It’s time to de-tribe – before it goes horribly wrong
I WATCH TODAY’S news like I watch hooky TV dramas: compulsively, fearfully, enthralled, through the barely-splayed fingers of both hands. I no longer remember a time when it was boring: when the bongs and themes of the big channels’ big news shows heralded nothing but a bit of bluster and a reversal on yesterday’s minor legislative tweaking. How could they, yeah but, what does that really mean,
I did not see that coming and how can any of this possibly resolve itself in time, is how I consume the News of Now; appointment viewing incorporating a series of vertigoinducing cliffhangers.
Who Resigned Today is one of my fave recurring plot twists in today’s high-stakes unmissable news spectaculars. Who walked, defected, left a sick burn of a resignation statement. Sam Gyimah had just ditched the Tories for the Lib Dems at the time of writing: because this isn’t the internet, I can’t tell you who’s done it since, who followed him, Amber Rudd, Philip Lee, Angela Smith, Luciana Berger, Chuka Umunna, Gloria De Piero and so on in walking away from political parties that had defined them, paid them, given them a platform for years and years…
I only know that someone has. Presumably: multiple someones. Whoever they are, and from whencesoever they walked, I admire them. It takes conscience, integrity and massive balls to give up on your political and professional identity. To publicly de-tribe yourself, because that tribe no longer represents you, your values, or the best interest of the nation. To give up any hope that you’re better placed to steer things back on course from within. To invite the fury of ex colleagues. To renounce a central part of you, the bit that always called itself ‘Tory’, or ‘Labour’, or ‘loyal’. It’s a big fat deal: and it gives me hope some of our politicians are actually not as bad as all that.
We can learn from them, us non-mps, us voters, us public. Right now, our tribalism is our undoing. Our unwillingness to hear any argument but our own, our incapacity to so much as follow someone on Twitter if their views diverge from ours in even the teeniest respect; never mind: have a proper, true conversation, with the other side of a political divide, hear them out without shouting them down, shaming them, insulting their intelligence, calling them names.
‘I could never be friends with a Brexiteer or a Tory,’ a friend recently said, ablaze with a righteous pomposity so familiar, widespread and destined to (excuse my French) f**k us. People who voted differently to you are not the bad thing. A nation riven and raging, tired and fearful, insular and weakened and so. Terribly. Tribal… That is the bad thing.