The trouble is that this is who we are

From London 2012 to Paris/Southport 2024

As I watched the riots that followed the Southport stabbings, I was at first lost for what to say, indeed if I had anything worth saying. There are already quite enough people condemning and despairing. Then I heard someone say, “This is not who we are.”

I am sure we all have them; phrases and cliches that irritate and annoy. One of mine (others are available) is, “This is not who we are.” Whenever one or a group of our citizens does something bad then amidst the general condemnation very soon someone intones, “This is not who we are.”

As a phrase it is platitudinous – the speaker arrogating to themselves the right to know or decide who WE are, and WE all agree. It also implies a supposed wisdom on and insight into our natures, further disguising the cliched reality.

Worse, it avoids acknowledging the rather more disturbing thought that actually it is who we are – or at least a part of us or an aspect of some of us. And if acknowledging that seems obvious, it at least leads somewhere more interesting and important, which is why it is how some of us are – or perhaps, in the right circumstances, more of us could be.

How is that some of ‘we’ end up rioting and deciding immigrants are the root of all our troubles? What the rest of ‘we’ can’t do is wash our hands of them because, like it or not, they are (to quote from John Donne’s ‘No Man is an Island’), ‘A part of the main.’

This musing came about as I flicked between the Paris Olympics and riots on the streets of British towns and cities and watched the British media going comically overboard in celebrating Keely Hodgkinson’s superb 800m gold medal. As strongly as we want to dissociate ourselves from rioters as ‘not who we are’, we do want to associate ourselves just as strongly with medal-winning Olympians as if they are ‘who we are’. Are the best not just the flip side of the coin from the worst?

And from that it was easy for me to flick back to the London Olympics to what, for me, is still the ultimate symbol of the best of ‘we’.

It is of course, ‘Super Saturday’. For those of you unfortunate enough not to hold a British passport (see, I’m already getting in the mood), this was the extraordinary 44 minutes when three British athletes won Olympic gold medals.

In fact, Team GB won six golds that day, an amazing achievement, but it’s those three golds in 44 minutes that made it Super Saturday. Why?

The answer I would say is because it summed up everything we wanted to be and also suggested we were getting there. Let’s break it down.

In the run-up to the Olympics, a bit like France now, the games had suffered much British cynicism as delays, costs etc gave us a serious fit of the glooms, “Oh, Britain has lost it, we can’t run/build/do anything anymore.” But then we had a spectacular opening ceremony, with its originality, its humour, with the breadth of engagement, right up to the Queen and James Bond. The world, not just us, loved it.

Maybe we still had it we thought. And so it proved. The main stadium was superb, the event organisation efficient, and after a slow start the medals started rolling in. Come Saturday our rowers and cyclists demonstrated with three golds not just talent but the fruits of superb training, innovation and organisation. Come the evening we were in the mood.

The stadium was packed, the atmosphere electric, and in those 44 joyous minutes Jessica Ennis in the Heptathlon, Greg Rutherford in the Long Jump, and Mo Farah in the 10000m all won gold.

What made it perfect though was the characteristics of those three. From Northern England came Ennis, diminutive and charming, a classic ‘poster girl’ with an English mother and Jamaican father. Rutherford was from a Southern England new town, Milton Keynes, and about as traditional English in looks and background as you can get, descended from professional footballers who played for Newcastle and Arsenal.

And then there was Mo Farah. Somali-born and trafficked as a child into Britain, after a rough start his talent was spotted. The talent was his, but Britain nurtured it, gave him the opportunities and he in turn was proudly British.

What a blend. The Northern mixed-race girl, the Southern bloke, the refugee. Perfect, and all cheered to the rafters by a crowd who didn’t care about anything other than they were British – and Mo was as British as Ennis, who was as British as Greg. They were ours. The Best of British.

I use Super Saturday in some of my lectures as an example of narrative, the narrative of a modern Britain.

In fact, I often argue that Super Saturday was ‘Peak Britain’- the culmination of something wonderful. Emblematic of course, and no-one should assume it was universal, but was modern Britain ever more united than it was then, including a sense of where it was going?

Those who know me will not be surprised if I suggest, perceptions become reality. At that moment all the diverse elements of today’s Britain came together to produce something wonderful many could appreciate. I will not undermine my own argument by saying we could say, ‘This is who we are’, but it did point the way to saying, ‘This is who we could be.’ Before our eyes we saw a physical, tangible example of what was possible.

So, what happened?

A Mo Farah of tomorrow could have been one of the asylum seekers cowering fearfully in one of asylum hotels attacked this week. A Jamaican like Jess Ennis’s father could have been one of those abused or attacked on a northern city street.

Was London 2012 a mere chimera then – sport is not life – or was it lost promise?

Well, sport is not life, but I would suggest it was still something lost. In many of the various elements that make up Britain, we are a less happy country, less contented, more disillusioned. In 2012 there was a sense of going somewhere, now there is more a sense of drift. As my mother used to say, it’s better to travel hopefully than arrive.

It’s not as if 2012 was free of troubles, we had had the 2008 crash and 9:11, we were up to our necks in Iraq and Afghanistan. But things still seemed soluble. We were travelling hopefully.

Now we seem to be floundering in a sea of troubles with no shore in sight.

There are any number of things we can point to as both symptom and cause. Toxic populism, social media filter bubbles, a darkening international scene, NHS queues, potholes in roads. Many of these symptoms and causes have global resonance, but some are ours alone, notably Brexit.

Without going into the wider debate about the merits of staying in or leaving the EU, what we can safely say is it has polarised us, and those divisions remain. It also has largely added to our disappointments and disillusion and on both sides. For the Brexiteers it has not fulfilled its promise – the sunlit uplands offered by Johnson et al remain shrouded in dark clouds, even if Brexiteers blame the lack of progress on it not being done right or being blocked by a mythical deep state. Indeed, the mythical enemy within adds to the fury. Meanwhile Remainers remain depressed as their fears of decline seem to be being realised with a Britain going downhill.

Behind all that remains another factor which is bigger than Brexit. The most potent phrase that got Brexit over the line was those three words, ‘Take back control.’ That sense of lost individual agency in a complex confusing world is widely shared by so many and not just in Britain. The genius of the Brexit campaign was to somehow annex the phrase and blame the EU for people feeling they were not in control of their lives. As if. Eight years on where’s that extra control?

That false promise was bound to produce disillusionment but if the promise was false, the feeling behind it was genuine, widespread, and remains so. It’s certainly widely shared by far more than the mobs who rioted last week. That is what I suspect many of the other ‘we’s’ in our country share with that toxic part of the collective ‘we’.

To be clear, I am 100% against them – they made me ashamed to be British, which incidentally is another contrast with 2012, and I am also noting how the world saw us then and how they reported on us now. However, as I said at the beginning, however toxic, they are part of ‘we’ and we need to understand them, not in order to excuse them (I don’t) but to help us work out ways to fix our society. Quick and robust justice is the right immediate response, to combat the immediate sense of spiralling out of control, but then what? Just as heavy rain would have quelled the riots, ending them doesn’t change the problems that lie behind them.

At heart the rioters don’t like the way things are and where we’re going. Meanwhile, neither do many others like the way things are, albeit with a different direction of travel. They don’t want people like Mo Farah, but I do, and I think most people do.

More though, I want that sense of hope I think many of us had in 2012. As I wrote this I was listening to the brilliant Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits) choosing his favourite music as part of a radio programme on his life. One he chose was ‘Wonderful Land’ by The Shadows, saying it filled him with joy, “It just seemed to me to sum up the promise of the time. The word is promise – to me it just promised everything.”

That made my mind flick back to another part of London 2012, this time the closing ceremony as the athletes entered to Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This.’ I’ve just watched it again, and it still choked me up (sorry, I’m a bit like that). ‘It’s looking like a beautiful day…one day like this a year would see me right.’

Is that too much for us to hope? Is the promise gone? Reality bites, but how we confront and deal with that reality also counts. Yes, we need to have an intelligence, breadth and nuance, but surely also more as well. The athletes in the current Olympics will tell us that, as well as a ruthless focus on getting all the other elements right, a positive attitude was fundamental.

There seems to me to be a widespread dissatisfaction, a sense of things spiralling away from us, and that there is nothing we can do – yet we all want to take back control. The rioters’ answer is not it, but what is?

Travelling hopefully is a good way to start to take back control, to believe drift and decline are not inevitable, but we also need to decide on the road we take. In 2012 we had something, a feeling we could travel hopefully. In 2024 we need to decide who we are, what we want and where we are going.