Why Can’t We All Just Get Along

I told him he was incredibly rude, as did several members of the audience. A lady then asked a question about the decline of public discourse. I replied that it comes to something when someone thinks it is acceptable to come to an august building like Panmure House and be so rude to a guest speaker’s face. Still, at least he gave me some material to start this book with!

As children we are taught to respect our so-called ‘elders and betters’ and indulge in the centuries-long tradition of deference. We repress our natural instincts to speak our minds and instead often caveat or give nuance to our real thoughts and views. At least that’s what used to happen.

The internet has seen the erosion of deference to such an extent that within a generation we’ll be able to see its dead corpse twitching. The decline of deference has mirrored the rise of division and provocation, on display every day in the worlds of politics and the media. Some will say t’was ever thus, but they lack perspective.

As the age of deference disappears, we appear to be regressing to the ways we treated each other in bygone ages, not just in politics but in much of the rest of society. The themes of most of Hogarth’s cartoons could equally comprise the subject matter of modern-day political cartoonists like Martin Rowson and Steve Bell.

It is good that the internet has given the voiceless a voice. The existence of social media and the invention of blogging have been great advertisements for the advancement of democracy in that they enable people to participate in the debate in ways they couldn’t have done before. But all advances bring dangers, whether it is in the fields of technology, medicine, media or business. It is how we respond to these potential dangers that determines whether they turn out to be good for society or not.

In the end, we can regulate the internet all we like – assuming it’s even possible to do so without international buy-in – but it’s human nature that is in question here. We like to believe that as humans we are fundamentally good and motivated by the best of intentions. The trouble with the internet is that it gives equal opportunity to those with malign intentions and whose aim is to cause disharmony and conflict. Such people are difficult to edit out of the conversation because their voices tend to drown out the peacemakers.

This has been at the core of political philosophy down the centuries. Are human beings fundamentally ‘good’ or fundamentally flawed? The French philosopher Rousseau was a prime advocate of the view that all of us are born innocent and if we became bad it is because society made us so. If we all existed in a Nirvana-type land we would all develop into thoroughly nice, well-meaning, rounded members of society without a rude word spoken between us.

Rousseau saw hurt feelings and contempt as intrinsically bad characteristics. He believed that there should be no place for criticism, judgement, blame and comparison with others. In effect, he believed that human beings are by nature without sin and therefore society is entirely responsible if these same human beings veer off the path of righteousness.

Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher who pre-existed Rousseau by a century or more, took the opposite point of view. He believed that human beings were programmed to relentlessly pursue their own self-interest, to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Human nature was defined by the permanent conflict between fear and hope. Instead of Rousseau’s world where the land flows with the milk of human kindness, in the slightly dystopian world of Hobbes’ we all live in perpetual fear and suspicion of one another. The contract that society arrives at to sustain itself is largely formed out of fear, and is then enforced by fear. Roll forward 350 years and you can see this at work in any modern-day election campaign.

Look at the way we have been programmed to fear people from different backgrounds, social classes, sexualities and races, and Hobbes must be looking down in wonderment at his own foresight. However, it is possible to argue that this world of conflict and fear is being eroded as the generations change or die out. Racial and religious stereotypes are gradually disappearing because it is easier for us to meet and get to know people from different backgrounds. Travel, the media and the internet all facilitate this. Even in the last 20 years, in modern Western liberal democracies attitudes towards gay people have been transformed. The opposite may be true in parts of eastern Europe and Africa, but the trend is there for all to see.

Just as human nature evolves, so does the language we use. The shame of using certain swear-words in modern-day discourse seems to be on the wane. Our discussion of sex-related issues is on the increase. Twenty years ago the regulators would get involved if a woman’s breast was seen on our TV screens before 9 p.m. Today they seem completely unconcerned by programmes such as Channel 4’s Naked Attraction, which revels in sending people on dates after they have seen their potential partner stark naked. It seems to me a game-show panel that doesn’t feature one or more comedians using the work ‘fuck’ at least once is considered a rarity. It surely can’t be too long before our TV shows feature full naked sex, including penetration, and there are no bars on what people say at all. TV executives will argue it’s the only way to compete with audiences on the internet, and given the decline in TV viewing, you can see their point.

As we know, on the internet, anything goes. Reaction is instant. Nuance goes out the window. The need to express a view with little time for any considered thought is imperative. Rationality is trumped by shoutiness. Someone who inadvertently says something mistakenly is immediately dubbed a liar. Anyone who questions the wisdom of open borders must be a racist. Express a view a tad to the right of Tony Blair and you automatically become a fascist. Agree with nationalising the water industry? You must be a communist.

I am regularly called a fascist by people who clearly have no understanding of what the word actually means. This is how Wikipedia defines a ‘fascist’ philosophy:

Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy … Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties.

I believe in none of those things. In fact, I am the antithesis of a fascist, given that I believe in a small state, the primacy of free markets, civil liberties, liberal democracy and racial equality, and I reject utterly any violence pursued in the furtherance of political objectives. No matter, the haters will always hate. It is perhaps just as well my skin grows thicker with each passing year. But should it have to?

There are people who fight against the sewer of abuse that exists on Twitter. The Guido Fawkes website launched an initiative called Positive Twitter Day in 2012 with the aim of encouraging people to engage in only positive exchanges. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to encourage each other to be nice and civil in our tweets?’ the site says. It has involved mental health charities and even Twitter itself is now supporting the day. What a pity #PositiveTwitterDay is only in place for one day – the last Friday in August.

Kerry-Anne Mendoza is the editor of the far-Left website The Canary. Seven days before #PositiveTwitterDay in 2019 she tweeted this.

You can fuck all the way off. Then, just when you think you’ve fucked off as much as it’s possible to fuck off, I’m gonna need you to dig deep and fuck off a little bit more.

One suspects Ms Mendoza is the type of person who ought to observe #PositiveTwitterDay.

This sort of language is, however, nothing new, as Nick Robinson noted, writing in The Spectator:

Robust discourse long pre-dates the Johnson, Trump and even Twitter eras as I have been reminded as I savour Tombland, the latest in C.J. Sansom’s magnificent Shardlake series. It brings alive the story of the 1549 uprising of the people against the elite in the Kett rebellion. Gentlemen and their briefly liberated serfs exchange splendid insults. My favourites are ‘you dozzled spunk-stain’ and ‘you bezzled puttock’.

I must remember those two insults for my next Twitter spat. They might have slightly more impact than my new insult of choice – muppet. The language may stay the same, with one or two modifications, but the ability of people to broadcast this disrespect or abuse has increased exponentially.

PART ONE

MEDIA

Chapter 1

Our Love/Hate Relationship with Social Media

‘From the streets of Cairo and the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, from the busy political calendar to the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, social media was not only sharing the news but driving it.’

Dan Rather

If you’re under 35 years of age you will have no recollection of a time without the internet, let alone social media. You probably can’t believe that mobile phones weren’t ‘a thing’ before the early 1990s. The height of modern technology then was possession of a fax machine and a Sky dish. Before 1989, Britain only had four TV channels. Before the mid-1980s, computers barely existed for most of the population.

Nowadays, most of us rely on technology to exist. We spend hours every day glued to our smart phones, which aren’t just used for phone-calls but to communicate with other people by email, text, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat or goodness knows what else. We share intimate aspects of our lives with perfect strangers. We have an online brand that we spend hours carefully nurturing and curating.

I first encountered a computer at university. I was studying German and Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. It was 1983 and as part of my Teaching English as a Foreign Language module I had to do a seminar in Computer Assisted Language Learning. Our task was to create lessons using BBC Basic, a computer language that might as well have been Swahili, so far as I was concerned. I had never had a very mathematical brain, and computer coding was beyond me. In the end I had to go to see my course tutor and ask that instead of computer coding a lesson, could I write an extra essay. Luckily, he agreed. And to think, 20 years later I would be regarded as an internet innovator. Hilarious. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Two years later I went to work for an MP in the House of Commons. I’m not going to lie, I was a glorified secretary. Nowadays, I’d award myself the title of chief of staff. I was the only staff. My employer, Norwich North MP Patrick Thompson, had an Apricot word-processing computer and a Brother printer. Virtually all of my contemporaries had to make do with typewriters. I learned how to do mail merging and we were one of the first to trial primitive forms of direct mail.

In my next job at the British Ports Association I also introduced computerisation into an organisation that seemed to have operated in the same way for decades. I built a database (once I’d worked out what the word meant) of press contacts and politicians.

In the early 1990s at the transport-related public affairs company The Waterfront Partnership I remember saying one day to my colleague David Young, ‘Dave, I read an article about something called email. Can you look into it and set it up for us please?’

A year or two later I had my own personal computer and was arranging dates – OK, less dates, more one-night stands – on Compuserve forums. Twenty-five years later I am still with my partner, who was the ex of one of my hook-ups.

I have related my computer history because for people of my generation it has completely revolutionised how we communicate with other people. For younger generations it’s changed nothing. It’s what they’ve always known. I learned in my Linguistics class at university that the optimum age to learn a language is seven years old. Young brains are also best able to absorb and comprehend new technology. Give your iPhone to a youngster to install and they’ll do it far more quickly than you could. That’s just the way things are.

So there I was, visiting a friend in Washington, DC in the spring of 2002, and he asked me if I had a blog. Er, no, I said, I didn’t, adding: ‘What’s a blog?’ His answer proved to be a revelation and it was one that in time was to change my life. Within ten minutes he had created a blog for me and off I went.

Up until then, unless you were a technical geek, it was quite cumbersome to update a website. Usually someone else had to do it for you. But blogs meant that you could update your own website in seconds, and tell the world what you were thinking in real time. But so what? I instantly understood what a blog could do, not just for me, but more generally. Different people use blogs in different ways, but essentially they are a hugely democratising force: blogging gives everyone a chance to have their say.

Up until the advent of blogging, Mrs Miggins from 32 Acacia Avenue, Scunthorpe, would have had precious little chance to make her views known. She might get a letter published in the local paper, possibly even a national one on the odd occasion. She could phone in to a radio show, but that was about it. With a blog, Mrs Miggins could have her say whenever she wanted. Now, she might not have attracted the hugest of audiences, but in a sense, that didn’t matter. No one sets out to blog with the aim of competing with the mainstream media. But the truth is that blogging started to eat a wedge into mainstream media influence. So much so that, having once viewed it as a pastime for sad geeks who tapped away at their keyboards in their bedrooms while wearing stripy pyjamas, mainstream media journalists started to embrace it – not just in politics, but across the gamut of journalism.

I decided early on that I wanted to make mine a very human blog. I wanted to write about my life, my experiences and my emotions, as well as providing political commentary and the odd dose of humour. It was a mix people seemed to like, and I always got a massive reaction whenever I wrote about anything in my personal life. I wrote about my dog dying. I wrote about delivering a eulogy at a funeral for the first time. I shared my feelings on my football team, West Ham, reaching the FA Cup final, only for their hopes to be dashed in the last minute. I wrote about my family, death, love and my civil partnership.

Writing a blog inevitably means becoming a bit of a hate figure, and writing about politics doubles your chances. I managed to make a lot of enemies along the way, but also a lot of friends and fans. Even now, people come up to me and tell me how much they miss the old incarnation of my blog.

The blog started as a personal diary, with little political content. Unfortunately, the original blog got deleted. In October 2003 I was selected as a Conservative candidate to fight the North Norfolk seat at the next general election. I decided to use my blog as an innovative way to have a dialogue with the electorate. Judging by the landslide result against me, it wasn’t a success! I then took a break from blogging for six months while I worked as chief of staff to David Davis during his leadership campaign. So my story really starts at the end of 2005 when I restarted the blog. It instantly attracted a sizeable readership due to a number of political news stories I broke on the blog. And it was the John Prescott affair with his Private Secretary, Tracey Temple, and Charles Kennedy’s toppling as Lib Dem leader, that really catapulted it into becoming a must-read in the Westminster Village.

At its peak, the blog was attracting 20,000 readers a day, and more than 150,000 unique users a month. Compared to national newspapers that’s not huge, but the circulation of the New Statesman was around 20,000 and The Spectator 70,000 so, in its niche, the blog did rather well. I never sought to monetise it, even though I could have. For me it was more of a marketing tool.

Blogs are a spin doctor’s worst nightmare come true. It would be understandable if political parties regarded them as uncontrolled, uncontrollable and sometimes downright troublesome. But if they did, they would be missing a huge opportunity to market their message without the filter of mainstream media reportage and comment. The political party that can harness social media, it is said, is the one that will prevail. Or maybe not. At the 2019 general election there is little doubt that Labour won the internet war. Their Facebook campaigns were more heavily viewed, and liked, and they had an army of Twitter users only too willing to do their bidding – most of whom seemed to have fewer than 20 followers. So successful were they that they even convinced me by polling day that we were heading for a hung parliament. If we ever needed proof that Twitter is not at all representative of the general public, this was it. Perhaps there’s a lesson to learn here when we discuss the coarseness of the language deployed on Twitter in later chapters.

Political party memberships are also not representative of the public at large, not least in age profile. Membership in all parties had been on the decline, in part because parties had no idea how to communicate with members. Mailshots are expensive, monthly magazines far too costly and, despite spending large amounts of money on websites, none of the parties had ever really ‘got’ interactivity. Party websites continued to speak ‘at’ people rather than to them, let alone with them. Even nowadays they haven’t learned how to have a conversation with people. In its heyday my blog would get more traffic than the official Tory Party and Labour Party websites. Guido Fawkes probably still does.

The trouble is most politicians see all the dangerous downsides of social media and blogging. They are seen by many as threats rather than opportunities. Some MPs, such as Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone, Labour’s Tom Watson and Tory Ed Vaizey, ‘got it’ right from the off, but even in 2020 the majority of politicians only do the bare minimum on social media. They have websites because everyone does. They’re on Twitter, but view the medium with suspicion and a degree of terror.

Writing the blog became a bit of a responsibility. People expected me to write at least five or six new blog posts every day. Fifty per cent of the people who read the blog returned three or more times every day. Their appetite demanded ever more content. I loved the interaction but, in the end, maintaining my prolific output proved too much. In September 2010 I achieved a lifetime’s ambition and was hired by LBC Radio to present their weeknight evening show. But I also had a day job running Biteback Publishing and Total Politics magazine. Effectively I was doing two full-time jobs, five days a week, and then also trying to write five stories a day on the blog. Something had to give. I knew that my writing was suffering and I wasn’t providing the readers with what they had been used to. So I took the decision to close down the blog. When I announced it in December 2010, it was the nearest thing I can think of to witnessing my own death. It even made the Today programme.

I could also see that blogging – at least as I had been doing it for the previous few years – was about to change. Once the mainstream media decided to start their own blogs, people like me couldn’t compete. In all honesty, I had also fallen out of love with blogging.

Blogging has been (or maybe was?) an immense force for good. It has uncovered major stories and held the media and politicians to account in a way that two decades ago would have been unthinkable. It’s given thousands of ordinary voters a voice.

Back in 2010, I could see that Twitter was about to eclipse blogging in terms of popularity. What I hadn’t bargained for was that Twitter paved the way to far higher levels of abuse and vituperation.

Blogging was a relatively spontaneous medium compared to how long it takes a newspaper article or broadcast report to be seen by the general public, but with the advent of Twitter, blogging became somewhat clunky and slow. A blogpost could be written in a few minutes. A reactive tweet took a matter of seconds.

I registered my Twitter name early on – in May 2007, but initially I couldn’t quite see the point of it. I remember taking part in a panel with someone who literally tweeted every two minutes of his life. Who on earth would be interested in that, I thought. Times journalist Rachel Sylvester seemed to agree, quoting psychologist Oliver James to prove her point:

Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.

Sylvester argued that everyone who tweets must have something missing in their lives. She may be right about some, but it’s also what MSM journalists used to say about blogging, which many of them chose to ignore or were forced to take up. She also maintained that ‘Twitter is reality TV without the pictures’. There is a small amount of truth in that, especially when you look at those who tweet obsessively. It was for that reason that I was a comparatively late developer on Twitter.

But having decided how I wanted to use it, and that I wouldn’t do it too often, I grew to enjoy it – at least until the last three or four years. For me, it complemented the blog brand and strengthened the feeling of community I tried to engender within the blog. When I joined LBC I used it to augment the marketing of my radio show and to drag in new listeners. That’s my prime aim nowadays.

Some people use Twitter purely as a broadcast mechanism. Some use it to describe their everyday lives, as if we should be interested in what time they go to bed, or put out the cat. I try to stick to tweeting about things I think – and I emphasise, the word, think – might be of interest either to my followers or blog readers. It’s mainly about events I am going to, media programmes I may be appearing on (it saves a blogpost), giving a bit of (hopefully insightful) political commentary, or saying something that I think might be vaguely funny. It’s as simple as that. Those who want to can dub it ‘narcissistic’ all they want, but is it any more narcissistic than writing a blog or a newspaper column in the belief that people might be interested in what you say? I don’t think so.

I still think that Twitter and Facebook are offering something positive in our public discourse. Friendships are formed, friendships are renewed. Last year I was sorting through some boxes from my time working in Germany in the 1980s and came across a diary date with a friend who was a teaching assistant in Hamburg at the time. All I knew was that his name was Ray. I tweeted this information and thanks to the research ability of some of my Twitter followers Ray and I were direct messaging each other within half an hour.

We soak up the information both platforms offer. We relish the spontaneity and instantaneousness. If there’s a breaking news story during my radio show, I rely on Twitter to tell me what’s going on. Yes, you have to curate it carefully and only rely on trusted sources, but I bring my listeners the news far more quickly that the BBC ever can with their cumbersome verification procedures.

In real breaking news situations Twitter can, as a presenter, be your best friend, During the London riots and the Egyptian revolution I was able to report things to my listeners more speedily than if I had relied on the normal news sources – Reuters, AP, PA, etc. But as well as being your best friend, Twitter can be your worst enemy. At around 6.15 p.m. on 23 April 2013 I noticed a tweet from the AP feed that read: