Why Can’t We All Just Get Along

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Iain Dale 2020

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Source ISBN: 9780008379124

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Dedication

For John,

whose love I have shared for 25 years

Epigraph

‘Now that every word is taken down and that the speaker knows that he is addressing not a private club, but a gathering that may embrace the whole nation … he must walk delicately and measure his paces; he cannot frisk and frolic in the flowery meads of rhetoric; he dare not “let himself go”.’

Lord Curzon, The Rede Lecture, University of Cambridge, 6 November 1913

‘Over the past two decades, national political and civil discourse has been characterized by “Truth Decay”, defined as a set of four interrelated trends: an increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increase in the relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact; and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.’

World Economic Forum, 2018

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents

7  Prologue

8  Introduction: The Decline in Public Discourse

9  Part One: MEDIA

10  Chapter 1: Our Love/Hate Relationship with Social Media

11  Chapter 2: When Opposites Collide

12  Chapter 3: The Art of the Political Interview

13  Chapter 4: Thanks for your call, what would you like to say?

14  Chapter 5: Fake News, Bias and Spin

15  Part Two: POLITICS

16  Chapter 6: The Language of Politics and the Media

17  Chapter 7: The Political Virus

18  Chapter 8: Why Language Matters

19  Chapter 9: Changing Your Mind and the Art of the Apology

20  Part Three: ISSUES

21  Chapter 10: Brexit: The Angry People of Leave and Remain

22  Chapter 11: Why Racism Matters (and Immigration Is Good)

23  Chapter 12: Crime and Punishment

24  Chapter 13: The Opium of the People

25  Chapter 14: The Gay Thing

26  Chapter 15: The Language of Business

27  Chapter 16: Calling Occupants of Planetary Dogma

28  Chapter 17: The Fraudulent Debate about Poverty

29  Chapter 18: Do We Really Love the NHS?

30  Chapter 19: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life

31  Epilogue: 50 Ways to Improve Public Discourse

32  Acknowledgements

33  Epigraph

34  About the Publisher

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Prologue

Publication date was set for 28 May 2020. The publicity plan was in place. I was booked to appear at thirty or so different literary and political events during May, June and July. I was pumped. Ready for action. Why Can’t We All Just Get Along … was set to be the publishing sensation of the summer. OK, I exaggerate to make a point, but what could possibly have gone wrong? As Harold Macmillan would have said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ Or coronavirus, to be more precise.

And it’s because of coronavirus that this book is being published more than two months later than planned and why I’m writing a prologue.

In some ways the timing could not have been better, because the rows in the media and among some politicians have brilliantly illustrated many of the points I make in the following pages.

Nuance is a word you will read a lot over the coming 300 pages. In the debate about coronavirus it hardly featured. On social media some reckoned that Boris Johnson deliberately engineered policies to ensure tens of thousands of older people would die, which, given that it was the older generation who largely voted him into power, is a bit of a counterintuitive view to hold. Others clearly regarded him as the nation’s saviour, and how dare anyone question any aspect of the government’s response. It was yet another example of how social media divides and rules without seemingly caring a jot about the consequences for our public discourse.

There’s little doubt that the coronavirus crisis has deepened the disconnect between the media and the general public. Part of this growing mistrust comes from the daily press conferences, where a succession of journalists have seemed to delight in asking ‘gotcha’ questions; challenging the minister on duty to apologise for this, that or the other; or enquiring whether they were ‘ashamed’ of failures to deliver on promises. To the public, these questions were designed to generate headlines for the journalists themselves (or their organisation) rather than to scrutinise government actions or tease out more information and/or an explanation of policy.

There was little nuance or context. When health secretary Matt Hancock announced a target of 100,000 Covid-19 tests per day by 30 April, this target was gold-plated by the media into a pledge, from which he would not be allowed to resile.

I genuinely think it would have been impossible for Winston Churchill to have fought the Second World War with a twenty-four-hour news media in full cry. I saw a tweet the other day featuring a suggestion of how a lobby journalist in 1940 might have posed a question at Churchill’s daily press briefing …

Winston, under your leadership we’re out of Europe, which the BBC fought against. Immigrant workers are staying away. The army has no PPE and ran away at Dunkirk. Hospitals are underfunded. We have no allies in Europe. You failed to stop bombers attacking London. The shops are empty, the economy is devastated and you missed an opportunity to escape from a German-led Europe. Why do you not surrender and resign after your failures?

Many a true word spoken in jest.

When it fell to me to announce live on air that Boris Johnson had been taken into intensive care, I saw both the best and the worst of human nature. I received a lot of texts and tweets from diehard Labour voters and political opponents saying they wished the Prime Minister well; some were even moved to tears by the news. Others, however, saw fit to tweet their delight. Boris Derangement Syndrome took on a whole new form, as evidenced by thousands of despicable tweets that expressed the hope he would suffer as much as possible and even die.

This is not to excuse government. The daily press conferences were a mistake. There was an imperative to say something new, yet often there was little new to say. Tired mantras were repeated day after day. ‘We made the right decision at the right time.’ ‘We’re straining every sinew.’ ‘I’d like to pay tribute to …’ ‘We mustn’t forget that behind every death is an individual story.’ It seemed to many that the politicians lacked basic human empathy and automatically reverted to robotic answers.

While I certainly blame the media for getting it wrong in this crisis, politicians cannot escape blame either.

All the issues raised here are examined in great detail in this book, and although it was intensely irritating for its publication to be delayed, in a way the messages contained in it are even more relevant than when I started writing it in 2019. How we answer these questions will determine the kind and quality of media and public discourse we’ll be getting in the future.

It’s all summed up in something I tweeted on 23 April 2020, which was seen by 1.6 million people.

Every journalist/columnist/commentator (including me) in the broadcast and print media needs to look at themselves in the mirror and answer this question: how have I contributed to the fact that I am less trusted than the people I am supposed to hold to account? Discuss.

On the bright side, the country coming together each Thursday evening at 8 p.m. to applaud the NHS and key workers has been heart-warming to witness. When it first happened, I interviewed the then Labour Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, immediately afterwards. He had been out on his street clapping away and I had been watching it on my TV screen. We both became a bit emotional and turned into blubbering wrecks.

While the response to coronavirus has engendered some pretty big divisions, the whole lockdown has allowed people time to reflect on their life priorities and to rekindle old friendships, albeit virtually, and has encouraged neighbourliness and a more real sense of community spirit. Political enmities have often been cast aside in the national interest. The collective sense of national grief over the tens of thousands who have fallen victim to coronavirus has proved to me that the answer to the question posed in the title of this book is that, yes, we can get along if we really put our minds to it.

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.

A fascinating discussion on the merits and demerits of taxation ensued, and although I’m by no means an economic expert, I felt I more than held my own. Towards the end, the subject of Brexit came up and I explained why I thought Brexit offered many opportunities as well as posed some economic threats, and why we ought to talk more about the economic opportunities rather than just concentrate on the threats as most of the media loves to do. I said I thought that there were huge opportunities for British manufacturing to revive, which provoked a man in the front row to laugh derisively. I asked him why he was laughing, but instead of engaging me in argument he said: ‘Ninety per cent of what you have said is shit.’ There was a collective intake of breath from the one hundred people in the audience.