I’m only asking because, on 7 May, just after the various elections across England, Scotland and Wales, I found myself deep in Twitterworld.
There, one (on the surface) quite coherent contributor was asking why, in the Hartlepool by-election, Labour had “put up a Remainer in a Brexit town?”
That was a coherent question and I was drawn in – more fool me, perhaps.
But then they continued: “Did they do that deliberately so Starmer could pin the blame for any defeat on the candidate rather than him? It was a gross error of judgement. But the fact is that the Lab party only represent Guardian readers, not real people.”
Oh dear. To which I responded by positing the obvious question (if you have a brain): “What are ‘real people’?”
Since I read the Guardian, does that make me ‘unreal’ – or is such ‘unrealness’ balanced out by my not only reading the Guardian, but a wide variety of other media too? After all, I still sometimes look at the Telegraph culture sections for the opera!
“If there is such a concept [as real people] and it isn’t ALL people, then what are ‘unreal people’?” I asked. “What would that actually mean?”
But then I found myself getting rather engaged. So I mused that it would be fun to try the concept “based on newspaper readership: what paper would the most ‘real people’ read ...? The Times? The Sun? The Mail? The Mirror? What newspaper makes you most ‘real’?
“What about FT readers? How real or unreal would they be? And as for the Express ...”
I have a subscription for Private Eye – where does that put me on the spectrum of real to unreal? Honestly, I’m wondering if I and Ian Hislop are about to fade away into unrealness.
The poster in question has still not responded.
The thing is, this all sounds like a bit of a laugh. But it isn’t. Earlier today, I looked back at the account that had tweeted this nonsense and discovered that it is currently lauding anti-lockdown demonstrators and similar idiots.
Such phrases have become a regular riposte from people with no actual argument. I’ll go further: it is almost a boast that they have no logical argument – and let’s face it, to have a proper argument would risk making them a “girly swot” and we know where that doesn’t get you.
At the most basic level, it ‘others’: it says that some people are not “real”. It promotes a sense that, if some people don’t share the same views as you do, then they are not as good as you. And it is widespread in social media.
It’s all part of – or at least connected to – a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-fact, anti-democratic and anti-free speech conspiracy culture.
It’s also no distance from the similar comment heard for years of: ‘in the real world’.
Let’s ask the same questions: if there is a ‘real world’, then what is ‘the unreal world’?
Does ‘the real world’ include a favella in Brazil? Does it include astronauts in outer space? Does it include Trump’s gold lift? Does it include children scouring waste dumps for things to salvage and sell to survive? Does it include those with the dosh to live on board luxury private ships all year round, cruising the globe? Does it include people trying to flee persecution for whatever reason? Does it include the nurse using a food bank to help feed her children?
Of course, we all know what it means: select from the following word salad – ‘metropolitan, liberal, lefty, artsy, luvvie, elite’.
Whatevs.
But let’s take just one – that ‘luvvies’ tag. Actors and performers, who seem to be mostly quite politically/socially progressive – possibly because the trade actually demands an ability to empathise/put yourself in someone else’s shoes, though are rarely anywhere near as far left as, say, Vanessa Redgrave – come in for huge stick. And they are most certainly not of the ‘real world’.
One assumes that those in ‘the real world’ never watch any sort of thing that involves dodgy presenters – that’s Match of the Day out, then, given Gary ‘woke’ Lineker, but obviously not Top Gear, given the general views of petrolhead star and conservative media columnist Jeremy Clarkson – or almost all films and TV drama and sit-coms.
But then again, consistency has nothing to do with this.
In the last year of his life, I remember my father ranting that he couldn’t ‘respect anyone who doesn’t have the same beliefs I do!’
Having no knowledge at that stage of how it’s best to simply agree with those with dementia, I bridled and rasped back: “So, you don’t respect me, then?”
That confused him. Somehow, it’s different with family. Yet of course, that excludes logic, which goes down the toilet – victim to simplistic gammon-faced ranting.
The simplistic gammon-faced ranting wouldn’t be important – except that in recent years it has had, and continues to have – a massive influence over the public and political life of this country: across the UK as a whole, but particularly in England, where it seems to be endemic.
My parents, Brexit voters both, were not uneducated. My father in particular achieved way more than most of those with whom he grew up with in a tiny, rural Cornish outpost. Little more than a Cornish peasant, he became an ordained Methodist minister and spent his working life moving around England – an incredible achievement.
But as with my mother, who came from far less humble a background in east Lancashire, his education was very England-centric. And both maintained a lack of enquiry into anything outside the UK as a whole.
I recall, in my late thirties, my mother seeing me reading a book and asking what it was. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I replied. My father had never heard of it – my mother seemed almost to blanch in fear.
After my father retired, they travelled a little on the Continent – and actually enjoyed it, though it often, in their reports, seemed to have been a revelation that, for instance, Germany was so clean and the Germans so ... friendly.
The first time they went was just after my father retired. It was a retirement present from his congregations, a trip to see the 2000 the Oberammergau Passion Play. He was almost terrified beforehand – it was, after all, the land of “the Nazis”.
They were neither stupid nor uneducated – but they were ill-served by a very limited and limiting education that severely constrained their horizons. They could list kings and queens of England, but knew almost nothing of the world outside the UK, except where that involved the wonderfulness of the British (English) Empire. And note – that was the what they could cling to as the ‘good bits’.
I strongly suspect that, in terms of Brexit and where we are now on a wider scale, this is a situation that was not limited to two people, on an individual level, growing up and being educated at almost opposite ends of England and in quite different socio-economic situations.
The English, with their long-term distrust of ‘intellectualism’, have allowed a culture to grow where we now ‘have no more need of experts’. Add to that a sense among (largely) older generations of not knowing what their identity is in a context of devolution and the end of empire, and you have fertile ground for opportunists, nationalists and populists.
‘The real world’ is simply a psychologically monochrome world view, where everyone ‘real’ is a mental mirror image of oneself.
It cannot, therefore, allow for free speech, political plurality and democracy, and any kind of diversity.
And that is why ‘real people’ and ‘the real world’ are not simply jokes, but are symptomatic of the problems we face in the UK as a whole – and most particularly in England – and why they need challenging at every turn.
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