I'm not sure how you even begin to cover something like this.
Our job is usually just to talk to people to find out how they feel.
Why aren't you a royalist?
I'm just not.
Well, who am I to say anything?
I'm interested.
Right, let's go and sit down.
I've had enough.
I always said it was an it was a somewhat inane
question – how do you feel about the queen died?
How's it going around here?
To sort of give it some shape we thought we'd visit places that embody various parts of
what some people would call the Elizabethan age.
New history now it's a new chapter.
It's going to be different somehow.
Do you think anything's going to change for Handsworth?
No.
She's the only kind of continuity in a world of in kind of in continuity.
Something that's steadfast
and is something to hold on to, I think, it's the most unprecedented two years of flux, really.
Like 50?
OK.
She just was always there.
One more bit of uncertainty and weirdness in a
very uncertain and weird world.
It is, you just never know what's around the corner.
So we were just in Salisbury which is steeped in heritage and tradition and
history and we're now going to Milton Keynes and it really represented the last sort of burst of
post-war British optimism.
Do you remember that?
And how's life at the minute?
Great.
What do you mean in the midst of the cost of living crisis
and all of that stuff?
Yeah, I'll just keep the other half outside.
Have you?
After 18 years.
Brilliant.
Everything's changing innit?
It certainly is, it certainly is.
A new era.
Oh it definitely is.
So how do you feel about the fact that all the telly's gone weird and
football has been cancelled on Saturday?
No that is not OK because I was supposed to go to White Hart Lane tomorrow.
United vs Tottenham women's.
The country wants to mourn, I suppose.
She was important to a lot of people.
But not you. – No ... well, no, not really.
Last question: there is a shopping parade near here somewhere, isn't it?
Over the next roundabout and it's to your right.
Now, when she died literally, like, we were crying, like my great nan actually, like, grew up with the queen.
Yesterday on Facebook you wrote, 'I've lost my grandma'. Wow!
I remember when I was very young,
my granddad was telling me, 'oh the queen of England has come to Ghana.
'And then when Harry married Meghan Markle, these were some of the most watched events ever.'
But when prince Harry married a black woman, right, it didn't work, right?
Yeah.
Now some would say that's because the the royal family has all sorts of problems about race and all that stuff.
To be honest, I think that wasn't true because it was just rumours that people were saying that the monarchy wasn't
happy about that and that wasn't true.
You don't buy that? – No, the queen loves everyone.
Yeah, it's sad.
No, like, it's sad that she's died of course, but it doesn't affect me.
I think people from my country can get visas here pretty easy because of like the connection.
That's another thing we talked about to people today is the British empire.
So I'm not going to look at it be like, oh they colonised this and now whatever has happened, happened.
Things move on.
It's just new history now.
It's a new chapter.
How do you feel about the future?
I'm sort of excited and scared at the same time. Tell them to up our pay, bro, I work for £10,50
and then i have to pay for gas, electric and everything and then by the end of the day,
I don't have no money and I'm going back to do a 12-hour shift that's so long and I need to ...
I feel like the King, once he steps in, he has to like make some changes otherwise
he's just on the same plate .
You can't look to him, that's not his job, he's going to sit
there and say nothing ... well, it's Liz Truss and all those people you want to be here.
You want to be looking at that, that's the prime minister's job.
She can't even do calculations, right? She's lucky, bro, we're pissed.
I've just seen videos of her and she's like,
she doesn't know what ...
So you're telling me we're f'ed up basically because I was hoping there's gonna be some changes ...
Well, there is an election in two years, you'll have to vote.
I mean, Boris Johnson couldn't do it ...
I don't think anyone's gonna do it.
When does that 70 years begin? Well, it begins in 1953.
Most if not all mainstream politicians bought into the post-war consensus, right?
That people needed to be looked after, that housing was part of the state's responsibilities.
But you can imagine if people came here from central London, they'd be living in
very cramped conditions a lot of people and they come here and they get without much of us,
they get a three-story house with a garage, you know, and they're surrounded by green space, you know,
a big part of the story the last seven years is how that sort of ambition rose and fell because
you can't imagine this happening now.
When I first moved here, there was the old people's place there,
that's been now knocked down, youth club where the kids could go to,
that's no longer.
The new prime minister wants people to work 10 times harder.
You think about the NHS, they're struggling as it is and they want them to work 10 times harder.
It's very hard, very hard at the moment.
See in your position some people would get maybe
quite cynical about the Queen, the Royal family because they're very, very wealthy.
They don't have to worry about the heating and all that but still felt a connection somehow.
Yeah, I still ... OK, the earn quite a lot, and? You know ...
She was the longest reigning
person that ever had the crown now she's not here, it's just like there's a big loss in the world.
'... of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is solely and rightfully ...'
' ... King, head of the Commonwealth, defender of the faith to whom we to acknowledge ...'
Oh, I can't cope with this, man.
There are places we tend to return to at times of
sort of serious national significance and one of them is this part of Birmingham, Handsworth.
It's a legacy, isn't it? It's such a long time.
But she's been there for as long as you've known ...
OK
I felt a bit sad when I heard that she died
but then it's time to go and rest.
Football's been canceled man, I'm annoyed about that.
Well, so you felt quite fond of the queen? – We are all fond of the Queen, even though she's
what she is, but we have to respect her.
Buckingham Palace and all that must feel very distant from here.
But whenever I go to London, I always make a visit to them.
I take my kids there.
I'm not going to convince you, right?
We've hit the wall a bit here.
For better or worse, you know, this moment requires that people fall into line, doesn't it?
And that's not really a good atmosphere to do journalism here.
When we last came here it was during the Brexit campaign, right,
so everything was up in the air.
We could get more questions than answers you see,
the questions that you've got to ask is why did Handsworth not change after the riot?
How can we improve Handsworth? Like the city centre, two minutes away from Handsworth, how can we
improve so that good things come out of Handsworth instead of bad things?
In Handsworth there were riots
in the 80s and the early 90s and more recently than that close by there were riots 11 years ago.
You hear a lot and we've heard a lot over the last few days about
the idea that the institution of monarchy has brought this country stability.
Because it has got community
spirit there's a soul to Handsworth. – There is, yeah.
There is a community here,
we just need like, as I said, support for everybody to come together to make something work.
I've got my child living out somewhere else, was all scared of this area in particular, Handsworth.
What were you scared of?
The knife crime.
Mainly knife crime.
How's life for you at the minute?
As in what? – I don't know, jobs, education whether you feel good about the future.
Am I allowed to swear? – Yeah, of course, yeah.
There's not that many opportunities and stuff like that in areas like this, like they're not
like, especially for young kids and black kids and like, colour kids ...
What do you want to do with your life?
I wanted to be a social worker.
You know the queen's died? – Yeah.
How do you feel about it?
It's actually sad. – Is it?
And now you switch on the TV every five minutes and it's Union Jack flags, God save the King,
king and all that ... does that connect with you?
No, not at all, I don't care about it.
There's a lot of just division and stuff like that, like, obviously racism happened time ago but
obviously there's still racism and stuff like that.
In a sense like, because of the colour of my skin,
there's like there's not many places that will take you on and stuff like that because ...
What? Work-wise?
I know like they might not say it but like that's just how I feel.
We're talking to people about life here ... and how old are you?
18.
Do you live locally? – Yeah.
How's life?around this neighbourhood? – Life around this neighbourhood?
Yeah.
It's bad.
Bad like how?
Nothing to do here, nothing for the youths.
The Queen ... it's like, I care
but I don't, that's me being real.
So tell me about the care part and then tell me about the don't care.
I care because it's our Queen.
It's a person who died like, it's sad. – And then they don't care part.
She ain't done anything for us.
She ain't done anything for us, let's just be real.
When the Thatcher government started rolling back the state, I mean, the riots there were also about
racist policing but they were very, very hard times for the country.
1981 was a hard year and then four
years later, you've got a another big watershed event focused on the kind of place we're going now.
It's a wedding.
And it's all about living in the midst of the sort of Thatcherite winner
which is really the birth pangs in the world we live in now.
See you tomorrow.
Tell me about living in ... how's it doing?
It's brilliant ...
How do you feel about the Queen dying?
I felt a bit emotional.
She's served this country for so long ...
How are you at the minute in the middle of the cost of living crisis and all that?
I'm alright, mate, it's not affecting me, like ...
Don't say that, you dickhead.
How long have you been waiting? – I think I've been waiting here since 2:30.
So you've been waiting 40 minutes? – Yeah.
In the last six months or a year has the bus service got worse?
Oh definitely, same as always.
Bus cuts are a big thing here
and remember one of the big stop-offs on this trip was Milton Keynes, a city which was built
from scratch.
You can't imagine government having the level of ambition to do that, they talked about
levelling up for five minutes right and forgot about it.
Well, I run a business so ... – What do you do?
I transport vehicles all around the country and I go to everywhere in the country
and I see it.
You just look and you think, yeah, there's money been put in there and then I go
back to my little village which don't get me wrong, it's not ... I've seen a lot worse places
than here.
Community-wise, it's quite a close community.
Friendly place, apart from ...
We get some trouble with teenagers ...
But you get that in every town village because there's noting to do.
When it were a coal mining it was absolutely thriving.
I have a theory that if you want to understand modern Britain and how unequal it is and the sort of messed up things about it very often,
it was the miners is getting defeated to open ... – Completely. My dad was striking when
I was born in 84 and my mum couldn't get food for me, they literally had to have handouts and stuff like that.
End of day we weren't industrial and the South was built on industrial North.
They should be thanking us but they're not, never have, never will. – You've heard that phrase levelling up presumably?
Our bloody Prime Minister, she's been voted on 82,000 Tory membership.
How is that democratic? It's just all backwards innit?
You can into the House of Lords ...
In the midst of all this, the Queen dying, how do you feel about that?
I pay me respects but end of day, i mean, I'm going through it with my mother.
My mother's 64 now and she's got cancer, I'm going to hospital to see her again.
Everyone's like, oh she did so well, oh she wasn't born into it, yeah I wasn't born ...
My mum weren't born into poor and she's 64 and dying ...
She's a grandmother and a mother and it's sad when anyone dies but there are
other things that I don't agree with, you know, like, Prince Andrew ...
It just needs modernising, everything needs modernising, just look at Westminster itself when they're going in with
a sword and banging on table and stuff like, you just like, what the hell are you all going on about?
The Queen dying ... I don't really know to be honest.
yeah everyone's talking about it like it's not like i don't want it
It's not like we don't care, it's just felt like it's not relevant ...
I don't think it's relevant to my life, like ...
Been there for 100 years and now they are just going to get ...
What do you think?
I don't know.