ Thankfully, there were no sprained ankles or broken bones. The ‘In Case Of Emergency’ contact card in my wallet was never needed. I did have a bit of a blister problem early on, but I solved this with some double layer socks I bought in Liverpool, something I can heartily recommend, by the way. Blisters became only an occasional irritant afterwards.
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On the subject of running sores, it’s finally time to move onto the loftier ideal of the project: the attempt to gain a deeper understanding of what makes England tick, and to see if it was possible to gain a deeper understanding of the forces behind the Brexit vote in 2016. All through the summer of 2018, the news media was preoccupied with the negotiations, providing moments ranging from high political drama to the definitive Whitehall farce along the way. However, while the news media may have been preoccupied with these details, it was my experience that the general public were not. Not once during my walk, did I have a detailed, informed, debate with anyone about the pros and cons of the decision – despite making it clear I was open to one.
To this extent, my views were not challenged from outside; I had to challenge them from within. I make no apologies for stating my position as someone who believes that our future should be as part of the European Union. I understand why it might be disliked and used as a scapegoat for wider concerns, and I equally understand that it is far from perfect – but what, or who, is? At the same time, a decision had been made and I wanted to understand what had been behind it. I wanted to engage with the mood of the country, rather than become enraged by it.
At the same time, as I’ve already mentioned, Diagonal Wa
lking was a sort of follow-up to my first book, and I wanted to get an appreciation of how the country had changed over the past nearly twenty years. It seemed to me that these two things might be connected.
First, though, some riders. This was my walk and my experience, seen through my eyes and the prisms of my upbringing, biases and prejudices. There’s an infinite variety of possible permutations of this walk. Anyone doing it, at any time, in any weather conditions, would experience a different version of it. My conclusions therefore are mine and mine alone, shared here for interest. I am just an ordinary white, middle-class, fairly privileged bloke; not a professional journalist or social commentator. I started out as confused as everyone else. This element of my journey was an attempt to rationalise that confusion. There was plenty of opportunity to do this – to think, as I walked along, largely alone, through this wonderful country of ours. I found it helpful, allowing my thoughts to brew and ferment a bit, as you’ll find out shortly. Maybe good old-fashioned thinking, and finding time for it, is something we could all do with more of.
Equally, my methodology was far from scientific. Although notionally based on the concept of a ‘diagonal slice’, a term even market researchers used only for a short while, this was only ever a pretext for the walk. In other words, and this should really go without saying but I’ll say it anyway, mine was not a representative cross-section of the population, and the evidence I collected was entirely qualitative.
Let’s start at the highest level. As well as open and honest people, I saw a country with some glorious countryside sandwiched between two contrasting, magnificent coasts. I saw random acts of kindness and people besotted by their dogs. I also saw a country that wanted to pull together, as it did for a few brief weeks during the Football World Cup, a sense magnified by the countrywide heatwave which meant we were all wallowing or suffering equally. I saw people who apologised when they bumped into you, even if it wasn’t their fault (especially if it wasn’t their fault), and I saw a wide variety of cities, towns, villages and hamlets, each existing as their own unique communities. I saw millions of individual planets all caught in their own orbits, lives spinning round on trajectories that would continue come what may, possibly altered, but still orbiting. From this perspective, it was easy to see why so many people saw Brexit in the abstract, as something that wouldn’t affect them directly, so could we all just stop going on about it and just get on with it?
All along my walk there was a slight frisson whenever the subject of Brexit came up. It was somehow impolite, almost awkward, to talk about and share thoughts on the subject, and there are few things the English hate more than being impolite, although they do awkward rather well. Not once did I see any graffiti about Brexit. Nor did I see evidence of any popular movement for or against it (with the exception towards the end of the summer when a well-financed group started a campaign for a ‘People’s Vote’). No public meetings, no demonstrations. Brexit was the topic that barely dared speak its name.
On more than one occasion, when I asked permission to record someone for a podcast, they agreed, so long as I didn’t raise Brexit. When I agreed but enquired off-mike about their reluctance, the response was typically that they didn’t feel able to be articulate on the subject. At best, those who declared themselves as Leavers would express sentiments such as ‘I just don’t like the idea of being told what we can do in our own country’ or ‘I don’t think it will be as bad as people make out’. When I was able to press for more, I was also struck by the level of passion, almost visceral at times, with which these views were held. Sovereignty was seen as absolute as basic human rights.
Those in the Remain camp spoke less from the heart and more from the head, of customs unions and single markets, despite the fact that probably less than five per cent of the population know the difference between the two. Less passionate, but equally committed; driven more by a sense of justice and logic, the Remain side of the argument remained convinced that facts would win the day. Few seemed to realise the debate wasn’t about theory and numbers, in fact the more they were used, the more they lost their resonance.
We were all confused, and didn’t know why. What was going on? There didn’t seem to be a single reason, so maybe it was a combination of reasons.
Yes, there was probably a section of the population that disliked the EU and all its devilry. One of my Airbnb hosts declared herself to be a libertarian, in favour of stripping out layers of government wherever possible. Others linked the EU directly to the demise of particular industries. Still others professed a dislike of having their lives governed from afar, a sentiment often combined with a contempt for ‘faceless bureaucrats’. These were often ideological objections, not always rooted in facts (the total number of civil servants working for the whole of the EU is a tenth of that for the UK government alone21), but that wasn’t the point. These were perceptions, and ones with roots as stubborn as an old tree. There had to be more to it than that.
Then there was the elephant in the room. The element everyone knows was part of the mix, but was the ugly secret rarely acknowledged in public. I’m talking about good old-fashioned xenophobia and, at the outer extreme, outright racism; often dressed up as patriotism. Let me state categorically that I’m not saying all Leavers are racists, but equally I don’t doubt that a proportion exist on the racist scale – they usually give themselves away once they become comfortable in your presence. It would be doing the debate a disservice not to acknowledge that a section of the voting population exists which simply doesn’t like foreigners, however these are defined.
It was my impression, gathered during the walk, that this, at best discomfort with, at worst antagonism towards foreigners, has become subtler than what might be termed more traditional racism. I saw very little evidence of hatred towards people of colour on my travels. What I did see, or more accurately, hear, however, were accents from Eastern Europe wherever I went. They could be heard on the streets, in shops and hotels and amongst Deliveroo guys. They could be seen in the proliferation of ‘International’ shops. In many people’s minds they were over-busy, over-visible, over-audible – and over here!
These outward signs of immigration are significant. Research22 has shown that people across the world tend to overestimate the degree of immigration into their country. For example when asked what proportion of the UK population they think are immigrants, the average guess is 25 per cent: roughly double the true figure. Furthermore, the average guess at the proportion of immigrants who are refugees or asylum seekers is about a third, when the true figure is actually a tenth.
This links back to the heart vs. head debate alluded to already, and to an established theory, charmingly called the ‘backfire effect’, which suggest that when people hold a view particularly strongly, facts contrary to that view can serve to entrench those views. People find alternative rationales for the supposed facts, doubting their veracity (for example ‘immigrant figures don’t count those entering illegally’) or saying the figures don’t match their experience. This is why high levels of visibility are so significant. Anyway, all news is fake, right?
Figures from the Office of National Statistics23 show that there are around 1.4 million residents of the UK originally from Eastern Europe. The largest proportion (two thirds) come from Poland and the next largest group from Lithuania, with Bulgarians and Romanians and others also in the mix. This influx, combined with the speed it happened, seems to have generated a fear of losing control, a form of xenophobia, of distrust, not really racism (because, well, they’re white aren’t they?), which it has been hard for people to process, feeding the sense that ‘proper’ English people were losing control over their own country.
This fear has been rationalised into a legitimate and reasonable grievance that these immigrants are coming over to this country to claim ‘our’ benefits, a pool of money that should be the exclusive reserve of ‘proper’ English people whose taxes have created it. This ph
enomenon is sometimes labelled ‘Nativism’. The fact that ‘they’ are actually in this country to work hard (80 per cent of these newcomers to our country are in employment24), and to do the jobs most ‘proper’ English people would rather not do, is inconvenient to this thesis and therefore conveniently brushed aside. It also assumes a ‘zero sum game’ theory of employment, that there is a fixed pool of jobs, a phenomenon that could be labelled ‘Trumpism’, as it pretty much sums up his view of the world.
Furthermore, research from the government’s own expert panel,25 the Migration Advisory Committee, has highlighted that migrants pay more in taxes than they receive in public services (i.e. not just benefits), £2,300 more a year than the average citizen, in fact. That’s a statistic that doesn’t get aired enough. This same committee has concluded that migration has little overall effect on levels of unemployment (their efforts create as many jobs as they ‘take’ from nationals), and very little impact upon wage levels. Additional evidence that this group is the new target of this new form of xenophobia, is the polling data26 that shows that people from ethnic minorities often voted in favour of Brexit in order to keep these new interlopers threatening their traditional territory (running shops, operating taxis, opening restaurants) out of the country!
