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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/20/change-tone-referedum-lull-of-humanity-jo-cox-death-over-sayeeda-warsi-david-cameron
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| It’s not too late for the tone of this referendum to change | It’s not too late for the tone of this referendum to change |
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| After the death of Alan Kurdi, you may dimly recall a round of frantic soul-searching about the state of political rhetoric on refugees. The Daily Mail started talking about a “humanitarian crisis”; the Sun’s front page launched a charitable appeal “for Aylan”. This persisted for a couple of weeks before normal service was resumed. If this felt at the time like a thoroughly indecent interval, it now appears comparatively restrained. | After the death of Alan Kurdi, you may dimly recall a round of frantic soul-searching about the state of political rhetoric on refugees. The Daily Mail started talking about a “humanitarian crisis”; the Sun’s front page launched a charitable appeal “for Aylan”. This persisted for a couple of weeks before normal service was resumed. If this felt at the time like a thoroughly indecent interval, it now appears comparatively restrained. |
| Following the death of Jo Cox, the same tentative humanity appears to have stuck around for slightly less than three days. The return of the EU referendum campaign didn’t have to bring with it the same old venom. But that poison is creeping back, with depressing uniformity across political lines. | Following the death of Jo Cox, the same tentative humanity appears to have stuck around for slightly less than three days. The return of the EU referendum campaign didn’t have to bring with it the same old venom. But that poison is creeping back, with depressing uniformity across political lines. |
| On the remain side, some have gone beyond reminding us that Cox’s killing should prompt a new civility, which is legitimate, to hinting that it is an argument in itself to stay in the EU, which is not. On the leave side, the example that Michael Gove and Boris Johnson sought to set, of a more temperate tone on immigration, does not appear to have trickled down to the foot soldiers. And in the media, there are those who just seem relieved that the boring old truce is over. After David Cameron’s appearance on Question Time last night, one sketchwriter spoke for the most deranged of his colleagues when he couched his description of the interrogation in a tone of antic glee. “Game back on,” Quentin Letts wrote. “Big time.” | |
| It’s not just politicians and the press who have a responsibility to treat people they disagree with with respect | It’s not just politicians and the press who have a responsibility to treat people they disagree with with respect |
| Sayeeda Warsi’s defection to the remain campaign is the first headline of today’s dismal ding-dong, and there is little evidence that anyone is going to do anything differently in response. She has been variously decried as a publicity-seeker, a traitor, a schemer who was really for remain all along. It may be true that Warsi timed her intervention for maximum political impact; it is certainly true that she was a long way from the centre of the leave campaign, some of whose senior figures have reacted with understandable bemusement at the departure of someone who never seemed to be involved anyway. For some people, these analyses provide sufficient grounds to traduce her character and as a result, her observations of an atmosphere of “hate and xenophobia” are simply dismissed out of hand. | Sayeeda Warsi’s defection to the remain campaign is the first headline of today’s dismal ding-dong, and there is little evidence that anyone is going to do anything differently in response. She has been variously decried as a publicity-seeker, a traitor, a schemer who was really for remain all along. It may be true that Warsi timed her intervention for maximum political impact; it is certainly true that she was a long way from the centre of the leave campaign, some of whose senior figures have reacted with understandable bemusement at the departure of someone who never seemed to be involved anyway. For some people, these analyses provide sufficient grounds to traduce her character and as a result, her observations of an atmosphere of “hate and xenophobia” are simply dismissed out of hand. |
| As I followed the Warsi debate this morning, I kept thinking back to Cameron’s interrogation on Question Time last night. The prime minister has had, I believe, an essentially decent campaign, perhaps in part because he recognises that characterising the other lot as monsters is a pretty reliable way of alienating the people who support them. Nothing in his tone last night dishonoured the legacy of Cox. Instead, as audience member after audience member took their turn at operating the ducking stool, you were forced to reach an uncomfortable, almost taboo conclusion: it’s not just politicians and the press who have a responsibility to treat people they disagree with with respect. It’s the public, as well. | As I followed the Warsi debate this morning, I kept thinking back to Cameron’s interrogation on Question Time last night. The prime minister has had, I believe, an essentially decent campaign, perhaps in part because he recognises that characterising the other lot as monsters is a pretty reliable way of alienating the people who support them. Nothing in his tone last night dishonoured the legacy of Cox. Instead, as audience member after audience member took their turn at operating the ducking stool, you were forced to reach an uncomfortable, almost taboo conclusion: it’s not just politicians and the press who have a responsibility to treat people they disagree with with respect. It’s the public, as well. |
| There’s nothing wrong with being sceptical about politicians, of course. But it doesn’t follow that we are obliged to meet their every utterance with a sneer, to relish their discomfort, to agitate for their humiliation. That’s been business as usual for years: the “masochism strategy” that Tony Blair once deployed can no longer be described as a strategy, since everyone has to abide by it, all the time. In each of the televised Q&As that have decorated this debate, it has felt like it would be entirely reasonable for the subjects on both sides to say: “Sorry, but could you rephrase your question without taking such obvious delight in being massively rude, please?” Instead, they offer up the one part of their face not pelted in tomatoes, and humbly point out that we’ve missed a bit. | There’s nothing wrong with being sceptical about politicians, of course. But it doesn’t follow that we are obliged to meet their every utterance with a sneer, to relish their discomfort, to agitate for their humiliation. That’s been business as usual for years: the “masochism strategy” that Tony Blair once deployed can no longer be described as a strategy, since everyone has to abide by it, all the time. In each of the televised Q&As that have decorated this debate, it has felt like it would be entirely reasonable for the subjects on both sides to say: “Sorry, but could you rephrase your question without taking such obvious delight in being massively rude, please?” Instead, they offer up the one part of their face not pelted in tomatoes, and humbly point out that we’ve missed a bit. |
| Related: Gordon Brown: Jo Cox’s legacy should be an end to the downward spiral in our political culture | Related: Gordon Brown: Jo Cox’s legacy should be an end to the downward spiral in our political culture |
| So it was again last night. Just as we might have hoped for our politicians and media to do better in the last days of this campaign, we might have hoped for the same of the rest of us. But nothing changed at all. “Are you a 21st-century Neville Chamberlain?” one man asked the prime minister. “Simple question! Yes or no, please!” This is a pretty amazing yes or no question and it is a sign of the times that Cameron did not feel able to preface his answer, rousing though it eventually was, with a simple negative. Mostly it just seemed mean, and stupid. No doubt some people will see this analysis as an elitist insult to the general public, a failure to acknowledge or understand the circumstances that nurture such contempt. But vicious circles don’t get broken without asking everyone to stop being vicious; Cameron was not being mendacious or dismissive. Any other view seems to indulge in what the leave campaign’s most intuitive supporters on the right might call the soft bigotry of low expectations. It is not unreasonable to ask for more. | |
| Grow up, some will say. Politics is a contact sport: game back on, big time. But the obvious and universally useful lesson of Jo Cox’s life is that while politics is, yes, bound to be a contact sport, a blood sport is something else entirely: that it is possible to make a tackle without putting your studs up, that it is possible to disagree with someone without being cynical about their motives. What the treatment of Warsi and Cameron have in common is an assumption of bad faith. And what Jo Cox’s life reminds us is that this isn’t usually justified. There is still a chance for something important and good to come out of this despair. We’re on the brink of wasting it. |