BLOG: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

I promise Patreon and Digi isn’t going to be political all the time from now on. We will get back to the usual nonsense soon. So, skip this if you don’t want to read more about the riots and protests, which I’m sure plenty of you don’t.

Anyway. 

We headed out last night to film some stuff for what will probably be the next video, just to see what was what. As widely reported, zero evidence of any “protests” – just a sizeable counter-protest, gathered around a solicitor’s that deals with asylum and immigration cases. Quite a heavy police presence, so they clearly had some cause to suspect trouble, even if it didn’t manifest.

It was fascinating though – seeing the entire town shut up and the streets far emptier than normal. A couple of police cars with their lights and sirens on headed past us at points, but that could’ve been Harrow on any given evening.

I don’t think the trouble’s over yet though. The issues that led to this haven’t gone away, the tension in the UK remains.

I don’t think it is as simple as just going “They’re all racist and/or thugs/Nazis”, because there are clearly way too many people who weren’t involved in the riots who aren’t Nazis. Those who are struggling, or angry, or who believe the rhetoric, who just want a change. Yes, there are obvious xenophobic undertones to a lot of it, but there are plenty who don’t even realise their own prejudices. 

THE WATCHER

I’ve been doing a lot of watching and reading this past week or so, and it’s very clear that there are many regular people – yes, regular white people, who probably wouldn’t set fire to hotels – who have been led to truly believe we live in a two-tier country, where the white population is somehow persecuted and that immigration and small boats are to blame for all our problems.

It doesn’t matter that all the statistics prove the exact opposite: this is how they’re perceiving the world and their place in it, so something has gone wrong. Whatever message it is that people are receiving, and no matter where it’s coming from, it’s what the regular people believe that needs to be addressed before this can die down.

Kier Starmer was right to condemn the riots, right to call out far-right thugs, but in doing so he completely ignored the fact there’s a huge chunk of the country that genuinely believes – again, for whatever reason – we’re living with uncontrolled immigration and that there are Muslim rape gangs roaming our streets.

I live in one of London’s most diverse boroughs, we have a large mosque in the town centre, a sizeable Muslim community, and everyone just lives side-by-side. I mean, we have violence between gangs, but show me an urban area that doesn’t. At least they just stab one another. The reality I live in is one where a diverse, multicultural, population lives side-by-side as harmoniously as any community realistically could.

The racist amplification and distortion of facts – which then trickles down to individuals and families – has to be stopped somehow. Then we need honesty and transparency, and for politicians to stop being so weak and afraid of saying anything that’ll alienate potential voters.

The cautious approach might've landed Labour an election victory, but they better grow some balls.

HOW IT STARTED VS...

I think the thing I’m struggling with most is how this all escalated in recent weeks. The false “Muslim” name that circulated on social media in the wake of the Southport tragedy… the false implication that the deaths of those three young girls was somehow caused directly by immigration or asylum seekers or small boats or whatever.

By the time the 17 year-old murderer turned out to be neither Muslim or an immigrant – but black, Christian, and born in Wales – it was already too late. The boulder had started rolling, and the facts just became irrelevant.

As far as they were concerned it was enough that he was born of Rwandan parents, still had brown skin, still had a funny name, so somehow he still became a symptom of the current uncontrolled immigration that is threatening our children, reality be damned, even if he was born in the UK almost 18 years ago. The main thing is... HE HAS A FUNNY NAME!!!!

BREXIT

A lot of this is going to go into our next video, but I discovered that one of the knock-on effects of Brexit – which, lest we forget, was sold on the notion that it would somehow stop all immigration overnight – is that certain types of immigration increased. Cutting ourselves off from the EU has led to a worker shortage meaning we’ve had to accept more workers from non-EU countries.

For the racists, this is awful because - of course - non-EU people don't even look like us, and they have funnier names. It's like insisting - against the warnings of a lot of people - that you're going to remove a pair of too-tight trainers by blowing them off your feet with dynamite and then complaining about your feet now just being bloody stumps.

No longer being part of the EU means we’ve had to negotiate trade deals with non-EU countries, which means trade-offs in terms of opening doors that previously were open only to EU citizens.

No longer being part of the EU has made it harder to prevent illegal immigrants entering the UK, due to co-operation and information-sharing no longer being as open and transparent as it was before.

What they thought they were going to get from Brexit turned out to be the exact opposite, because Brexit was so ill-considered and driven by those who were blinded by a race-driven agenda.

They never remotely got the Brexit they expected, just made it worse for everyone, including those of us who could see the iceberg ahead. They were led to believe they would get some sort of Rule Britannia utopia, that international laws could be ignored, and Britain would somehow be able to weather the ensuing economic storm and stand alone on the world stage!

Rather than, as happened, everyone else suddenly realising we're a nation of idiots, whose main broadcaster inexplicably platformed a known racist - who back then had never won an election - on Newsnight some 40 times. Oh, and the other main channel made him a contestant on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. ITV and BBC are both culpable for this mess.

Instead – on top of more of the “wrong” sort of people entering the UK – it has made the country poorer, our prices higher, diminished the NHS, decimated our farmers, and made life more of a struggle for all of us who aren't already millionaires like Nigel Farage.

This has exacerbated the issue even more, as people see their quality of life diminish they look around for scapegoats.

Who to blame? Well, that lot look different to us, so it's probably them...

The best thing we could do to fix all of that - or, at least, improve it at least a bit overnight - is re-enter the EU, but there's not a single party in the UK who would dare to even suggest for a second that perhaps just over half the country may have made a massive mistake.

BRICKS IN THE WALL

Covid is another building block in all this, I think.

The Tories’ despicable handling of it – the hypocrisy of telling us to behave one way, and them doing whatever the hell they wanted – has resulted in deep, simmering, frustrations and divisions. Trust in government is just gone. People feel they’ve been lied to, repeatedly, by those in charge. They feel like they’re not being heard, that they’re irrelevant – just cattle, put on this earth to be ordered around by the privileged.

Many of us did what we were told for the greater good, followed the guidelines, and then found out those laying down the guidelines weren't even following them.

Labour’s election victory is another potential tipping point, because to the right it seems like the “Woke mob” has won; the so-called Culture War that has been happening in recent years. I mean, I’m not going to pretend it hasn’t affected me directly.

It hasn’t been spoken about, because people are scared to talk about it publicly, but everyhing changed in UK TV first due to Covid, and again following the Black Lives Matter protests. Almost overnight, there was a shift, and I’ve since been turned down for work in favour of less experienced writers because of diversity quotas.

I mean, literally – that’s not my perception or prejudice; I’ve been told it first-hand by producers and my agent. Literally had: “Sorry – we have diversity quotas to meet, and we can’t take on any more white male writers on the show” from more than one producer, and “I’m struggling to find you work, because they’re mainly looking for diverse writers at this time” from my helpless, hopeless, agent. While, of course, 90% of the execs and commissioners at these companies and broadcasters are white and very middle class.

I think there’s also an unspoken belief that men – particularly white men – aren’t worth the risk post-#metoo, and I can’t blame them for that. Every single time another white, male, sex pervert got rightly exposed (pun not intended) I knew it was making things harder (pun not intended) for those of us who go to work to do our jobs rather than to plunge our knobs into a plant pot or to be predatory towards women. There have been so many now that I don’t blame them for being wary. Even I don’t trust men anymore.

It has all made the last couple of years a lot tougher, but it is what it is, and I’m possibly only as experienced as I am because throughout my career I got favoured over non-white writers. I could've become bitter about it, but I've found a way forwards - just about - and I’ve thought back to the writer’s rooms I’ve been in over the years and most of them were entirely white and predominantly male. The imbalance clearly needed to be addressed.

Yes, I share the co-creator credit on 4 O’Clock Club with Doc Brown – who’s mixed race – but he only wrote on the show for the first series. The rest of the time it was us fully white folks, split 75-25 between straight white men and straight white women.

On one show I worked on in recent years, the executive producer hired a Muslim female writer to be there for a day because the BBC were coming down, and he thought it would be better to have her there “for the optics” (literally his words to me).  

She was never given the chance to actually write on the show – just a bunch of white blokes were given that privilege. I was angry about it at the time – though to be honest it was just one of many things that the exec in question did which made me angry – but she’s since gone on to have an absurdly and justifiably successful career in Hollywood, so I doubt she cares too much.

It still bothers me though that she was seen for her tokenism rather than her talent.

THROUGH THE KEIRHOLE

The whole “Two Tier Kier” thing is ridiculous given he’s only been in the job a month or so, but there’s this perception that the Black Lives Matter protests of a couple of years back were somehow allowed to sow chaos freely, while the second a bunch of furious white men set fire to a hotel they’re arrested and sent to prison inside of a week.

It’s a far cry from the good old days when white people could set fire to hotels and throw bricks at the police with absolutely no consequences…

Something I was taught when I was doing my counselling training was to listen to what people are really saying; not just to their words, but their actions, their body language. What is being said beneath it all? Read the patterns, take in everything holistically, and try not to bring your own prejudices to it.

Yes, far-right gammon thugs blah blah. But what is the anger really about? Where is it coming from? What is really making them so angry? We can be angry about their actions and their racism, but just seeing that isn’t seeing the whole picture. It’s difficult I know, because it requires humanising those we see as inhuman, and there are few people in this world more despicable than Nazis.

One of the topics we covered in our training was whether we’d ever be able to have a paedophile as a client. 

The school of psychotherapy I studied required us to aim to develop empathy for everyone, regardless of their actions. We were taught that we could condemn behaviour, we could show disgust or disapproval of actions we saw as negative, but we had to try to hold onto our empathy and be non-judgemental, and to be aware of our own prejudices, regardless of who was sat opposite of us.

Half the class said they could never do it where a paedophile was concerned, but a few of us said that we could, including me. We’d also been taught the profound power of empathy and unconditional positive regard – and the power of that, especially for somebody who perhaps had never received it before, was a path to healing and growth.

I always get into trouble for talking about this – called a centrist, or politically naïve, or whatever, but this isn’t some touchy-feely nonsense.

I’m not some holier-than-thou monk; I can still be as judgemental as anyone. I can get angry like anyone, I can show disgust – as I do about the riots over the past week or so. But… I can own those feelings, and still at least aspire to be empathic towards everyone, regardless of their actions, because it’s the only option to change things. It’s the only way to break a cycle of behaviour, and make people better.

SCARY

We can’t just scare or shout people into submission; the government needs to make everyone feel heard, make everyone feel they have a voice, because there’s nothing more likely to lead to anger than not being listened to, or being judged or labelled, whoever you are.

I see no efforts from our leaders to explain why we are where we are. There’s still no transparency, just a lot of “Don’t do that – you’re wrong”, which sends the message to those behind the thugs that they’re wrong too. It’s not enough.

You may remember that I was attacked a few years back - ended up blind in one eye for a few months - and my assailant happened to be black.

In fact, that was the first thing ANOTHER TV producer asked me when I told them: "Was he black?". I didn't really see what difference that made. The guy was probably mentally ill - because it was entirely unprovoked - but the people who helped me afterwards were a mix of black and Asian, as were the doctors who treated me. I was shown more kindness by non-white British people that day than I was shown violence by non-white British people.

But yes... maybe if I was a bit different, if I'd walked a different path, had different experiences, not grown up surrounded by multicultural schoolmates, I could've gone "Well, black people are a problem... we need to stop more of them coming into the country!".

There has to be education, there has dialogue, and I’m sorry if that paints me as some sort of centrist, but we can’t just keep going with the division, with the constant othering of each other. All it will do is prolong the problems indefinitely. Hate creates hate.

Labour has to get on top of this issue, and not in the wishy-washy way they’ve pledged to so far. During the election campaign they tried to appeal to both the fears around immigration as well as their more traditional base, by being neither here nor there. There was no openness about the process of immigration, how it works within the economy, or the fears around illegal immigration, or how we’ve gotten to a place where a big slab of the country now believes immigration is out of control. There was barely a mention of Brexit.

Be honest, be open, and stop being so abjectly cowardly for fear of alienating people. Stop being too scared to say plainly that Brexit has been a disaster – and made every problem worse. It’s okay to say that the country was lied to, and that people believed that lie. Say plainly that the country has problems. What is there to lose? Farage, Johnson, Gove, Rees-Mogg, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, Laurence Fox, Elon Musk, Andrew Tate.... Tell people they've been lied to if necessary, and tell them who's doing the lying.

Stop being so afraid.

Just say it. This can't go on.

The same rich, powerful, influential people who promoted Brexit are still stoking and inflaming all these tensions. They’re using ordinary people as pawns in their own agendas, their own power games, whipping them up with angry rhetoric and lies, telling them that everything is worse than it actually is, and because people are hard-up and fed-up, they’re believing it.

The problems in the UK go far beyond immigration, but that’s all we’re hearing about It’s distraction; you can’t just close a country’s borders without breaking the economy and turning it into North Korea. People will always want somebody to blame, and these ideologues are offering the easiest, shortest, least complex route to that.

 Enough, as they say, is enough.