Don’t Look Back in Anger

"It is a reflection of an extreme minority who are seeking to hijack our values, our insecurities, and our sensibilities."

If our planet survives long enough for historians to look back upon this time, they will, I believe, describe it as The Age of Anger. They may well ponder what it was that made the inhabitants of the West so incensed when so many other corners of the world were facing infinitely greater challenges in the shape of war, starvation, and natural disasters.

They would have looked across the world to Afghanistan and seen that it had known nothing but bloodshed for more than three decades. Syria, now in its eighth year of war and the genocide of its own people.  All the while, South Sudan was being ravaged by famine, the civil war in Yemen blamed for over eight million people being subjected to famine and death, whilst the genocide of the Rohingya people and Kachin Christian minority in Myanmar went on as the Burmese government looked the other way.

If social media survives in any shape or form, the historians would have seen that each day we were being subjected to horrifying images from all these regions, but we seemed not to care. Worse, when boats full of migrants capsized off the Libyan coast – a country that was an infinitely more peaceful place before David Cameron felt the need to intervene militarily – some British commentators actually rejoiced, with Katie Hopkins notoriously describing the souls fighting for their lives in the water as no more than “cockroaches.”

I would like to put this article I am writing into a time capsule and hope that one of these historians who will sit in judgment upon us finds it.  The first thing I would like to say to them is that we weren’t all that bad. With the possible exception of Miss Hopkins, my countrymen and women – when confronted by the sight of an individual in mortal danger – rushed to their aid, irrespective of their faith of nationality.  When immigrants who came to rebuild our country post the second world war, the Windrush generation, were experiencing a hostile environment and being threatened with deportation having worked, paid taxes, fallen in love with English boys and girls and had bright-eyed mixed-race children, made Britain the place they call home – the public were outraged.

So much of the anger that we see now on social media, in certain newspapers and being spouted on the airwaves is not, I believe, a reflection of who Britain really is as a nation. It is a reflection of an extreme minority who are seeking to hijack our values, our insecurities, and our sensibilities.

Nicky Morgan, the former cabinet minister, has spoken of some of her fellow politicians as “toddlers” who are prone to “stamp their feet.” She is spot on. There is no escaping that there is more childlike anger now in our politics than ever before. More tantrums. More pig-headed stubbornness.  And we do all of us need to step back for a few moments and ask ourselves what it is that these people are actually getting so angry about?  Why does a seasoned politician like Iain Duncan Smith think its ok to call hardworking civil servants frightened rabbits? Or suggest that if people have a different view to his they should leave the country? To think it is ok to bully a Prime Minister to tears.

Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary, who has himself been in receipt of sacksful of Islamophobic hate mail as part of the despicable “punish a Muslim” campaign, has said quite rightly there is something about this anger that is fundamentally “un-British.”

I would go further and say that the anger we are seeing has been imposed upon us. It is a commodity that has been manufactured and packaged by utterly unscrupulous, illiberal forces – many from beyond our shores – for their short-term political gain, or the gain of their paymasters.

All the evidence that we are seeing from the breaches of data by the internet giants point to vast swathes of the electorate being manipulated to react in ways that certain vested interests want them to react. These people know our trigger points, and they know how to wind us up.

Politicians are all the while positioning themselves as the solutions to all these computer-generated problems as they spout over and over again phrases such as “taking back control” and “British jobs for British workers”, “the will of the people”.  It is all a part of the same process and it is insidious as it means in a real sense we are now all actually living in a world of virtual reality.

The methods that are being used in our politics now are both very modern and very old. They capitalise, all too often, on ancient hatreds – foreigners, members of specific faiths, and easily identifiable minority groups.

What we need to recognise is that we are being made to get angry, about things which all too often we have no legitimate reason to get angry about. This anger is being engineered to incite division, to push us in the direction of certain politicians who vast sways of the public – in more normal circumstances – would have the good sense not to touch with a barge pole.

The lack of authenticity about this anger was brought home to me when I found that a man was offering £5,000 to the first person who “accidentally” ran me over. This keyboard warrior described me as “a bloody troublesome first-generation immigrant” and added, for good measure, that “if this is what we should expect from immigrants, send them back to their stinking jungles.” By the 2,700 strong Conservative Debating Forum, a controversial pro-Conservative Facebook group containing Islamophobic, homophobic and racist comments about public figures; which had 10 Tory MPs and 25 Tory Councillors signed up.

Individuals who troll and use vicious language as weapons against largely innocent people do not, however, define the British people.  Nor do lying politicians define us, any more than Donald Trump defines the American people. These false gods of our time are already beginning to crumble before our eyes.  People are waking up.

Lord Heseltine has said that he believes that this is no more than a passing phase. We are certainly as resilient as any other people on this earth and there is no reason why we shouldn’t in time – when a bit of that good, old-fashioned British cynicism of ours kicks in – develop a healthy natural resistance to moral and social corruption.

The alternative is that we risk losing what defines our “Britishness.”  I have more faith in the people of Britain to not let us burn whilst the self-interested fiddle.

Gina Miller

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