I heard you talking about change and the idea that we
are all refugees and that we all move even if we don't actually move, if we stay still,
because of course time passes, the world changes, and this struck me is
particularly relevant when we think about some of the things that are
happening in this country at the moment with people dealing with the idea of Brexit
and this idea of Britishness that people are wrestling with seems to me to be
based on a very old-fashioned idea of values that maybe didn't exist anymore
or an idea of the past that was probably a bit of a myth and maybe a group of
people who consider themselves natives, who have been here all this time and
they don't want anything to change. Is it perhaps true that things have changed
around them and that they just haven't realized, or that that is just part of life.
Well, I think you know I mean I have strong views on on Brexit. I'm not a fan.
Not because I'm not uncritical of the European Union but because I think
there's a kind of potentially xenophobic, nativist tendency embedded within much
of the Brexit movement that I think is misguided.
I think there's a generational divide as well. We see younger people
disproportionately voting against Brexit and older people voting for Brexit.
Sometimes I wonder whether the referendum shouldn't have been weighted
by the amount of years that you would experience the consequences of that
referendum. And so somebody at age 80 would have you know five or six years
worth of votes and somebody aged 18 would usually have 60 or 70 years worth of votes.
But it didn't work out that way you know in a sense the generation that's
longing most for Brexit in any case is nearing the great Brexit in the sky.
As we all are slowly. But they, as generation, more rapidly.
Now, all of that said, I think we make a
mistake when we imagine that people who feel that they are becoming foreign in
the place where they have grown up are necessarily racist or chauvinistic
or xenophobic. There is a migration that occurs with time. If you were born in
London 80 years ago and you live in London today still in the same house
everything has changed. You might very well feel quite foreign as you step out
of your door. But for me the opportunity that comes from that isn't that we
should say the person who migrates geographically and the person who migrates
temporally, you know the one who suffers a loss of their country or place
of origin because they'd have to leave and the one who suffers it because time
passes and it changes are different, actually. I think they are experiencing
quite a similar narrative of loss. And so rather than setting them up in
opposition to each other, if we can acknowledge that there's a
similarity to the pain and sorrow it might well be that what offers solace
to one will also offer solace to another. Which is to say, beginning to
articulate a kind of more optimistic vision of the future that isn't shrouded
in nostalgia. I think that an emotional violence occurs in the moment
of migration as well. And if that's ignored that trauma can echo forward
across generations. You can have second and third generation migrants who
are still feeling much of the emotional pain that was experienced by their
parents or grandparents, who feel that they abandoned their own parents.
And that has to be looked at. But similarly the person who feels that the country is
changing around them, their country is changing around them, needs to be
considered sympathetically and I think in both cases starting to imagine
a more equal world and a more compassionate
world is part of the answer. As opposed to this us-versus-them 'othering'
which is what we see a lot of today.