Why Can’t We All Just Get Along

Introduction

The Decline in Public Discourse

‘So you’re a shock jock, then?’ is a question people often put to me when I say I work on a speech radio station. No. I’m not. I’m the very antithesis of a so-called ‘shock jock’, or at least I like to think I am. I am always up for a robust debate, but instead of causing division and hatred, I like to think I try to bring people together and give people a platform to argue a case I might not agree with, but I respect. Hence the title of this book.

Over the years, I have grown hugely frustrated and a little bit angry about the decline in the way we talk to and debate with each other. It doesn’t have to be this way, if only we could all exercise a little self-restraint and recognise the importance of politeness and mutual respect. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? It really is. We don’t need to return to the days of deference, but it’s within us all to behave better both online and offline. I include myself in that.

How did we get here? Why has the internet, and social media in particular, exacerbated this growing trend towards rudeness and hatred? Those are two questions I want to explore in this book, as well as search for some answers.

This is not an intellectual book, mainly because I am not an intellectual and don’t pretend to be one. It’s written from experience and it’s written from the heart. It is about how we communicate with each other, but it’s also a book that uses my life experiences to illustrate the themes I address. It’s not an autobiography, but it is autobiographical.

I’ve divided the book into three sections – broadly, media, politics and issues. In some chapters I’ve adapted previous pieces of writing that I’ve done over the years and incorporated them into the narrative here.

Rather fittingly, the inspiration for this book was a tweet. It was just before Christmas in 2018, and I said this.

FYI I’m very happy to engage in polite debate on any issue. I probably respond more than most. However, if you call me a c**t, use profane language or insult me for no reason, I will mute/block you. No questions asked. You’d never dare say it to my face so don’t do it here.

I can’t remember what someone said to provoke that tweet but it was no doubt one of the usual insults I get from random strangers on social media on a daily basis. Someone at the Mail on Sunday noticed and asked if I would write an article for their New Year’s edition on the state of public discourse. And that’s how I spent Boxing Day 2018. I wrote that so far as political discourse was concerned, 2018 plumbed poisonous new depths of anger and abuse.

It was more than a year to forget. To borrow from a now familiar Brexit mantra, politics seemed to crash over a cliff and into the waves of intolerance.

It was a year that saw our then prime minister, Theresa May, told to ‘bring her own noose’ by one Tory MP, another warning that ‘the moment is coming when the knife gets heated, stuck in her front and twisted – she’ll be dead soon’. It was a year when Boris Johnson mocked Muslim women who wore burkas for ‘looking like letter-boxes’ or ‘bank robbers’.

And there was the sight of Labour MP Luciana Berger arriving at her party’s conference with a police escort for her own protection after being targeted by the sort of vile anti-Semitic abuse we thought had been consigned to history.

Yet what we heard and saw in public was mild compared with what went on behind the scenes – the private abuse our politicians reserved for each other and the sort of thing I’ve encountered all too frequently as a political pundit and broadcaster on television and radio.

Take the time I sat with a Remain-supporting minister in a TV studio, ahead of broadcast. As we chatted, he was spitting blood about the ‘fucking lunatic Brexiteers’, saying how he would personally ensure a special place in hell for them. Minutes later he was serenely explaining to the interviewer that the country must come together, while he and his colleagues were working in tandem to provide a united government.

The noted liberal historian Simon Schama seemed to have caught a bad case of Brexit Derangement Syndrome when, on the weekend following Boris Johnson becoming prime minister, he thought it appropriate to call him ‘fatso’ in a tweet objecting to a perfectly normal journalistic metaphor about the cabinet being put on a war footing:

Can someone please stand up and start shouting (it wont [sic] be the weasel Corbyn) ‘YOU ARE NOT CHURCHILL, fatso, and the EU is not the Third Reich. You do not have a war cabinet because THERE IS NO WAR. How DARE you invoke the sacrifices of those [who] fought one!’

It is difficult to imagine the great historians of the past indulging in such public venom. Would A. J. P. Taylor have deigned to insult Harold Macmillan in such a way? Would Thomas Babington Macaulay, perhaps Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century historian, have called Lord Palmerston a ‘bedswerver’ (a nineteenth-century word for ‘adulterer’)? Had Twitter existed in 1920, would G. M. Trevelyan have shouted to Lloyd George that he was a RANDY OLD GOAT?! Doubtful.

Brexit Derangement Syndrome (BDS), more recently replaced by Boris Derangement Syndrome, has driven normally sane people round the bend. Sufferers are obsessed by only one thing and lose all sense of perspective. Their normal calm empirical analysis and assessment is trumped by cries of righteous and illogical outrage.

Scroll forward to New Year’s Day 2020 and little seemed to have changed. Well, in Australia at any rate. Australian Green Party senator Mehreen Faruqi tweeted that Prime Minister Scott Morrison should ‘just fuck off’ over his refusal to provide more funds for firefighters to combat the terrible bush fires. An ABC journalist told a Twitter correspondent to ‘go fuck yourself’ and a Tasmanian Labor MP told a tweeter to ‘get a life, you loser’. All in a day’s politics …

Was it ever thus? To a degree, perhaps, but things are getting worse. The coarsening of public life has taken on a frightening new momentum – and it seems that people can no longer exchange opposing views without questioning their opponent’s parentage.

I gently chided the Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen for her tweet decrying Iain Duncan Smith’s knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List. I suggested that instead of ranting about how evil he was, it might have been more polite and deft for her to congratulate him, while still making clear her opposition to his policies. I didn’t expect to be thanked for my troubles, but even a grizzled old hack like me was quite shocked at the response. For two days afterwards I could barely look at my Twitter feed. It was infested with the hard-Left spitting their bile at me. All I had done was dole out some well-meant advice, from one electoral loser to another. Coming across as a bad loser is never a good look.

Yes, for all its undoubted benefits, social media is a big part of the problem. A minor disagreement can spiral out of control into a vituperative slanging match within seconds, and frequently does so.

Take the mild-mannered Labour MP for Bermondsey, Neil Coyle. Piers Morgan had made a comment about murdered Labour MP Jo Cox on early morning television. Responding immediately, Coyle tweeted this:

It’s early doors Piers but I say this hand on heart: go fuck yourself. You’re a waste of space, air and skin. Trying to use Jo against us whilst encouraging the fascists is shocking even for a scrote like you. You make me sick.

The tweet was later deleted and an apology issued.

The anonymity, spontaneity and instant nature of social media – especially Twitter – encourages people to say things and behave in a way they wouldn’t dream of doing in normal life. I know. I’ve been guilty of it myself on too many occasions.

As one of my followers put it: ‘On the radio, Iain Dale is nice, nice, nice. On Twitter he can be an absolute beast.’ And I could do nothing except admit that she was right.

Twitter has become a hateful place, an absolute sewer, and if I didn’t work as a pundit and commentator, I’d happily remove myself from its clutches. Upset the Cybernats (somewhat vicious online supporters of the Scottish National Party), the Corbynistas, adherents of Leave.eu or the pro-Europe #FBPE (Follow Back, Pro EU) cult and you enter a living Twitter-hell for days on end.

Just look at the response from Corbynites to anyone who was concerned that anti-Semitism was being tolerated in the Labour Party. Or imagine the reaction you’ll get from the so-called Cybernats if you dare to criticise Nicola Sturgeon.

As the columnist Suzanne Moore tweeted after a particularly bruising encounter with trans activists: ‘One thing Twitter has ruined for ever is the fantasy that Left-wing people are nice. What a bunch of b*******, spewing out nastiness …’ That’s not to say things are any better on the Right. They’re not.

Yet social media is not the sole cause of the problem – far from it. The problems are both wider and deeper. Political conversation itself is now, to be frank, debased. Political debate has become a binary world, with everything in black and white. Shades of grey have been driven out.

What, for example, should we make of those such as Labour’s Laura Pidcock, who proudly declared that she couldn’t possibly be friends with a Conservative? It was perhaps karma that she went on to lose her North West Durham seat in the December 2019 general election.

She, like a growing number of us, appears to live in an echo chamber, determined to reinforce existing views. God forbid that we should question our own side.

If you’re on the Left, you think Channel 4 News is the most balanced news programme on TV.

If you’re on the Right, you probably believe the BBC to be a hotbed of liberal Lefties. Whatever happened to research, to careful questioning, to open-minded debate. To nuance.

If we’re not willing to engage with people who hold different views, how on earth can we challenge ourselves – or those in power?

It was one of my 2019 New Year’s resolutions to play my own small part and aim at a little more civility in political exchanges, whether on Twitter or elsewhere. I told my (then) 125,000 followers that I would mute or block anyone who insulted me using four-letter words.

It’s not that I’m a snowflake, but that sort of abuse is plain wrong. Most people wouldn’t dream of calling me something obscene to my face, so why should I let them do so on Twitter?

Even children are now brought up to hate. Hate him, hate her, hate Manchester United, hate the Tories, hate the EU.

How much is the ‘B’ word responsible for this change in climate, for making foul-mouthed rants seem somehow normal? Has Brexit helped unleash and legitimise argument by insult?

It’s clear that the referendum and ongoing argument have opened a Pandora’s box of anger and rage. Yet that cannot be an excuse for descending into common abuse.

For example, as a Brexiteer, I believe Britain will be better off outside the EU. At the same time, I cannot prove it and must acknowledge the fact.

We need a sort of collective resolution – on the part of those in power and from the nation in general – to grow up. Yet, somehow, I doubt we’ll get it.

It surely comes to something when it was left to Her Majesty the Queen to ask the nation, politely, to behave with more civility, which she did in her 2018 Christmas message. ‘Even with the most deeply held differences, treating the other person with respect and as a fellow human being is always a good first step towards greater understanding.’

Despite this toxic political debate, there is massive demand for live political discussion and debates all around the country.

Last summer I hosted a run of 24 shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I was also invited to Panmure House in Edinburgh, the home of Adam Smith, to take part in a panel with economist and comedian Dominic Frisby and Heather McGregor from Heriot-Watt University, who made it her mission to restore Panmure House to its former glory. We were each deputed to give our favourite Adam Smith quote and explain our reasons. This is the quote I chose:

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.