This week, I blocked an old school friend on FB, after she shared a number of posts that were clearly racist, anti-muslim and anti-immigrant – oh and there was one of those ‘share this if you think we should look after our own before spending billions in foreign aid’ posts too.

The thing is, this woman was someone I remember as being a quiet, kind, nice girl. What happened to make her politics so angry, so violent? Part of the answer might be local – my home town happens to be the constituency seat of the repugnant Lee Anderson, former deputy chair of the Conservative Party and now a Reform party MP after his racism became too toxic even for the Tories. In other words this place;

I feel a deep sadness when I watch this film. If feels like the legacy of working class collective consciousness that gew up during the mid and post industrial period has been eroded down to a sort of angry desperation which is searching for someone/something to blame, and so is wide open to the easy answers, and the convenient victims, offered to them by dreadful men like Anderson.

I say ‘dreadful men’, but I ‘know’ him. I have not met him personally, but he used to work with Michaela’s uncle in the mines, before Thatcher closed them all, decimating whole communitiies during my teenage years. My late sister knew him when he worked in the constituency office of the then Labour party MP for Ashfield. His unfolding and unravelling to the extreme right has been the same trajectory as the wider politics of the area, so I feel ike I understand Anderson. He is that man in the corner of the pub who makes people laugh and holds court with his loud opinions. He has verbal intelligence, quick wit and that say-it-like-it-is bluntness that seems authentic and appropriately ‘northern’. Of course, he is also a bigot and as slippery as a greased rope.

Regretably, Anderson has read the room. His journey from Labour party staffer, to the top of the Conservative party, then to the extreme right wing has not been about principles, it has been about political electability. He has been able to ride that same wavecrest that saw the end of the ‘Red wall’ by Boris Johnson’s populist Tories. He took the racist rhetoric of people like Patel and Braverman, along with the fear mongering and division making over immigration, and gave it a Bentick miners welfare twist, leading him inevitably towards the right – and more than enough of the good people of Ashfield went with him.

Now we jave far right mobs on the streets, setting fire to police cars, stoning mosques and trying to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers – people fleeing from war, murder and rape. As if they are the problem. As if they have stolen our country. As if they are the wealthy elites storing up more and more wealth, more and more property. As if they closed down the mines and hollowed out the high streets, as if they clog the corridors of out Accident and Emergency wards. As if they personally emasculated each and every one of those red faced men standing at the bar in England football shirts.

We need some light relief.

How can this happen? How did people get so angry? How does this anger become a social movement- a moraly-bankrupt, based-on-lies eruption of fake-righteous activism?

Lessons from the past

Firstly, we have to pay heed to history. This is not the first time after all. It is almost a cliche to talk this way so i will not labour the point, but look at the economic circumstances that led to the rise of fascism in the 30s, or the battles against the racists and antisemites in east end of London in the austerity at the end of the second world war. In the words of the proverb Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.

Political discourse

Politics is about the operationalise of ideas, right? It is about justice and looking after the weak and poor. It is the way that large diverse populations are able to work out differences and work towards peaceful consensus. It gives everyone a seat at the table. No? That is NOT what it is really like? OK, well can we at least agree that our system is the least worst option? Has the bar sunk so low?

What happens when politics loses contact with overarching ideology or principles? When power seems an end in itself?

What happens when – rightly or wrongly – the perception grows in a population that we are beset by ‘problems’. These ‘problems’ are defined poorly of course, because they are complex and filtered through information sources that are often untrustworthy and controlled by powers that have a vested interest. Then, what if the political system we vote for seems powerless to address these problems in a way that makes any obvious difference?

One answer is that clever people see this as a political opportunity. The Tories tried it first, by framing the problem in a way that could divide and anger just enough people to make a political difference at the voting booth. In the absence of hope, give them fear, give them anger. Give them hate, because nothing unites like a common enemy.

But who makes the best enemy? Who deserves our anger most? This takes us back to the question of by whom and how our ‘problems’ are defined.

We now have a Labour party fight-back, who have offered little or no hope in relation to those ‘problems’, rather playing a political card called caution.

The freedom of information

The internet. The ultimate expression of libertarianism. A free, open space in which everyone (or every geek at very least) has access to the same megaphone as the rich and powerful. Except that is not how things panned out.

Firstly, if everyone has a megaphone, that is a whole lot of noise.

Then there is that algorithm thing. We run a small business, and anyone who does this will be well versed in just how damned complicated a game we have to play to game Google towards recognising our humble offerings on the altar of the algorithm. The time this takes is entirely open ended. This is not a level playing field.

Much more seriously however is that other quality of the algorithm – the way it feeds on attention. The way it feeds us ever more extreme versions of what it thinks we are interested in. The way it allows us to exist outside our bodies as excarnate, silicone avatars, devoid of the mediating effect of fleshy proximity, insulated from responsibility. They become externalised egos, allowing us a certain liberty and freedom we would find appalling in reality. There are some unintended, but convenient to some, consequences to all this, in that extreme megaphones become much louder.

The two-dimensional slicone goggles starts to affect our every day ways of seeing.

Truth or fiction- who cares. Who is loudest? Whose content makes my outrage tingle most?

And some clever people know how all this works – they can game it, use it as a tool for mass maniplation. The Cambridge files laid all this bare, but there has been no corrective, no regulatory response. It sits there as an open undemocratic secret.

Is there an antidote?

Of course not- after all, we know what the internet has told us about vaccines. We have made our bed and we must lie in it. There is no medicine for this kind of poison.

I really do think this is true in one sense. We can’t make a world without extremes or without the algorithm. Thugs will always be thugs and politics will always be political. The poor will always be with us. Wars will always force refugees out on the terrible road, longing for distant mythical places of peace. It has always been this way.

Dear friends, I cannot hope for the end of violence, but I can sing of the present reality of love.

I can tell you that the same person I unfriended on facebook was kind to me in ways I will remember.

I can hope that deep inside each and everyone of us on all sides – rioters , counter-protestors, police – is god. That the deepst, most truest part of us all, is god.

I am still processing a poem I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Here it is again.

Given what we know

.

Given what we know and what

We fear about the trouble we’re in

We will bounce babies on our knees

We will run our fingers through loose earth, and

We will love one another

.

Given what we know and what

We fear about the state of our world

We will feed strangers

We will dance to the skirl of fiddles, and

We will pray

.

Given what we know and what

We fear about just how much is broken

We will embrace

We will light a candle in the empty church, and

We will plant trees

.

Given what we know and what

We fear about the misuse of power and money

We will play

We will wave willow and kick leather

We will laugh

.

Given what we know and what we fear

About the end of things we hold dear

We will look to the birds

We will walk the woods that remain, and

We will sing