Diagonal Walking

by Nick Corble

  It is surely no coincidence that the Brexit referendum came at the very moment that annual net migration into the UK peaked, at 300,000.27 Since the referendum, the total number of workers from the eight eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 has fallen by 154,000.28 It may come as a surprise to many, but in modern times Britain has historically been a net exporter of people. It became a net importer during the 1990s, driven in part by overseas students (as I saw at Keele, these were now a strong feature of most universities, whereas they were a rarity in my day) as well as a strong economy. The wave of immigrants from the east of Europe began after those countries joined the EU. The strange thing here is that the UK, at the time, took an extremely liberal and welcoming attitude towards these new workers, in fact, much more liberal than many of our EU partners.

  Equally strangely, the UK chose not to implement29 all sorts of restrictions on migrants from fellow member states. For example, we extended a similarly open door to people from Croatia after it became a member in 2013, despite provisions which allowed the imposition of limits. Belgium, for example, still operating within EU laws, throws out migrants who don’t get a job within six months. Equally, most other members limit access to those precious benefits until they have built up some years’-worth of contributions. In other words, if people coming into the UK from other EU states was such a problem, it could be addressed without leaving the EU.

  This suggests a couple of things. First, a general ignorance of, or failure to engage with, how the EU works. This seems to highlight a basic problem amongst some when it comes to the EU – a rejection of all its works, whatever the actual facts, bringing to mind Groucho Marx’s famous comment that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. Why would the UK need the EU when its sovereign is head of the Commonwealth (and apparently will remain so after the Queen’s death, as she recently made clear)? Why does the UK need the EU when, after all, dammit, it won a world war on its own (er …)? The UK has always felt like a reluctant member of the EU, like someone who agrees to come to a party but refuses to participate in any games, preferring instead to grumble about having to bring a bottle and to complain about the noise. It also adds to the suggestion that the referendum result wasn’t driven by information, but by sentiment. This resistance to facts on the part of those preferring to leave the EU (fuelled by advice to ignore experts), and over-reliance by those preferring to remain on what they regard, rightly or wrongly, as incontrovertible truths, remained a feature of the whole Brexit debate throughout my summer walk.

  Brexit has been called a class war that the middle class lost. There may be some truth in this, but I suggest it’s a mistake to see it in purely class terms. The so-called ‘elite’ lost to a coalition whose bedrock was formed of the dispossessed and concerned working classes, for whom the EU acted as a convenient scapegoat for, well, just about everything. On top of them were a right-leaning upper-class elite safe in the knowledge that their wealth would insulate them from the economic damage of Brexit. Indeed, many of this latter group may well profit from the deregulation and general free-for-all that will follow from the jettisoning of all that dull, but often boringly necessary, stuff emanating from Brussels. Add to them, those harbouring ideological objections to EU (such as my libertarian Airbnb host, or those who fear a European superstate), and throw in the many who had equally strong psychological objections to foreigners telling us what we could and couldn’t do, and you just about scraped a majority. Furthermore, you have a complex coalition, hard to pin down and categorise.

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  When I wrote Walking on Water, I saw a country at the beginning of a technological revolution. Nearly two decades later, I saw plenty of evidence of a country trying to cope with the consequences of that revolution, now in full swing and probably still with some way to go. This was exciting, but also troubling. Jobs had been lost, old industries had disappeared, high streets had been decimated. The landscape had become dotted with faceless metal boxes operating as distribution centres, offering a fraction of the jobs the old factories used to provide.

  Industrial change has always been with us. I passed through many a town which defined itself in pre-industrial times through a single product: shoes, flat caps, brewing, vellum, straw hats … but no longer. This process continued into more modern times, with other towns, Stoke with its potteries, Dagenham and Luton with its cars, suffering similar fates. With the loss of these industries went a loss of identity, of purpose, replaced by people employed in a diversity of ways, not all of them obvious, visible or tangible, and certainly not in a way that brought them together in a common cause. The sense of disconnect brought about by these changes is not a revelation, but it would be foolish not to recognise it as a reality.

  The demise of the high street is a particularly visible sign of change, and one that adds further to the loss of community. This is directly attributable to technological change in the form of internet shopping, and represents a distinctive and fundamental change from the England I travelled through in 1999. If high streets offer a place for communities to gather, then we’re in trouble, because they’re struggling big time. Restaurants have been replaced by fast food joints, as people either can’t afford to eat out, or prefer to retreat to their castle to do so, at the same time missing out on the communal benefits of preparing and sharing a meal together. Delivery services like Deliveroo, which already employs 15,000 riders, are also becoming more popular, as I saw on my walk. During 2017, the home-delivery market rose by 11 per cent30 at a time when mid-range restaurant chains were suffering. Ironmongers, bakers and dry-cleaning outlets have been replaced by nail bars, tattoo parlours and tanning salons – the useful, in other words, by the vain and mindless.

  A number of previous staples of the high street went to the wall or suffered near-death experiences during my walk, including national chains serving both the top end of the market such as House of Fraser; the very bottom, such as Poundland; and the middle, such as Toys R Us. What might be labelled experience shopping has migrated into regional centres, Liverpool for example, Lakeside, Bluewater or Maidstone, condemning the smaller centres to a slow death by a thousand store closures.

  Luton and Northampton were both extreme examples of this, although the latter also offered some hope. Warned beforehand that it was, I think the phrase used was ‘a shithole’, I had a fun day there, largely because an attempt had been made to revitalise the town centre through a music festival. The idea of offering a platform for a community to come together and interact as a community, to show some civic pride, was a positive one. One that other towns suffering from the decline of retail, and communities gradually losing their sense of identity, might want to emulate. Northampton was doing something, even though its council was bankrupt. This suggested to me that civic pride has to come from the bottom up, not led by local authorities or driven by a website like Luton’s LoveLuton.org.uk.

  Imagine what might be possible if there was more local autonomy. My experience in Higham Park suggested that once mechanisms could be found, local people did want to engage at a more micro-level. I found similar initiatives in Churchover outside Rugby with its village hall pub, and in Egerton with its attempt to create a community shop. It’s at the local level where the bread and butter issues, the things that affect people every day and make a difference now, are found. Maybe it was time to reconsider the relentless centralisation of power? Not so much I want my country back, as I want my county/city/town/locale back.

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  Another issue it became impossible to ignore during my walk, and a clear change over the past twenty years, was the problem of homelessness. I came across regular evidence of the high levels of people living on the streets. Of sleeping bags and tents colonising shop doorways almost immediately after shopkeepers closed their doors. An article31 I read during the walk suggested that in 2018 there were 8,000 rough sleepers on any given night; that’s up from 1,800 in 2010.<
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  Again, I’m not offering any particular insight here, the problem is well documented, but what I saw shocked me, and I felt powerless to do anything about it. There were examples of kindly souls trying to help those whose lives had reached this point (step forward Liverpool), but these were the exception rather than the rule. How a country with the sixth biggest economy in the world (for now) can allow this to happen is damning. At the same time, there’s a certain irony that at a time when people seem unduly concerned about migrant refugees across the English Channel, they appear largely indifferent to tents on their own streets.

  As it happened, there was a big government policy announcement32 during my walk with a strategy supposedly designed to eradicate the problem. The issue with this was that by the next day the announcement had become fish and chip paper. There was a sense that the government wasn’t being sincere, that it was just paying lip service to the problem. More considered analysis later backed this up. Of the headline £100m in the plan, half was money already allocated to the problem and the rest was money ‘re-prioritised’ from other programmes. Within hours, the headlines were all about Brexit again, and it struck me that the two things weren’t unconnected.

  Homelessness acts as a very visible reminder of how fragile the modern economy is for many people. Pay growth over the past decade has been at its lowest since Napoleonic times, and is lower than it was a decade ago. People may be in jobs (the country’s unemployment rate is impressively low by European standards), but they are low-paying, stagnant jobs, offering little hope of advancement or an increase in pay. For too many, the only way to get more money is to work more hours, but even that route offers only a marginal improvement in living standards, with any extra money easily gobbled up by an unexpected bill. For these people, the system isn’t working; capitalism is letting them down.

  Too many people have lost hope in a brighter future. Having walked through them, it comes as little surprise to me that Stoke, Northampton and Luton voted so decisively for Brexit. They all came across to me as places tottering on the edge of viability, both financially but also, and perhaps more importantly, as entities. The referendum was a perfect chance to deliver a kick in the pants to the politicians who were supposed to be looking out for their interests.

  Those same politicians were now preoccupied with a single issue, one which the country had vented its wrath on, but was now largely indifferent about. It was a strange state of affairs. There had been a narrow vote in favour of perhaps the biggest constitutional change to the country for decades, and yet no one really understood it, or was even that exercised over it. But, rather than focus their attention on the underlying reasons behind the vote, to dig deeper to understand and address its roots, the government was completely preoccupied on the symptom, rather than the cause, of the country’s unease.

  To make matters worse, as the so-called negotiations went on during the summer of 2018, the more it became clear that things weren’t as straightforward as they’d been portrayed during the inadequate run-up to the referendum. As a consequence, not only was the government focussing on the wrong thing, it was focussing on something that they must have known it was impossible to deliver in a way that would satisfy even a significant minority of the country. Instead of showing leadership, which involves standing above the fray, seeing the bigger picture and setting out a case for something, the government came across as obsessed with managing a problem that was unmanageable, and doing even that badly.

  By the end of the summer the government was so fixated on delivering Brexit it had ruled out a new Queen’s Speech, effectively abdicating from its responsibility to address other national priorities. At a time when the country is facing perhaps its greatest challenge since the end of the last war, it also has its weakest politicians, on all sides, in living memory. The irony here was that that same government was being led by a Prime Minister who had begun her term of office by setting out her stall as the champion of the JAMs – those who were ‘just about managing’ – when she and her colleagues were showing themselves incapable of managing themselves!

  This isn’t a party political point, more a comment on a whole political class. The Government was getting away with it because we had an Opposition that was either invertebrate or invisible, shying away from the real issues, often pursuing their own internecine agendas, probably in the knowledge that they couldn’t do any better anyway. One argument being posited by politicians was that failure to deliver Brexit would undermine trust in politicians and the political system. This was particularly ironic given the damage they’d inflicted on their own profession over the years, not least through the expenses scandal, and a view they were perpetuating through their collective mishandling of Brexit. This wasn’t just undermining the system, it was laying dynamite and pressing the plunger.

  Brexit aside for one moment, this lack of leadership was doubly important because the country was facing a series of problems that were fundamental, even existential if failure to address them led to a break-up of the Union – not the European Union, but that between England and the other parts of the UK, notably Scotland and especially Northern Ireland. Politics aside, these problems also presented basic issues of morality, of respect, of fairness, all of which were themselves fuelling dissatisfaction and nurturing the sense of puzzlement I sensed all around me.

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  Technological change isn’t the only challenge we face. Many others have been well documented elsewhere and include demographic shifts, how we organise and pay for health and social care, providing affordable housing, making our education system fit for the twenty-first century and, as I’ve already hinted, democracy itself. By the latter I mean, how we harness the changing ways people communicate, interact and debate: to create a proper Demos, in the Ancient Greek sense of a common political entity, a way for ordinary people to engage with the political process.

  It feels like we’re living in a country only capable of coming up with analogue responses in a digital, multi-dimensional and increasingly fluid world. Our systems are transactional rather than inspirational. On the one hand we have middle-grade managers rather than leaders, whilst in the real world we have digital masters of the universe laughing into their lattes while they develop incredible influence over our lives. So far, they have exercised this power relatively benignly, but it would be a massive assumption to think that’s always going to be the case. At a time when artificial intelligence threatens yet another fresh wave of economic change, we have MPs who have to be told how WhatsApp works.

  Amidst all this, it is little wonder if people regard the current democratic process as increasingly irrelevant to them, as politicians jettison their principles in favour of their careers, openly lie in their promises, actually break the law and pretend that policy papers that hold bad news don’t exist (until, it turns out, they do). Instead, they ‘keep calm and carry on’, increasingly indifferent to the fact that their political leaders are flailing around like flags in a storm.

  I don’t know the answer, but think it’s a question worth asking – how do we ‘do’ democracy in a digital and increasingly diverse age? At a time when nothing is simple (in particular Brexit, as the summer of 2018 demonstrated in spades), a simple majority no longer constitutes a mandate. Delegating decision-making for five years to MPs might have worked when you felt there was some trust or integrity in the system, but these have evaporated like early summer dew.

  Our current means of exercising democracy are two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world. People, especially the younger generations, identify in all sorts of different ways, not only by nationhood, but also by sexuality, religion, region, music, ethnicity and so on. Life is complicated, and the way we conduct our Demos needs to reflect that. There need to be mechanisms for discussions, rather than shouting matches. Disagreement needs to be respected not vilified. Healthy debate should be something to celebrate, not regarded as a zero-sum game. As I discovered durin
g my walk, perhaps some fresh thinking is required on how our education system encourages critical thinking, rather than a focus on knowledge? Without a different approach, the direction of travel is towards a simplistic, dogmatic form of politics, where a so-called Leader of the Free World regards it as acceptable to communicate using the vocabulary of a primary school child.

  Further evidence of the inadequacy of the binary or transactional approach to politics also emerged during the walk in the increased use of ugly language to describe those who held opposing views. This was true both of politicians (Ian Duncan Smith, hang your head in shame) and newspapers. Rather than tolerance, we heard of ‘traitors’ or of people being told to ‘like it or lump it’ if they didn’t favour Brexit, or even to emigrate! This isn’t leadership, it’s demagoguery, and use of this language poisons the democratic well, aggregating into nastiness and even violence. These examples need to be called out.

  I’ve already highlighted the much-mooted generational gap, and an increasing awareness of this grew on me during my walk. It’s difficult to point at particular evidence for this, other than the tone of the conversations and encounters I had along the way. Some, especially with older people, those whose careers were near an end or had already ended, would speak almost conspiratorially about how things were better in the old days. At a time when the future is a little bit scary, the past can offer a comforting refuge. Maybe it’s always been the case that the old feel protective towards the past, which they see as their legacy, but to my subjective ears, it seems to have intensified since I last took the temperature of the nation.

  One stark example of the generation gap that frequently came up during my walk was how difficult it was for the young to buy property. This was a concern raised more by their parents than the young themselves, who presumably saw becoming a homeowner as so far out of their expectations it wasn’t even worth considering. Houses now cost seven times annual income, compared with three times a generation ago. This represents a significant challenge, one more that has got buried under the Brexit mountain.