Transcriber: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Thank you very much.
About six weeks ago, I was standing at King's Cross Station,
and my wallet was stolen from my bag.
At the moment it happened, I was answering a text from my daughter.
I was checking at the same time to see yet one more train had been cancelled.
I was worrying about if I'd left my umbrella in the taxi.
A young woman asked the way, I turned to help her,
you can guess the rest.
I wasn't paying attention.
I wasn't focused on the right things.
I was trying to do too much.
I wasn't doing what I was brought up to do:
to sit there and pay attention.
I was instead doing what so many of us do in our busy lives,
is thinking that somehow I could do it all at once:
have a conversation with my daughter, check on the train line,
answer somebody's plea for help, in a kind and generous way, I have to say,
before her boyfriend took my bag.
I did all that because I was thinking about something else -
probably thinking about what I was going to have tea
when I got home to York.
My mind was not focused on what I was doing.
And it occurs to me when I think about our hugely busy lives at the moment -
that when you think about social change,
most of the time we are missing the point
because we're thinking about something else.
Three big things have rocked our world and shaken me to the core
in the last three years.
They've each got a name: Grenfell, Windrush, Tilbury.
Each of those events happened because we weren't paying attention.
The Grenfell fire that happened,
that shocked the country,
that killed so many people so tragically, so needlessly, so criminally
happened at a time with a big public discussion about housing.
It was not about safety.
It wasn't about people iving in a block of flats
managed by 13 different landlords.
It was about, How can we build more housing?
Shall we protect the Greenbelt?
That was the discussion about housing.
And a hundred families died.
Grenfell will stay as a scar on our conscience
because we weren't paying attention.
But other people knew it was going to happen.
If you'd looked, the day of the fire, at the website put up by those residents,
they knew they were in danger.
If you talk to the local priests in the area, they knew it was dangerous
because they heard it from their parishioners.
If you talk to the advice centres there, they knew danger was afoot.
Windrush -
scores and scores of grandparents, aunts and uncles
deported back to the Caribbean,
people who'd made their lives here,
whose lives were distorted and destroyed by an act of government
when sent back to a place they hadn't lived in for 40, 50 years -
people who are the bedrock of our society.
We weren't paying attention.
We were having a big debate
about whether we should be counting student numbers
as they came from India and Pakistan.
We were having a big national debate about immigration in that.
We didn't notice what was happening
to people who had lived in our midst all that time.
Some people knew.
Their families knew.
The communities knew.
The churches they went to knew.
But we weren't paying attention.
So we didn't notice what was going on.
And that lost a home secretary her job
as well as destroying so many people's lives.
So Grenfell, Windrush
and Tilbury - the one you probably thought,
'What's she going to say now?'
29 young Vietnamese found dead in a freezer container.
Because they were being trafficked over here
to do our nails in nail bars and dig our potatoes in Lincolnshire.
We didn't really know what was going on.
We knew people coming here illegally were looking to the Mediterranean.
We weren't looking there.
29 nearly children killed freezing to death in a freezer.
Those three things shocked us.
We didn't expect them to happen.
We weren't paying attention.
We were looking somewhere else -
we're always looking somewhere else.
And something dreadful happened that's a scar on our country.
Bigger things than that have happened:
2016 referendum.
We are in the north of England woke up and saw what the result was.
In London, the CBI, the TUC, the major newspapers,
Whitehall, Westminster, the leading politicians
were surprised.
They weren't paying attention.
They hadn't been listening to what people had been saying.
I think up here,
many of us had a bit more of a sense
that things were not going to go quite as smoothly
as those people have so casually and cavalierly assumed.
We haven't been paying attention to the anger, the dismay
and the sheer sense of disconnection that so many people felt.
Now this matters.
It matters because it's in these things that happen
that our society gets changed forever.
Nobody will ever again be able to hear the words 'Grenfell'
and not think of a shocking fire.
Nobody would ever again talk about Windrush,
as that amazing moment of the '50s
when people came over here to form new lives and to build our society
after the Second World War.
What they'll remember now
is the grandparents deported at the end of their lives
back to a country in which they've never lived.
Those are the stories of our nation's history,
which when we miss them because our eyes are somewhere else -
just like me, looking at the railway timetable
and being cross with the trains that come -
bad things happen.
Now, I don't know, looking around this room,
if on a Friday morning you woke up elated or destroyed
by the results of the election on Thursday night -
I'm not going to make any judgment about that.
But I do know one thing:
I do know that whatever the result had been at that general election,
we are facing a decade - the second decade of this century -
when some very big things are going to happen.
We are going to have a constitutional crisis,
a major discussion,
with some very difficult decisions and very uncomfortable truths,
about whether we stay as a united kingdom,
whether there is a united Ireland in my lifetime -
which I would now put money on -
big changes about the shape of our society.
We're going to have that constitutional debate
in the next 10 years.
We are going to face more climate disaster
in the next 10 years.
The floods in South Yorkshire are now, I believe, described as "the new normal".
That's the way our life is going to be in the next 10 years.
Weird, funny weather events -
things will happen in ways we didn't predict,
the things we were told would happen once in 100 years
will now happen once in 15 years.
The climate change is here, and the climate emergency is with us.
So constitutional change, climate change and massive economic volatility.
You may think that leaving the European Union
is the best thing that could happen to us.
Many of you may well believe it, or you may think it's a disaster.
It doesn't really matter what you think
because we are going in for a period of economic volatility,
when stock prices would go up and down, house prices would jump about,
big household-name industries will relocate,
and some may come here, and some may go,
but there will be a lot of change.
And when you have change on that scale
on all three fronts -
on the Constitution, on the climate, on our economy -
it's extraordinarily easy to be as distracted
as I was at King's Cross Station a few weeks ago.
It's extraordinarily easy to be told that the real story is one thing
when something else quite different is happening.
So I want to go back to reflect on who knew -
who knew about these terrible things,
about Grenfell, about Tilbury, about Windrush?
Who knows now about the county lines
which are transporting our children along railway lines to sell drugs
and have their lives ruined forever?
Who knows now
about child sexual exploitation going on in some of our towns and villages?
The people who know are the people we need to pay close attention to.
And they are the people who I would call
those of us who make up civil society.
The connectors, the people who know their neighbours,
the people who are in groups and associations,
the people who go to a church or a mosque or a synagogue -
the people who make deep connections.
If we listen to them -
if we listen really acutely to what people say is going on,
perhaps we won't be so surprised by the very big changes that take place.
But we have become a society that finds it tremendously easy
not to pay attention
because after all, there's so much filling our minds,
there're so many interesting things we look at all the time,
even as I'm speaking
l can be distracted by looking at what's on my phone.
Here it is; I'm looking at it as I speak.
It's extraordinarily easy for your mind to go somewhere else.
Someone very wise said to me once, years ago:
'Don't just do something, sit there'.
And I think we could all do with a lot less doing something
and a lot more sitting there
because it's in the sitting there that you make the deep human connections.
Facebook likes are not human connections.
Retweeting something is not very human.
Understanding a little bit about many things
doesn't make you an expert on anything.
But being deeply connected where you live,
in the school at which your children go,
to the people around you,
to the institutions and organizations that shape your lives,
whether those institutions are the massive ones of the university
or the tiny ones of the lot of society in which you're in,
is what prepares us to make real change.
Because in this disruptive, scary decade,
which we are all daunted about -
and don't let anyone tell you it's going to be a breeze
because this decade is going to be a scary one.
It may be a massively productive one.
It may be, as our Prime Minister tells us,
the decade in which Britain will become great again.
Let's hope so.
But it is also the decade of extraordinary change.
And at times of change, what do you need to do?
You need to pay close attention to what's happening -
not in front of you,
not what the newspapers tell you to look at,
but sometimes what's happening at the edge of your eye,
the corner of your eye,
edge of your consciousness -
what's happening at the margins,
what's happening at the places where they don't want you to look,
what's happening in the places which are, perhaps,
a bit more uncomfortable, a bit more difficult to see.
Those changes are what make us,
as a village, as a town, as a region, as a country.
They're also what makes us human beings
because, I think,
the next decade could be the decade for deep and powerful human connection,
for making links which surprise us,
for getting to know people who are different from us,
for working across those boundaries that are so often so policed.
If we do that, we grow as individuals.
Yes, for sure.
And that is hugely important.
But we also grow as a society
that can make the really difficult decisions,
that could be ready for the really major shocks.
When the floods happened in South Yorkshire,
people there didn't say it's because of climate change.
Not because they're stupid
but because they were taking their neighbours cups of tea,
and putting people up in their room overnight.
People facing disaster don't see the big picture,
but what they do is express their humanity.
And that, in all my experience, is the beginning of social change:
paying attention, being connected,
recognizing that every small change has consequences.
And that those people who thought it didn't really matter -
but in Grenfell Tower, they now have 13 landlords, not one,
made a very small mistake that has had massive consequences.
Those people who said, 'We can call a referendum' -
because everyone we know votes one way -
have had massive consequences.
Those people who failed to listen
to the detail of the stories that people are saying,
those people who are unable to stop doing something -
just sit there, listen carefully.
They're the people who make real social change happen.
Thank you.
(Applause)