- James, welcome to Waterstones first of all. - Thank you for having me.
When Brexit happened, let's say Brexit straight away, let's get that out there.
I guess a lot of people were surprised at the result. One of the things
that was said was that there were huge swathes of the population that people
hadn't been listening to. And it seems to me that you, more than many people, have
been listening to these people and talking to them and hearing what they've
got to say. I guess the first question is what have you learnt from listening to
people across the UK?
The first thing I learned was not to be
surprised by the Brexit result actually. It didn't surprise me
at all and in retrospect I'm surprised the gap wasn't even bigger. Because
what I discovered from listening to these people is that they believe
passionately in a variety of, sadly, things that are best encapsulated as
slogans and sound bites and they're genuinely fearful that they feel under
threat in the context of Brexit in particular but also other issues like
Islam and immigration and political correctness and gay rights and
what-have-you. They have been successfully persuaded that there is an
enemy at the gate and so when they were asked to vote to flee from the enemy, as
it were, it's not a massive surprise that they did. What I've learnt is that when
you ask them to perhaps describe the enemy, that's when things get rather
tragic/heartbreaking/hilarious.
You have mentioned some of the titles of the chapters and you've got the
different topics that people are talking about and they all are quite different
and yet as you say when you ask them to actually articulate what's going on
or why they feel a certain way it often gets towards being the same thing.
It's not just people that ring me that use phrases like 'political correctness
gone mad', it's national newspaper columnists,
it's prominent pundits and commentators on household name television programs.
Almost every phrase that's fallen apart under scrutiny on air with
me and these clips that go viral and what-have-you which is I don't know if
I'd ever have got a book deal if the clips hadn't gone viral
so that was a big part of the process because people are obviously going
crikey this is new - it wasn't new to me! It was what I'd been doing for ten years,
but it was new to other people because no one ever
challenged the slogans. So you might get Farage on Question Time saying it's
political correctness gone mad or saying we can't make our own laws or saying
we've been swamped by immigrants and no one ever said to him, and you know
David Dimbleby is not in the job anymore but it was his job to do this, to say
what laws? What do you mean when you say political correctness? What do those actual
words mean? Which seems such a simple; I think the
reason people didn't ask it is because people weren't quite as simplistic as me.
I don't care what you think – I need to know what you think in order to ask the
question that I care about the answer to – I want to know why you think it. And the
second thing was even simpler than that. What do you mean when you use those
words? That's most pertinent in the context of something like political
correctness, some beautiful exchanges with people who end up saying well I
suppose political correctness means being polite and trying not to be
offensive. And I say but you rang me up to say that was a bad thing.
I love those moments. But also with words like Muslim, you know, or even migrant.
What do you mean when you use the word because we've allowed them to become
catch-all terms for a variety of interpretations and realities and that's
another part of the reason why people have ended up furiously
committed to positions that don't stand up to scrutiny, and that's just weird.
People will have seen the, as you say, the clips that have gone viral and what
they often see is somebody phoning up and you either giving them
enough rope to hang themselves or to sort of you know to hit them with some
facts and to sometimes occasionally look a bit stupid. And I
guess the worry there is that there's this idea that you're punching down
rather than punching up, but you make clear in your book that what you're
trying to do is to as you say find out why is it that you believe this, to work
out who the real problem is here. And I guess the real question is at the end of
that: who is the problem? Who is stoking this hatred? And you identify at
least one or two areas where we should be looking at like the mainstream media
I guess in some cases.
What the media did was commoditise callousness and cruelty
and when you opened up your Daily Mail under Paul Dacre's editorship
it was putting immense amounts of effort into
terrorising you. To make you terrified of the European Union, to make you terrified
of Brussels, to make you terrified of Romanians, terrified of Muslims, terrified
of immigrants... because it sells. There's a line I use tirelessly on
air, I've had to ration myself because it sums up everything for me. Because I'm in
a business and I, by accident, have ended up doing quite well professionally
selling tickets for the speak your weight machine. I do, as you say,
hit people with facts. I ask them to explain themselves and deal in
provable, evidence-based... I get stuff wrong, but I try to deal in provable,
evidence-based phenomena. The people over there, the people working for Fox News,
who are making millions and millions and millions of dollars, or the Daily Mail
columnists or the Sun columnists and editors; they're selling tickets for the
ghost train. Ghosts don't exist but people will still pay to be frightened.
Unfortunately they end up believing that ghosts exist. So when someone comes along
and says I am the only person that can deliver you from these ghosts, they do
unsurprisingly well in the polls: it doesn't mean that ghosts exist.
You do mention George Orwell in the book and there is something about as you say
people are able it seems to say contradictory things, one thing one day,
another thing the next and people don't care. Nobody in America seems to
care about the fact that Trump seems to lie...
But he gets that, doesn't he? That line in Orwell
near the end about the... 'They were told to ignore the evidence of
their eyes and ears, it was the party's final, most terrible command.' I don't know about
you but I didn't read that as a warning. I didn't really understand what dystopia
meant. But this week you've got Alabama in America essentially turning into a
tribute act to the Handmaid's Tale and you remember that what
Orwell meant was exactly what Donald Trump said in the run-up to the election when
he said that I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a
single vote. And then you have Kelly Anne Conway introducing the phrase
'alternative facts' into public discourse, which is a euphemism
which means lies. And then you had Donald Trump saying, not long ago,
about three months ago at one of his ludicrous rallies, actually telling
people not to believe what they can see, what they're seeing. Don't believe what
you're seeing, believe what I'm telling you. And I
suspect like probably – I'm almost, I'm 47 now and probably everyone my age or younger,
I thin it's got something to do with proximity to the second world war
although it doesn't work entirely as a generational observation; when I
read about the Holocaust, when I read about the rise of Fascism, when I
read the literary warnings against fascism like Orwell or The Handmaid's
Tale or the nonfiction warnings against it like The Banality of Evil by Hannah
Arendt, I didn't think it was about my species.
I thought it was about what you could describe as a historic
cousin from history, that was somehow DNA based different from me and
my neighbors and my friends and my colleagues. And the most horrible thing
to happen in the last three or four years is to realize that a lot
of these ancient hatreds, a lot of these
people who will encourage you not to trust the evidence of your eyes and ears,
they're us. They're our neighbours, they're our family members, they're our
friends, they're our colleagues. And what the book tries to do is understand
how they can end up where they've ended up without necessarily castigating them
all as cretins and bigots and racists and homophobes.
Some of them are but they can't all be. If they all are we might as well go home now.
In that case, as you say, because we are talking about our
friends and family and neighbours, is the solution, and I use that word very
carefully, to challenge it? Is it now more important than ever to challenge what you hear?
I interviewed Farage in 2014 and prominent journalists were writing about
his career is over now because he's completely exposed Farage for what he is.
And I knew, it really isn't, because I read social media, I read the emails. And
people who are having their prejudices and their bigotries
validated will forgive the person doing it anything. So how do you challenge that?
I don't know because you present them with all of the evidence...
Probably the most tragic call in the book is a Donald Trump supporter and I
list the things that we've seen on screen, the things that we've seen on
screen that demonstrate he is an unpleasant bully. That's all, let's leave
it there, let's not go further. I can, with evidence, but just for the context of
that conversation I say what about the time he mocked the disabled journalist?
And this caller, from Crawley, not from Alabama, from Crawley, says 'Fake news.'
I say it was on our screens. How do you challenge that? I don't know yet. I'm
working on it. I'll have to get back to you.
That will be in book two.
Yeah, although who can write a book at the moment? I delivered a bit of
an update for the paperback edition of How To Be Right and almost as soon as I
pressed send in the context of Brexit the bloody goal posts moved again. It's
quite ridiculous, it's almost impossible. But you've got to publish it at some point.
We will get this interview out as soon as we can but – It's already out of date!
We'll add a text update. But, no, James, it's great to read your book and to talk to
you about it in a bit more detail so thank you so much.
Well, thank you very much.