It's weird being away. I say this to you
every time I come back from a from a
break, but you you you kind of remember
that old Rabbi Burns poem about seeing
yourselves as as others see you with
some gift to gifty gears to see
ourselves as others see us. And you you
do a bit when you're away, especially if
you come off um the news drip, the drip
feed of news and and um even more
importantly perhaps social media. The
weirdest thing perhaps
was was the absence of whatever you want
to call it, Faradage, riots, civil
disorder, violence on the streets when
compared to the headlines. A couple of
threads that I have seen since I got
back actually counting heads at these
so-called protests on on both sides of
the divide. the the um uh uh the the the
mixture of massive racists and perfectly
ordinary people who like to spend their
spare time protesting outside buildings
full of refugees and the anti-racist
protesters. Someone actually goes to the
trouble counting them. And the reality
of these stories is a a a tiny fraction
of what the media coverage would
suggest. I'll share some of the numbers
with you shortly because it matters,
doesn't it? And and today's news
contains two stories that you might
consider to be quite important. The
first is that the UK has secured an
enormous contract to supply Norway with
warships. I think the figure I saw was
10 10 billion pounds. I'm not suggesting
for a minute that you've missed that.
But you could be forgiven for having
done so. It was leading the BBC's
coverage yesterday. I don't think it's
on a single front page this morning. And
then the other story that is I I think
significant is the one about the roll
out of 30 hours a week of free child
care to every parent in the country
earning less than £100,000 a year. These
are massive moments. These are really
really big moments. And yet I saw one
politician being interviewed this
morning on television and and was
actually asked, "Why are you talking
about free child care when people only
care about migrant hotels?" And you sort
of found yourself thinking, "Oh,
it's the tail that wags the dog, isn't
it? Everything now is driven by online
metrics. Everything is driven by click
counts." And what gets the biggest
reaction? It's as if the whole world has
turned into a radio phone in show. And
how many times have I told you that
getting calls is easy? Getting attention
is easy. Is there anybody old out there
feeling poorly? Um, would you like to
ring in and be a little bit racist on
the radio? It's really easy to get
calls. Um, but it doesn't guarantee that
they'll be interesting. So the news is
in a bit of a hole uh pretending that
problems are much bigger than they are
because the online reaction to these
stories and these problems is much
bigger than the real life reaction the
numbers as I say turning up outside
these buildings um are relatively tiny
and that of course leaves us you and me
in a in a tricky position because should
we be talking about this stuff at all?
Should we be are we falling into the
sort of trap of clickbait even as we
point out that that is what is happening
here? I and and the short answer to that
is I don't know. But rest assured that
we will be talking uh later in the
program about the roll out of free child
care for untold new numbers of parents.
And we will probably have a little look
at this big military contract as well.
But fears of mass unrest was one of the
headlines I saw when I got back. Um
there wasn't any. Warnings of civil
disorder was one of the headlines I saw
I think before I went away. And of
course, there wasn't any fears that the
hideous scenes of last summer would be
repeated, turning that woman, Lucy
Connley, into some sort of folk hero for
inciting actual pograms on British
streets. It just hasn't happened in the
way that they wanted it to happen.
Learned a word just before we went away.
Um, I never knew that the word you
should use, the correct verb to use when
you talk about cogs turning is mesh.
Cogs, they mesh and then they unmesh.
So, you've got two turning cogs and the
teeth aren't biting each other. They're
not meshing and then they mesh and
everything starts moving. It's as if
these cogs are worring furiously and
they never actually meshed. Thank God. I
mean, you know, we saw what can happen
when certain political and public
figures spread hideous racist lies all
over social media and the next thing you
know, they're setting fire to buildings
full of entirely blameless and innocent
human beings. But they didn't mesh. The
cogs didn't mesh. So, you find yourself
thinking, "What what's actually
happening here? Can we keep this up for
4 years? Are we really going to be doing
this until the next general election
pretending that a few weirdos on social
media speak for the entire nation? You
got entire political parties in hawk now
to billy bunch of numbers with a bulldog
avatar and and yet I I can't quite see
how it ends. Does it burn itself out?
And the only question you're left with
is what will be the next uh what will be
the next chapter? What will be the next
incarnation? What will happen next? You
have stories of course of people being
abused as they go about their lawful
business because they look a bit
foreign. There's one in the news at the
moment which we probably won't touch on
further because I think arrests have
been made. But the but the what's the
word you want? The empowerment of
bigotry is now almost a national
pastime. people in the British media who
would once have uh quite rightly held
their noses at the sight of some of the
uh words coming out of the mouths of
politicians are now going all in joining
in on it. And what they do and this is
what I want to talk about today.
They they they deploy the worst sort of
inverse snobbery. So what you get with
Times colonists or telegraph colonists,
they like to pretend that racism is a
workingclass enthusiasm. They use the
words workingass or sometimes even as a
synonym for racists. It's as if cable
street never happened. One of the books
I read on holiday um was set in the
1930s when Oswald Mosley was on the
march. And what everybody forgets, and
of course people like the owner of the
Daily Mail are desperate for you to
forget this because his granddad was one
of the best examples of it, is that
Mosley's fascism was hugely popular
among upper and upper middle classes
right up to and including the
aristocracy and even members of the
royal family. This idea that racism is a
workingass enthusiasm is palpably
absurd. You bring a bit of a nin bean in
who you could see as an almost an
antidote to Oswald Mosley. Then you're
left with that classic question of how
on earth do you persuade labor as in the
working man and woman of this country to
use their political freedom to keep
wealth in power? And one of the most
obvious answers throughout history is to
lie to them about the threat that's
being posed to them by foreigners. So
it's a posh process,
institutional racism. It's a posh
process designed to dissuade people or
distract people from the real reasons
for their unhappiness or the inequality
that they suffer from by pretending that
it would be massively improved if you
could ship all those asylum seekers out
of the local holiday in. But what
happens next?
And the short answer to that question
when I got back from holiday was very
simply
flags.
Flags to the left of me, flags to the
right of me. particularly interesting
new pastime for some members of the
British populace is to paint
roundabouts. I I'll say that again in
case you've missed it. So, you know the
sort of mini roundabouts that are like
pimples on the on the road, like big
pimples. What's the opposite of a
crater? Like a sort of what's the
opposite of concave? Convex? Well, like
an upturned dish, you know, like a big
upturned dish on a road. Not quite big
enough to be a roundabout, but too big
to be just a sort of crossroad. So
you've got a you've got a s So what you
do is you you find one of those and you
paint it white in the middle of the
night and then you paint a big red cross
through the middle of it. I saw one
which looked a little bit more like the
Danish flag than the flag of St. George.
Um but nonetheless that was presumably
the intention unless we've got a sort of
uh Danish nationalist cell operating
somewhere in in the southeast. But that
that's another so that's become a
popular pastime while I've been on
holiday. that and flags. Flags are going
up everywhere. We touched on this just
before we went away. And I told you that
the um the story is as old as the hills.
I wrote about this in my very first book
117 years ago, a book called How to Be
Right, which sadly is becoming more
relevant again as each day passes. And
it was it was about the pretense that
being ordered to take down a flag, a
particular flag, is somehow an assault
upon values. Almost always councils have
rules in, for example, communal areas
about what you can and can't put on the
walls. And in short, the rule is usually
nothing. You can't put anything on the
walls. There are also rules governing
what you can put up by way of signage if
it were, for example, to pose a threat
to traffic or to impinge upon
visibility. But all of those concerns
aside, how emotional does a flag make
you feel?
I don't think it's right to sneer at
people or or or or to snigger because
for example the Ukrainian flag carries
enormous heft at the moment as does of
course the Palestinian flag as the
unconscionable murder of countless
civilians and killing of journalists in
um in Gaza continues. The Palestinian
flag carries enormous power for many
people. The Israeli flag carries
enormous power. So to say that flags to
to imbue flags with power is somehow
wrong is clearly arrogant. You might
think it's silly, but I bet there's a
flag that you would have an emotional
reaction to. So here's a question no
one's asked you yet. And it may be
because you think the answers are
obvious or the answers are
straightforward.
Why are they doing it? 034560973
to to personalize it for a moment. Why
have I returned from holiday to find I
mean listen my evidence is mostly
photographic I have to tell you I
haven't encountered that many actual
flags but I got mates who have they've
sent me pictures and there's one outside
Gregs on Chisik High Road which is um
the sort of next town along from where I
live in West London and I just want to
know why. I want to know why you think
people are doing this and I want you to
be as honest as you can. I'll give you
one warning. Well, one of my holiday
covers last week, Emily Thornbury, got
into terrible trouble for posting online
without any comment at all a picture of
someone's front yard, which if memory
serves, contained a transit van, a white
transit van, and a flag of St. George
dangling from a window. That's all she
did. But it was argued, I think fairly,
that she was casting some sort of
judgment on these people. And you're not
allowed to do that in Brexit. Britain,
you're not allowed to say, "Do you know
what? I'd rather my neighbors didn't
hang a sort of massive piece of tatty
nylon out of their spare bedroom window
and leave it there as it got battered
and and and sullied by the elements.
You're not allowed to do that because
people will pretend that you're being
unpatriotic or that you're assaulting
their values." And that is important to
remember because I don't want you to get
into any trouble. But I do want you to
think about this question. Why are they
doing it? Or or of course, why are you
doing it?
Can we find the positives? 034560973.
I've got one story.
It happened on my street a few years
ago, my old house, and I think it was
football related, but one of my
neighbors put a flag of St. George, and
another neighbor actually had a Chelsea
flag, which
followed a similar fate actually, but
we'll think we'll focus on the flag of
St. George. And they they put it over
their balcony. It was a block of flats
next to the house where I lived and I
didn't really give it a second thought
particularly because I think it was in
the middle of the Europe Euros or or
possibly even a World Cup. I forget you
forgive me. And and they never took it
down. And you you you stop noticing it.
You do that, right? So you stop noticing
things. If you're a man, um you never
notice things that have been left at the
bottom of the stairs, for example, for
you to take upstairs. But if you are
human and something has been part of
your backdrop, the backdrop of your
daily life indefinitely,
you stop noticing it. And I did stop
noticing it until an estate agent came
around and sort of winced when they saw
it. And by that point, it had been there
for about 18 months since the end of the
football tournament. I presume the
people living in the flat had actually
forgotten about it because they it had
become invisible to them as well. And by
now, it was a sort of it wasn't even
gray. It was sort of brown. It was a
brown flag with a red cross through the
middle of it. One bit had sort of come
loose on the end. So, it wasn't hanging
true. It was dangling off a balcony on a
block of flats. And I I I mean, it might
still be there now, actually. I can't
even remember. And that's the problem
with this stuff. It's not really
adorning or improving your natural
environment. It's not an act of It's not
an act of community.
So, what is it an act of? Why is it
being done?