While down south, I probed COVID.

This was the response in one chipshop:

“We haven’t had much bother with the old pandemic down here because we don’t have the same genes as them coloureds. Haven’t heard of a single person down here who’s died. It’s all made up by them medias.”

It’s a disturbing truth about Britain. Not particularly surprising, perhaps.

Ultimately these are the lines of disconnect so many people struggle with because echo-chambers make you forget.

It’s always been troubling. Always. And the mess around us is because of this.

And when I say probing, I literally mean just making idle chit chat. However, it’s always better to go and vet and verify public sentiment away from social media. A habit of intelligence gathering never goes away really.

The theme of belief/disbelief was commonly held.

Our country is a depressing mess of over-empowered privilege, legacy prejudice, and is laden with poverty traps which stop it changing.

It is genuinely important to remember that not every bad thing is caused by external disinformation.

All of the defects are ours to own.

The big protest marches and the campaigns have always failed to recognise this, our broken structure.

Which is why they’ve failed.

You can’t do anything if you’re only acting out stuff which is interesting or accessible to you and people like you. And you self-delude too.

You want to make change?

Orwell knew where to aim.

The stock response is to dismiss people as “thickos” or “UKIPers” and it’s just not true.

That’s another form of prejudice. Call it elitism or classist or whatever you want.

The majority of people don’t care about right or left politics. They just want a less hard life.

There aren’t jollies or second homes, just an endless grinding wait until the next payday.

Big concepts of economy and rights don’t matter when your day to day is a struggle. Any freedom above that is being well off.

That privilege is far away. Detached.

So a lot of what has been done in the “fight against Brexit” and “fight against Boris” is just hugely counterproductive. Gazing into a small hand mirror because it’s preferable to the other reflections in the funhouse.

It’s all enhanced the disconnect.

The problem is us.

It has always been us.

And we’ve made it worse by failing to recognise there is no “them.”

And I want to thank @raquelster69 and @simondowser for replies while I was still writing the thread which helped tighten up the concept of the last tweet above.

Will expand on this thread in the next episode of #HoldTheLine as soon as @GuyDorrellEsq and I can get together and do the podcast.

Also: https://twitter.com/agoodfireburns/status/1286988904067936259?s=21 https://twitter.com/agoodfireburns/status/1286988904067936259