Making Sense of The UK Riots: The Danger of Division
Everyone wants to feel good about themself.
Our inner narrative is driven by this imperative. No-one wants to hate. We hate when we're empty.
We need to find a scapegoat that explains why we're not doing as well as we wish we were.
In the UK this week there have been shocking scenes of anti-immigration riots. On the surface it looks like racism. Actually there's a bigger problem.
This is about hopelessness and groups of people being manipulated.
Politicians and Social Media Influencers are creating a narrative that serves their agendas. There are sections of society that feel like failures. And they are being given a narrative that creates a scapegoat.
This is nothing new.
It's been the story of human civilisation for years. This issue is too big and complex for us to really do justice to. But it is a dynamic that threatens every team.
Division.
I got together Michael Ward, Clark Ray and Michele to try and make sense of the issues we've been seeing with the UK riots.
Transcript
I was watching what was unfolding.
Rob:I'm, not a big news reader, but you get when something is
Rob:going down, which is quite big.
Rob:And for me, it's really a sign of division.
Rob:There's certain people who manipulate situations like Nigel Farage the one
Rob:who calls himself tommy robinson, andrew tate manipulating people who
Rob:they're stoking their primal fears And basically this is about division.
Rob:The podcast is called the unified team and division is the enemy of the unified team.
Rob:The biggest question I get if I'm interviewed on a podcast or talking
Rob:to someone is they say, can you just keep it to business relationships?
Rob:You can't, because people are people, you can't separate the person and
Rob:the way that they think about their personal relationships plays into how
Rob:they're business relationships play out.
Rob:So I thought it would be interesting, because this is
Rob:something that's very public.
Rob:It's something that we are able to look at but learn the principles behind it.
Rob:And I think all of us are able to think of all of us have been
Rob:involved in solving problems.
Rob:And when you have to solve a problem, the solution comes
Rob:at a higher level of thinking.
Rob:And so you have to think outside of the context.
Rob:Clarke has something called the 10th man, which he advocates, which is someone
Rob:who questions and prevents the group.
Rob:I'm being very careful not to say devil's advocate.
Rob:No, you're dead right.
Rob:It is
Clark:that I believe even in the Israeli intelligence community where
Clark:the idea originated, they also called it the the devil's advocate department.
Clark:Yes, there are similarities, but over the years, the idea, the
Clark:concept has changed somewhat.
Clark:I don't know if you guys reacted the same to this situation as I did.
Clark:But when I saw it happening, it had a painful sinking inevitability
Clark:about the whole situation.
Clark:As you saw this thing unfolded.
Clark:It was just clear that this was not going to clear itself up very quickly and it
Clark:was going to head down a particular road.
Clark:One of the things having worked in manufacturing for more than
Clark:20 years dealing with morale on the shop floor with unions.
Clark:battling with management for improved circumstances and so on
Clark:with dissatisfied groups of workers and all sorts of things that happen
Clark:as we know in the industrial arena.
Clark:There are some similarities between what was going on the streets and what
Clark:I've seen so often in, in factories.
Clark:I was at a factory in Coventry four or five years ago where they were trying
Clark:to move part of the factory, but it was crossing over all sorts of, sensibilities,
Clark:amongst certain groups of workers.
Clark:And there was all sorts of problems.
Clark:A lot of workers were causing some difficulties with the changeover.
Clark:And they asked me to go in and try and bring some order to this situation.
Clark:And one of the interesting things I found about it was that the
Clark:bosses, the management, had certain assumptions that they made about why
Clark:all these problems were happening.
Clark:If only we could do this, and this, it would all go away.
Clark:And this whole idea that Rob's just mentioned about the tenth man.
Clark:Is that he challenges those assumptions because an assumption is just based
Clark:on a set of beliefs that you guys as lecturers and psychologists will know
Clark:that I have no basis in reality if they just guesses and sometimes we would
Clark:get lucky and we guess right and other times it goes catastrophically wrong.
Clark:There were certain assumptions that were being made about these
Clark:things that were taking place.
Clark:What is it now over a week ago in places like Rotherham and Sunderland
Clark:that couldn't be wider of the mark.
Clark:I wrote a post yesterday on Substack.
Clark:about the fact that the seeds of this discontent in places like Rotherham,
Clark:Middlesbrough, Sunderland, was sown 40 odd years ago, when all the mines
Clark:were closed, and Thatcher did a walk across the wasteland, and talks
Clark:about moaning minis in the mining industry and that sort of thing.
Clark:This is a part of the country that's been pushed into
Clark:irrelevance for years, for decades.
Clark:And I do occasionally rail against the, this holier than thou attitude
Clark:that certain management and leadership types have towards these people.
Clark:Because, I try to challenge the ideas of leaders when they assume
Clark:that these working class people have got nothing to say for themselves.
Clark:They're uneducated and so they don't know the world around them.
Clark:And of course they do.
Clark:They may not interpret it very well, they may not express it very well,
Clark:and sometimes they can get hijacked by the agendas of people with some
Clark:very seriously dark vested interests.
Clark:But they're unhappy for a reason and these things need to be looked into.
Clark:And as I say, in fact, as I said in my post yesterday, get off
Clark:your arses, get from behind your desk and go and have a look.
Clark:You cannot know the answer sitting in your little desk in Whitehall.
Rob:We've had other discussions on, about men being left behind and
Rob:the struggles certain men have, and I think this is an outcome of those
Rob:kind of changes that when we change, we have to take care of everyone.
Rob:Nobody goes out and hates because they're happy.
Rob:They hate because they're feeling disenfranchised.
Rob:Some deep loss, some deep futility.
Rob:And there is a whole section of often we try to make change and we make
Rob:knee jerk changes, and then we don't consider the people that are losing out.
Rob:It's key that we bring everyone along and give everyone a voice.
Rob:I think there are whole sections of society that The gap between
Rob:the haves and the have nots are falling further and further behind.
Rob:And there's a lack of education, there's a lack of, understanding.
Rob:And there's a certain section of, society that is falling
Rob:further and further behind.
Rob:Yeah, but, Rob, this wasn't the
Clark:case 30, 40, 50 years ago.
Clark:There were many poor people that didn't go around kicking other people's doors in.
Clark:So there's clearly some other ingredients in the mix at the moment.
Clark:You mentioned when you spoke about having this conversation that you wanted to
Clark:talk about things like herd mentality, groupthink is something that I've always
Clark:pushed against because to me, the idea that you're in the group that knows best
Clark:is anathema to me, the minute you join any group, you're wrong, just by virtue
Clark:of the fact that you've joined the group, because no group can have all the answers.
Clark:Otherwise, we'd all be in it.
Clark:And the problem is, when you, I watched some clips of people walking
Clark:down the street kicking doors.
Clark:And I just thought no sane person would do that.
Clark:The people doing those things are not acting the way they ordinarily would under
Clark:normal circumstances and the psychology.
Clark:You will know better than me, Michael, about this.
Clark:The psychology of a person, we've mentioned before the
Clark:Stanford prison experiments.
Clark:You put a person in a particular set of circumstances.
Clark:I know from my own experience in the military, you put somebody in
Clark:a given set of circumstances and their personality changes completely.
Clark:And that can be manipulated, and so with the rise of the internet and Twitter
Clark:and all this stuff, it's so easy now to whip people up into a feeding frenzy.
Clark:And this whole idea that I've been banging on about for probably 10
Clark:years now, about the 10th man, is to me the only answer is to get somebody
Clark:in the room that has no agenda.
Clark:Socrates, I think, said it, Thousands of years ago, when he echoed the words
Clark:of the the Pythagoreans, that, anybody that offers any advice to government
Clark:should have no property, own no money, have no bank account, because you can't
Clark:then be bribed or coerced to do anything.
Clark:And that's the problem.
Clark:Everybody has an agenda to push these days.
Clark:And funnily enough, I'm in the middle of trying to put this book together.
Clark:It's a bloody nightmare.
Clark:It's just getting bigger and bigger.
Clark:But the idea at the moment is that I'm trying to establish in the moment is that
Clark:the heuristics, the rules of thumb that we apply to our framework, our belief system.
Clark:And, the fact that we live in a world now where all truth is relative makes
Clark:it next to impossible to say to somebody whether something is right or wrong.
Clark:Even though the image of somebody kicking somebody else's door in.
Clark:It's clearly wrong, but as the saying goes today, that's
Clark:your truth, it's not my truth.
Clark:How do you overcome this group mentality when everybody's swept along
Clark:by this tide of we're in the right?
Clark:And clearly, in the cold light of day, they look at their actions
Clark:and must see that they're not.
Michael:I'm sure they absolutely do, but my feeling is that we're
Michael:probably reaping the reward for the last 40 years, to be blunt, really.
Michael:Do people know the Bruce Springsteen song, The River, at all?
Michael:Yeah.
Michael:Okay.
Michael:Bruce Springsteen, he's obviously got this image as this blue collar worker.
Michael:In fact, he's probably never looked at a spanner in his life.
Michael:But who am I to speak, as Michele will tell you.
Michael:But about late 70s, maybe 78, 79, 80, his brother in law was a blue
Michael:collar worker, and he got laid off.
Michael:And Bruce Springsteen did this song called The River, and it's about young
Michael:kids growing up together, the guy and his girlfriend, he gets her pregnant,
Michael:they get married at 19, he's got a job in construction, 2021, boom, the job's gone.
Michael:And he lives in the valley, and you work for the same place, but it's gone.
Michael:And it ain't coming back.
Michael:And I think those people have had 40 years of it not coming back, not just in this
Michael:country, but in America, particularly in America, particularly in the Midwest.
Michael:And I think there's just 40 years of hopelessness, fueling a kind of, I
Michael:don't understand the world, the liberal intelligentsia, the elite, whoever they
Michael:are, don't understand me, they don't care.
Michael:I think it comes out with, you need somebody to blame.
Michael:So it's somebody different to yourself.
Michael:It's some poor guy with a different colored skin and
Michael:then you go kicking doors.
Michael:And the next day you probably do feel dreadful about it, but you've
Michael:got a sense of hopelessness.
Michael:I know Rotherham, I know Middlesbrough, they are desperate places.
Michael:I'm not saying that to be rude to the people.
Michael:Middlesbrough always was a desperate place.
Michael:It was always the grimmest place up there.
Michael:People used to drink in Middlesbrough for oblivion.
Michael:The way the Gregorians drank, you drank for oblivion, it was unbelievable.
Clark:Since the sort of late 70s, early 80s, obviously the
Clark:Thatcher years made a difference.
Clark:It clearly changed the landscape dramatically.
Clark:However, since then, neither the Conservative nor the Labour
Clark:governments have been able to do anything to redress that balance.
Clark:I remember seeing a few months ago, It might have been last year, actually.
Clark:A woman that was arrested for killing her husband.
Clark:They were in the middle of an argument.
Clark:It was over something ridiculous, like what cereals, whether he'd
Clark:eaten the cereals or something.
Clark:She killed him, stabbed him to death.
Clark:Now she clearly didn't kill him because of the cereals that he ate.
Clark:Absolutely, yeah.
Clark:There was a whole load of other stuff going on before that, and that was the
Clark:straw that broke the camel's back neck.
Clark:I wrote in the article yesterday that I consider the British and
Clark:the English specifically to be amongst the most civil, tolerant and
Clark:fair-minded people on the planet.
Clark:I joined the British Army at the age of 16.
Clark:And despite my my contempt for politicians of all stripes, I love this country.
Clark:And I love the habits and the traditions that, that we continue to cultivate.
Clark:I grew up in Birmingham where chicken tikka masala was as common as Korean
Clark:chips and kippers and, jollof rice, there were all sorts of people there,
Clark:and yet we were all, to my mind anyway, British, and this seems to be This idea
Clark:seems to be slowly getting eroded at the moment, because people are politicizing,
Clark:basic fundamental cultural issues.
Clark:In the post that I did yesterday, I put a picture towards the end that I made in
Clark:Canva, and it basically was two signposts.
Clark:One pointing that way to London, and the other one pointing that
Clark:way to all the poor people.
Clark:And basically that's how this country is since the times of the Normans, as
Clark:far as I can tell, the Normans never ventured much beyond, Essex maybe,
Clark:or a little bit further but anywhere from Birmingham and upwards, nobody
Clark:went, and money never goes that way.
Clark:You just said that Middlesbrough is desperate.
Clark:But places like Coventry and Derby, and all the towns in between, Stoke on Trent
Clark:and all Crewe and all those places.
Clark:are desperate.
Clark:They've been neglected for such a long time because what
Clark:politician ever goes there?
Clark:The money's all coming into the City of London.
Clark:It's getting passed around Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament and all
Clark:the people that have got these very big houses with moats around them.
Clark:And as far as they're concerned, the rest of the country is just
Clark:to feed the City of London.
Clark:It
Michele:amuses me when I go up the M1 and shortly after leaving near the M25
Michele:there's a sign which says to the north.
Michele:Yeah.
Clark:With a skull and crossbones.
Clark:Yeah.
Clark:Michele, where are you from if you don't mind me asking that?
Michele:Michael and I lived in Sheffield for a long time so of
Michele:course we knew Rotherham very well.
Clark:Yeah.
Michele:I mean at the time when the steel industry went, I mean I
Michele:remember going through the Don Valley and seeing all the furnaces lit up.
Michele:And then that all went, and then you were left with just special steels.
Michele:They call them little mestas, little special steel companies, and that changed.
Michele:So it's a big difference for me to live in the south of England
Clark:there's a definite change of attitude as you go down south
Clark:and look, we've all been to London and Hampshire and places like that.
Clark:They're lovely.
Clark:The people are lovely.
Clark:But outta sight, outta mind.
Clark:My wife's a few years younger than me and we had a conversation a
Clark:couple of days ago about the miners.
Clark:I'd written this article about the minor strikes and so on, and
Clark:growing up in the seventies, in the three day week and power cuts.
Clark:it was fairly common to get a knock on the door at sort of seven o'clock at
Clark:night and it would be miners or their wives from places like Coventry and
Clark:Derby and from all around Birmingham.
Clark:Birmingham exists because it was the epicenter of all these places that
Clark:were sending coal in to provide for the foundries and the furnaces and yet all
Clark:that's gone so we now have the shell.
Clark:The skeleton of an infrastructure that no longer exists and Britain has become this
Clark:service oriented country that is all about fake money, pretend money and yet fake
Clark:money doesn't buy the dinner for the kids.
Clark:And, there are a lot of people in, this is half of the country.
Clark:Who have been hanging on year after year and whilst there is a great value
Clark:to be have had from bringing immigrants into this country, let's face it, we
Clark:are a country built on immigration.
Clark:We're all immigrants.
Clark:From the Saxons all the way through the Vikings and so on up to today, all
Clark:of my friends growing up in Birmingham were of different nationality.
Clark:My best friend was Iranian and all of my friends were either Irish or West Indian.
Clark:So clearly this is a country built on immigration.
Clark:However, when people are going without and then they see people from another
Clark:country being put into hotels, whether you agree with that or not, you can
Clark:understand why they might be a little bit annoyed, especially when they're
Clark:only seeing what's going on the surface.
Clark:One of the conversations that I often have in factories when we're
Clark:talking to disenfranchised workers.
Clark:Was that they had it in their mind that if they were put in
Clark:charge, it would all change.
Clark:And I always used to say, okay, what would you do?
Clark:How would you change things?
Clark:Because I guarantee within a fortnight, you'd be running it
Clark:exactly the same way as them.
Clark:Because you only have limited resources, and you have the
Clark:same brain capacity as them.
Clark:So clearly you can't see everything that's going on behind the scenes.
Clark:However, you need to have that conversation.
Clark:And that's not something that's been happening for a long time.
Michael:Also, I think something else happened with, when you said
Michael:about Thatcher kicking things off, we basically changed from
Michael:Keynesian politics to neoliberalism.
Michael:And that's a huge sea change.
Michael:That's a huge sea change.
Michael:And I would argue that, there's obviously lots of factors to do that have caused
Michael:the present circumstance, but I would argue that neoliberalism is probably
Michael:the single greatest factor in our lives.
Michael:And yet most people have never heard of it or couldn't particularly define it.
Michael:And I'll give you my rough definition because I'm no economist.
Michael:My definition basically is that neoliberalism is when the government
Michael:acts in concert with the markets.
Michael:Basically, the whole point of capitalism isn't immoral, but it's amoral.
Michael:It's neither moral nor immoral.
Michael:It's just a more capital.
Michael:It's just use money to make more money to make more money.
Michael:And that's fine.
Michael:That's fine.
Michael:But if you want any kind of normal society, unless you just want one
Michael:AI robot to end up all the wealth in the world, because that's
Michael:where it would go in the end.
Michael:a government needs to decide, really decide how capitalism
Michael:should work and practice, where the money should go, what should be
Michael:allowed, what shouldn't be allowed.
Michael:Now that's not been happening for a long time under Labour governments
Michael:as well as conservative ones.
Michael:I think.
Clark:There's a point I often make in these sort of conversations in factories,
Clark:because a factory to me is a little microcosm of the way the country is run.
Clark:The people in charge, they think they know best and they
Clark:tell everybody else what to do.
Clark:One of the things I always say is, get out from behind your desk, go and have
Clark:a look, talk to the people that know.
Clark:Ask them what they need, and then get out of their way while they fix it.
Clark:Because you don't know.
Clark:You can't do what they do.
Clark:And, funnily enough, you mentioned that about neoliberalism.
Clark:I have a really good friend who is a lecturer at the London School
Clark:of Economics, and she wrote a book last year called Late Soviet
Clark:Britain, which I found fascinating.
Clark:We had a conversation about it a couple of weeks ago.
Clark:Because it sounded it's a strange title.
Clark:Britain couldn't be further from a Soviet model.
Clark:She was talking about the fact that the similarities between the two are
Clark:that Both the Soviets and historically British governments have decided
Clark:that they know what's best for the people that live in the country.
Clark:And rather than treating them as humans, who evolve and change and have
Clark:differences of opinion and so on, they try to fit people into these processes,
Clark:as you said, about the financial models that they impose upon the country.
Clark:As if everybody would just go along with it, because, that's
Clark:what we do, we're just robots.
Clark:And of course, the end result of all of these ideas are that there
Clark:are places where money tends to congregate, as in the City of London,
Clark:and other places where there's none.
Clark:And how do you redress that balance?
Clark:Because you can't just pump money into a place that is now rotting from the inside.
Clark:One of the things that Mrs.
Clark:Thatcher did, which was very clever, was she abolished a lot of the county
Clark:councils, because most of them were labour, and a lot of them would go
Clark:against some of the reforms that she wanted to impose, so by getting rid of
Clark:them, evolved into the cities, which were predominantly capitalist in nature.
Clark:So a lot of these things, as you said right at the beginning, Michael, we're
Clark:now, reaping the whirlwind from some of the decisions that have been made.
Clark:As I said in this article yesterday, there are no easy answers.
Clark:Anybody that says, these are right wing fascists and we need to impose
Clark:this absolutely, there are some people that have got some really strange
Clark:ideas about the nature of this country.
Clark:They are a minority that the real problems will involve getting down to grassroots
Clark:and having some serious conversations about how the country is run at a
Clark:local level, and those conversations are going to involve some hard truths,
Clark:I think, both for the people involved and for the government as a whole in
Clark:Westminster, because they have been shamefully negligent in the way they've
Clark:dealt with the rest of the country.
Clark:As Michele says, the North, there ought to be a sign under
Clark:that says, here be dragons.
Clark:There used to be, there
Michael:used to be a sign, I can remember hitching in the early 70s and as you
Michael:went out in London I can't remember where it was, Edgware or somewhere,
Michael:we got on the motorway and there was a sign that said, it said Aylesbury and
Michael:the north, and Aylesbury was 23 miles up it, so it was the north, it was
Michael:a vast brooding territory, up there.
Michael:Where the Ninth Legion had gone into the mists and never come back.
Michael:There's so many differences.
Michael:There's a North Side difference.
Michael:There's a neoliberalism versus Keynesian.
Michael:There's, there are just so many differences, I'm just
Michael:not sure we can bridge them.
Clark:I'm massively optimistic.
Clark:I find myself pathologically positive about the future.
Clark:And, I said to my wife, as we were watching some of these scenes unfold,
Clark:I may be enormously misguided, but I said, look I'd love somebody to
Clark:say, Clark, go and talk to them.
Clark:I
Michael:would happily.
Michael:So I'd love to as well, but it's not going to happen.
Michael:And if we did, would anybody listen to us, Clark?
Clark:When we were talking about this, my wife, for a short while,
Clark:worked in the same factory as me.
Clark:She's a quality inspector so she knew some of the issues that we
Clark:were facing at this great big factory in Coventry, enormous place.
Clark:And I said there was a time when I was trying to instill some
Clark:changes, but they saw me as a tool of the management, because I've
Clark:been sent there to fix this issue.
Clark:So I was neither one nor the other.
Clark:I was stuck between the devil and the deep.
Clark:There was a point, this factory made enormous vehicles big dumper trucks,
Clark:10 ton dumper trucks that carry stuff around quarries and stuff, and there was
Clark:a point at which somebody wanted to move one of these trucks, and I just said,
Clark:Hold on, these guys haven't finished.
Clark:And they were at the point of running me over with this great big truck.
Clark:They were threatening to, they were trying to intimidate me.
Clark:And I said, look, if you push ahead of this guy, then that
Clark:will have a knock on effect.
Clark:Please, just trust me.
Clark:It took months and months.
Clark:But over a period of time, they started to realize that I had neither
Clark:interest in the management, nor in the shareholders, nor in anything else other
Clark:than just getting this thing functioning.
Clark:And it takes time to get that sort of trust.
Clark:And you have to prove that you can be trusted by the actions that you take.
Clark:Unfortunately, every politician that has ever stood up in any of the cities of the
Clark:North and given lip service to the help that they want it's never materialized.
Clark:Nothing's ever come of it, and so how can you expect these people to trust anybody?
Clark:And, all that happens is that the police have been beating them with
Clark:sticks and calling them fascists.
Clark:I saw an old guy, on camera, I think it was Sky News, and he said I have no
Clark:opinions either way about this stuff.
Clark:He said, but I'm part of this community, I feel I need to support them.
Clark:And witness What's going on?
Clark:And that's really what most people are doing.
Clark:They're just there to be a part of it and to voice their concern.
Clark:But somebody needs to actually physically do something.
Clark:Where's Mr.
Clark:Starmer at the moment?
Clark:I believe he's on holiday, is that right?
Michael:I don't know, and I'm not a huge fan anyway but I'd be very
Michael:surprised, he's not a risk taker, that's for sure, he's setting himself
Michael:out to be a safe pair of hands, and I can understand that but most politicians,
Michael:in fact all politicians these days, come up through the Westminster circle.
Michael:And their world is Westminster, not anywhere else.
Michael:It used to be, it used to be that the Labour MPs would have kind of trade
Michael:union experience, at least they'd have been, they'd have worked in the shop
Michael:floor, they'd have done something.
Michael:The Tories were considered to be people with business experience, usually
Michael:because they had family companies.
Michael:We're usually appallingly wrong, but that's another story anyway.
Michael:But even that limited experience, or maybe both of them were in the
Michael:military perhaps, but that's gone now.
Michael:Paddy Ashton was unemployed when he became an MP.
Michael:He'd been in the SBS, a special boat squadron.
Michael:He'd been out there doing stuff.
Michael:There's no ifs and buts, but that type of person doesn't exist anymore.
Michael:You start as an intern in Capitol Hill or Westminster, and you go up
Michael:through the greasy pole, and your world is Capitol Hill or Westminster.
Michael:That's your world.
Michael:That's what you know.
Michael:You don't know factories.
Michael:If you take most people into factories, they're just totally lost.
Michael:It's oh my God, what's happening?
Michael:Not to you, Clark and not to me either, even though I can't
Michael:change a bloody light bulb.
Michael:It's familiar territory.
Michael:They're familiar people.
Michael:I know them.
Michael:But Westminster politicians don't know them, and I can't see that changing in
Michael:our country, in America, or really any other any other major country either.
Michael:I don't know.
Clark:That, that is an issue, isn't it, that most politicians are nowadays career
Clark:politicians, as you've just mentioned.
Clark:Politicians, yeah.
Clark:Yeah Paddy Ashdown was probably the only politician I've ever had any
Clark:Maybe John Major to a degree, but John
Michael:Major got better.
Michael:Yeah.
Michael:Yeah.
Clark:But Paddy Ashton was one of the only people that I ever listened
Clark:to when he spoke because you could just tell there was a sincerity.
Clark:I noticed you call it a bit special boat squadron as well.
Clark:Very good.
Clark:Not as special because they changed the name to special boat service.
Clark:But back in the day it was the squadron, wasn't it?
Michael:I'm being old fashioned there.
Michael:Yes, good man.
Clark:But he'd seen life and he understood what it meant to
Clark:to try to influence a group of people for the greater good.
Clark:And that to me is where the real world meets politics.
Clark:He had an insight into both worlds, which politicians today don't have.
Clark:And you can see that by some of the.
Clark:monumental cock ups that have been made recently.
Clark:And watching the conservative government, disappear up its own
Clark:backside over the last year or two has been astonishing to watch.
Clark:It's almost like they, they've been committed some sort of communal suicide.
Clark:Because you couldn't have scripted it better than the way and clearly
Clark:a part of this whole situation.
Clark:Has a political agenda.
Clark:It's funny that it just happened, and regardless of what your political
Clark:ideals are, we just want to see a government that helps the country
Clark:regardless of what they call themselves.
Clark:It doesn't matter, does it?
Clark:So it's no coincidence that as soon as Mr.
Clark:Starmer gets into power, this thing is
Clark:And it's just a shame that it was a test that the current government doesn't appear
Clark:to have passed, certainly not yet anyway.
Clark:And let's hope they get a better grip on it.
Michele:I'm really pleased that you're optimistic because
Michele:I'm not very optimistic.
Michele:, I can see this happening.
Michele:I've been working as a volunteer with the young men on the barge in
Michele:Portland Harbor for several months.
Michele:I've just been immersed in the local bad feeling.
Michele:I remember when I first started doing it, I was absolutely staggered
Michele:by posts put on Facebook sites.
Michele:It was unbelievably racist and horrific.
Michele:And I'm just immersed in that the whole time now.
Michele:I've talked to other volunteers.
Michele:And I've said, even my friends, I've stopped talking to
Michele:them about these young men.
Michele:Because they are so fixed in their ideas, I can't see them ever changing.
Clark:I don't know if you have any kids amongst us.
Clark:I've got a son and a daughter, both in their sort of late 20s.
Clark:And I look at my son and then compare him to his friends.
Clark:And the sort of the, because most of the people that work in factories
Clark:are young men, predominantly depending on the industry.
Clark:Some certain sectors are predominantly women, but in heavy engineering and that
Clark:sort of thing, you have a lot of men and some of these ideas spread like a virus.
Clark:One of the reasons I got into the educational side of manufacturing,
Clark:training, was because I felt that a lot of these young men had no role models.
Clark:When I grew up, my granddad was still alive, he'd been in the Second World War,
Clark:he always wore a shirt and tie if pushed, he would stand and have a fist fight,
Clark:but he would much rather have a pint with you he had some strong opinions, but they
Clark:were based on, as far as he was concerned, the real world of what it meant to be a
Clark:working class man in Birmingham, and those people were all up and down the country.
Clark:Who do these guys have now, these young guys?
Clark:And I would watch a shop floor of 100, 150 people trying to get the, these
Clark:products out of the door, trying to work together to accomplish a common goal.
Clark:And they were a simmering mess of all of these contradictory ideas about
Clark:women, gender, sex, foreigners, and all of these real knee jerk, simplistic
Clark:attitudes towards the rest of society.
Clark:And I don't know about you, Rob, Michael, but when I was a young lad,
Clark:Certainly going into the military, my opinions were corrected by a
Clark:whack around the back of the head.
Clark:It worked, there was a sense of fairness in everything.
Clark:Nowadays there's as you say, Michele, there's some horrific sentiments going
Clark:around amongst some of these young guys.
Clark:And, I am optimistic because this is a country that's been forged
Clark:through difficulties and hardships.
Clark:I had a conversation with somebody recently, I do a lot of writing on
Clark:LinkedIn, and I was talking to somebody about an article that I wanted to
Clark:write, but I didn't know whether it would be inflammatory or not.
Clark:And what I was going to say to them was, it was an open letter to the rest
Clark:of the world that, look, it may look like England's going up in flames.
Clark:We've been here before.
Clark:Proportionately, the English Civil War killed more people than any
Clark:other war that has ever taken place.
Clark:We killed something like 5 percent of our own population.
Clark:One of the idiosyncrasies of the national, British national character is that we are
Clark:pathologically polite with each other.
Clark:And people think it's quaint and cute and nice.
Clark:But the reason for that is that if we aren't, We have an overwhelming
Clark:tendency to kill the living daylights out of each other, with a zeal
Clark:that people would be shocked at.
Clark:You only have to go to any football match and people are knocking seven bells out
Clark:of each other on a consistent basis.
Clark:And then they're all back at work on a Monday morning
Clark:drinking their tea together.
Clark:So there, there is a part of our character that tends toward being
Clark:somewhat belligerent and pugilistic.
Clark:However, in spite of all of these things, it's a beautiful place.
Clark:The British character to me it's a unique thing in the world and far be it for me to
Clark:say I'm proud of being British but I am so glad that I grew up in this country with
Clark:some of the ideas that we have about how we should live and look after each other.
Michele:One of the Afghan guys I was talking to yesterday off
Michele:the barge said, after the end of our conversation, I love the UK!
Michele:I thought, I hope it treats you well.
Clark:Michael, you might know something about this and I'm
Clark:interested to get your thoughts on this because my mum was a psychoanalyst.
Clark:When I was growing up she was batty as a fruitcake.
Clark:She was sorry?
Clark:My mum, my mother, she was mad as a box of frogs.
Clark:As so many of you are, in my humble opinion.
Michael:Go with the territory.
Michael:I'm not a psychologist any longer, by the way.
Michael:And I never liked psychologists but anyway.
Clark:But she was, enormous fan of Jung, Carl Jung, as so
Clark:many people are these days.
Clark:And in conversations with her I got to learn a little bit about Alfred
Clark:Adler, who had a very different view of how things like trauma and the things
Clark:that are supposed to affect the way we are how they manifest in the world.
Clark:I liked his approach, although I'm no psychologist and I certainly
Clark:wouldn't try to, Delve into it.
Clark:I just find that some of the ideas that are prevalent today that we
Clark:are basically the sum of all the bad things that ever happened to
Clark:us is a little bit detrimental.
Clark:I think, as a national character is going through something of a little bit
Clark:of a self loathing period at the moment.
Clark:We don't like ourselves very much because of all the terrible things
Clark:we did as part of our colonial past, all the things the influences
Clark:we had on the rest of the world.
Clark:And we seem to have this distaste for our past, which I personally
Clark:find puzzling because we've come out the other side of it.
Clark:That to me is the key to dealing with any trauma, that you come out of
Clark:it the other side, a better person.
Clark:which is something that seems that Alfred Adler seemed to propose that it's not
Clark:so much the thing that happened, but how you deal with the thing that happened
Clark:that makes you a better or worse person.
Clark:So I'm positive, Michele, because I think we'll be better for it.
Clark:The influx of immigrants that have come into this country has probably been
Clark:greater than we would ordinarily be able to withstand, but we will withstand it.
Clark:They will be assimilated into the country.
Clark:They will become British, and we will be a better nation for it, I'm sure.
Clark:Hopefully.
Clark:not at the cost of our feelings of how we feel about ourselves.
Clark:I think that's one of the sad parts of all this, that we, we don't look
Clark:very kindly upon ourselves at the moment, but that will change, I'm sure.
Michael:I agree, but this isn't a British problem.
Michael:It's a global problem.
Michael:Every country in Europe's got this problem.
Michael:America's got it too.
Rob:I'm optimistic, but for a different reason.
Rob:I think that, Basically, we're in a system that doesn't work.
Rob:And I think the problem is we've got a world that's too complex
Rob:for the narrative that we have.
Rob:So politicians give us a simplistic idea.
Rob:And people think that they can read a headline, the headline of the Sun
Rob:and they understand the issues, and the world has become so complex.
Rob:We're making snap decisions, based on headlines.
Rob:And we think that we know.
Rob:The riots is basically about a lack of trust and a lack of information,
Rob:or people perceiving that they have a lack of information.
Rob:And as you said, Clark, there are times when people are
Rob:running a factory, for example.
Rob:They're making decisions from a completely different basis
Rob:from someone on the shop floor.
Rob:And it's a matter of perspective.
Rob:In the same way that the rioters have a different
Rob:perspective from the politicians.
Rob:But I think where my optimism comes from is that we've had the same
Rob:basic model since, since the Greek.
Rob:Since the Greek Republic.
Rob:And there's that adversarial law adversarial politics.
Rob:So for me, I think the system is broken in where we're trying to vote on something
Rob:that most people don't understand.
Rob:And when you look at the political candidates, when it comes down to
Rob:Biden versus Trump, as it was a couple of weeks ago, that is the best in a
Rob:country of, what 340 million people.
Rob:That is the best candidates we can get.
Rob:And we're getting that because we've bound ourself.
Rob:Part of what we've seen is the problem of democracy and politics as they stand,
Rob:because politics isn't about truth.
Rob:Politics is about selling the narrative that gets you power.
Rob:We need something that works for the whole.
Rob:Not for individuals or individual parties.
Rob:Think we need a basis where we can unify as a nation.
Rob:And I think that what gives me, I think economically, politically,
Rob:socially, we're at the end of a system that isn't, that can't work,
Rob:as the world becomes more complex.
Clark:Yeah, Michael you just, I think when you were talking about the political
Clark:system in this country, I think you nailed it when you said that they are all
Clark:predominantly from the same pool these days the politicians in this country.
Clark:One of the problems that I have found In my work life, certainly working
Clark:for myself, banging this whole 10th mandrum, is that a certain mindset
Clark:will not accept the idea that there are alternative ways of doing things.
Clark:I have a brother in law who is a managing director of a company in Birmingham.
Clark:We've grown up together.
Clark:He knows what I'm all about.
Clark:And he said to me, about a year ago, just after I started working for myself,
Clark:he said, the problem that you have, Clark, is that the people that you need
Clark:to persuade of this idea you have about the tenth man, are the people that will
Clark:never employ you because you're basically telling them they're doing it wrong.
Clark:One of the problems with that is, and you just said that this is a
Clark:worldwide problem, which I agree with, but there are two exceptions
Clark:that come to mind immediately.
Clark:They give me cause for some positivity.
Clark:The first one is Japan, where, you know they operate as
Clark:part of a a global economy.
Clark:And yet so many of the problems that we have here in the West, they don't,
Clark:they have their own problems, of course, but they don't suffer from it.
Clark:And also from my time in the military.
Clark:I know it's changed in recent years, but from my time in the
Clark:military, it was a world unto itself.
Clark:The reason both of those entities stand out to me as different from
Clark:so much of what's wrong with the world at the moment, is that they
Clark:have a completely different culture.
Clark:The Japanese culture pushes back against so many of the mores of Western society.
Clark:And the British military has all these traditions and cultures that
Clark:completely Eradicate any room for some of the problems that are coming
Clark:in upon the world at the moment.
Clark:So much of the negativity just couldn't take place in a culture
Clark:that pushes pride and certain elitism and tradition and so on.
Clark:And I know those things are changing.
Clark:Just to go back very quickly to what I was talking about with regards to
Clark:leaders not taking me into their, some do of course, otherwise I'd starve.
Clark:Most don't.
Clark:And the reason is they say, yes, we have a problem with our culture in
Clark:this factory, in this organization, and we need to address that because the
Clark:culture is making certain behaviors, predominate and causing us problems.
Clark:And my answer is, you've got it the wrong way around.
Clark:You need to change the behaviours, then the culture will improve.
Clark:But whilst they're constantly trying to address the problem of
Clark:culture, nothing will ever change.
Clark:It's a self perpetuating organism.
Clark:You can't change something from the outside.
Clark:You have to get in and change the behaviours.
Clark:And that's something that they won't have.
Clark:As leaders, most people feel that they need to, and it becomes oppressive
Clark:this belief that they've got to change the culture, they've got to change the
Clark:way the people on the shop floor think before any behaviors will improve.
Clark:It doesn't work that way.
Clark:And they said how can you possibly think that you have the right
Clark:to change a person's behavior?
Clark:And I said look, if there's two doors into the factory and I close one, I
Clark:will automatically change people's behavior because they've got to
Clark:come in the only door that opens.
Clark:It doesn't have to be litigious.
Clark:It doesn't have to be oppressive.
Clark:You just change the environment and people's behavior changes.
Clark:And I think that's part of the thing that we need to do in this country.
Clark:We need to open up conversations about how we change the way we, for instance,
Clark:if you've got a working group of people together that have some sort of work in
Clark:knowledge of a particular community, and you discuss with them ways that you could
Clark:change the problems in the community, but in every group of people, you put,
Clark:for instance, some representative from the local mosque, a representative from
Clark:the, from let's say the local miners or the local factory workers, or all
Clark:the different people that have to work together, regardless of their different
Clark:differences in ideologies, they, as they get to know each other, those
Clark:differences start to become less and less.
Clark:As you get these people to work together, it will become clear,
Clark:I'm sure, that their similarities far outweigh their differences.
Clark:And then you can start to change the behavior, because in as
Clark:much as they're talking to each other, behavior will change.
Clark:But whilst we're trying to change the culture, we will never, ever succeed.
Michael:My first book was about culture change.
Michael:I used to run culture change programs and companies.
Michael:And I could face up to the most aggressive management director
Michael:who said, prove you can do this.
Michael:I'd just give them chapter and verse again and again.
Michael:They couldn't argue with it.
Michael:Couldn't argue with it.
Michael:What I just said,
Clark:does
Michael:that make sense?
Michael:Yeah, it does.
Michael:I could then do that in companies.
Michael:That huge effort, it destroyed my health.
Michael:It would take months and months.
Michael:It was really difficult to do.
Michael:That's therapeutic change, working it from behaviour to attitude to culture,
Michael:which is how culture gets formed.
Michael:Starts with behaviour, then attitude, then culture.
Michael:Short term, medium, long term.
Michael:Conscious, semi conscious, unconscious.
Michael:You can't deal with culture itself because it's unconscious.
Michael:But that, you can do that with a group of 250 people or 350 or 450.
Michael:But a country that's really hard.
Michael:It's easier with a commercial organization.
Michael:It's relatively easy to see what they're there for.
Michael:They're there to turn on power supplies or whatever.
Michael:With a country, that's hard.
Michael:The closest thing we've maybe got is perhaps the truth and
Michael:reconciliation process in South Africa.
Michael:I'm not sure how well that worked, but that's the only
Michael:example I can think of, really.
Clark:And as you say, Michael, even in an organisation of a few hundred people.
Clark:The enormous effort of will it takes to oppose the prevailing attitudes
Clark:is shattering for one or two people.
Clark:I worked with a with a consultant who was a little bit older than me
Clark:in one factory and it broke him.
Clark:And he ended up giving it up completely because the enormous pressure from top
Clark:to bottom throughout the organization stacked against him was too much for him.
Clark:So yeah you're quite right.
Clark:And you can see why somebody, for instance like Mr.
Clark:Trump has had the measure of success that he is had simply because he
Clark:seems to be impervious to a lot of the criticism, weighed against it.
Clark:And that in itself has gotta be a little bit of a defense, hasn't it, against
Clark:so much of the negative vibes that are directed against anybody trying to
Clark:make changes within an organization.
Michael:The interesting thing about Trump is his supporters don't care.
Michael:I felt that we had a watershed with Bill Clinton, Because Bill
Michael:Clinton blatantly dodged the draft.
Michael:He just did.
Michael:So did Bush for that matter, but Clinton blatantly did.
Michael:And the Americans, they said, the Americans, they just didn't mind.
Michael:40 years previously, our father's generation.
Michael:Oh, you're joking me?
Michael:Draft dodger?
Michael:I don't think so.
Michael:But they didn't care.
Michael:They just got to a point where they didn't care anymore.
Michael:And I don't know why.
Michael:Maybe it was like the reincarnation of Kennedy.
Michael:He looked bright and sparkling.
Michael:I don't know, somewhere along the way, maybe Also, we've lost organized religion
Michael:that gave people a sense of morality for whether for good or ill, I don't know,
Michael:but at least we've lost social structures.
Michael:We've lost so much, and, I struggle to see how we go forward.
Michael:There's also, there was a guy, Alvin Toffler's book, Culture Shock.
Michael:I was banging on to Michele about it a couple of days ago.
Michael:In 1970, a guy called Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Culture Shock,
Michael:and basically predicted the rate of change without a fast tide
Michael:strip our ability to deal with it.
Michele:Yes.
Michael:Boy, he wasn't wrong.
Michael:Going back to what you said at the beginning, Rob, if you actually tried to
Michael:understand the world now, you'd go crazy.
Michael:It's just, it's too complicated for anybody, wouldn't matter who you are.
Michael:It's just unbelievably complicated.
Michael:For a lot of people, instead of trying to up their game and raise their
Michael:level of understanding, it's simpler to just go with a Dominic Cummings.
Michael:It's similarly called make America great again, or it's the immigrants
Michael:fault, or whatever, it's simply just devolve into simplicities.
Michael:They're just bollocks, of course, it's easy.
Rob:Which then like the Kruger Dunning effect of the less people know, the more
Rob:they, the more confidence they have.
Rob:What comes to mind when I'm listening.
Rob:Politics and social media has become a game of talking and nobody's listening.
Rob:And I think a lot of these problems like with the rioters and problems
Rob:in factories or whatever come about because no one's listening.
Rob:There's certain people just don't get listened to.
Rob:And then I think what happens is you get someone like Farage
Rob:or Andrew Tate or Tommy Robinson who talk and yeah that's me.
Rob:Because they're the nearest voice that they have.
Michael:I think Trump understands that perfectly.
Michael:You just go straight to the lowest common denominator and plug in there.
Michael:Actually Farage is probably better at it.
Michael:Farage sounds like the nice guy in the pub.
Michael:He's obviously a nasty piece of work, but superficially he sounds your favourite
Michael:uncle, the guy that understands you.
Michael:There was a guy told me when Johnson got into power, there was a guy told me, he
Michael:was in a hairdresser's in Hebden Bridge, Happy Valley, where Happy Valley set.
Michael:And this girl, Tracy, she said, Oh, Boris, he's one of us.
Michael:He really understands us.
Michael:I don't think so, love.
Michael:I really don't think so.
Michael:The reality of Johnson, American privilege, blah, blah, blah,
Michael:Eton, Oxford, totally different to this lady in Hebden Bridge.
Michael:But she thought he's one of us.
Clark:But there's a thing, Michael, and I think probably this speaks
Clark:to the influence that people like Farage and Trump are able to
Clark:exert over the general population.
Clark:there was a boss that I worked with a couple of years ago, who
Clark:never moved outside of his office.
Clark:One of the things I said, look, the very first thing you need
Clark:to do is just go and walk about.
Clark:on the shop floor.
Clark:He said, Clark I have nothing in common with them.
Clark:They don't like me.
Clark:It's like I can feel them staring at me.
Clark:I said, for a start, when you're there, they're wondering why you're there.
Clark:What have they done wrong?
Clark:What are you going to do?
Clark:I said, let them just get used to you being there.
Clark:Walk about.
Clark:People will start to talk to you.
Clark:They'll ask you things.
Clark:Then you'll start to understand what's going on and you'll
Clark:feel comfortable there.
Clark:I said, but you've got to get on the ground and walk around and put up with it
Clark:for a little while you'll start to find that you can gain some common ground.
Clark:He said, but I've got nothing in common.
Clark:I said, no, because you're still sitting in your office.
Clark:You will have something in common because you're both trying to get
Clark:the bloody product out the door.
Clark:That's where Farage and Trump, I think, win.
Clark:Whether they can or not they give the impression of being able to understand
Clark:the difficulties and the challenges that the average person, encounters
Clark:on a day to day basis, because They get out and walk about, and there's
Clark:a saying in manufacturing and go to the gamba, go to the front line,
Clark:go to the shop, go and have a look, don't sit there and hypothesize on the
Clark:cultural ills that are causing this.
Clark:Maybe, race, gender, all of these things come into it, but that's not the problem.
Clark:The problem is the fact that you and them are alienated from each other.
Clark:You're at different ends of the spectrum.
Clark:Go and talk to them.
Clark:I genuinely believe that if we could just get some of these political dandies
Clark:out of their offices in Whitehall and stick them in the middle of Stockport or
Clark:South Shields or Sunderland or Sheffield or wherever, and make them stay there.
Clark:Don't let them back.
Clark:Actually.
Clark:Sounds
Rob:like a TV show.
Michael:There is a precedent for that.
Michael:Thatcher at one point sent Michael Heseltine to Liverpool to punish him.
Michael:And he went down an absolute bomb there.
Michael:He's still remembered with enormous affection.
Clark:Because the average person, that's all they want, isn't it?
Clark:They just want to be seen and heard.
Michael:I think, Heseltine was different because he had a lot of experience of
Michael:the real world and he did get stuck in.
Michael:He didn't try and pretend to be what he was.
Michael:And he obviously is a posh git.
Michael:He didn't try and pretend otherwise.
Michael:He just was as he was.
Michael:And people got that totally.
Clark:Yeah, we don't mind.
Michael:People don't mind, do they?
Clark:There used to be a thing, I don't think it would be allowed now,
Clark:but I did it with Supervisors are constantly looking for a machine to
Clark:hide behind so they don't have to be involved in what the workers are doing.
Clark:And I used to draw a square on the floor, is it?
Clark:It's a Japanese thing.
Clark:The Japanese were very big on this.
Clark:Draw a square on the floor and say, stand there, and you can move when
Clark:I come back and tell you to move.
Clark:And they may have to stand there for two, three, four hours.
Clark:But back in the day, 50, 60 years ago, that's what the foreman would do.
Clark:He would stand there, and you would feel his eyes on the back of your
Clark:neck while you're working away.
Clark:And by virtue of just standing there for a few hours, People approached with
Clark:problems and issues and things that they need an opinion on and it literally
Clark:changed overnight, the atmosphere on the shop floor and supervisors then
Clark:starts to come out of their shell.
Clark:So I think there's something to be said for that.
Clark:Just send all of the politicians up north and don't come back until you've
Clark:got something to say for yourself.
Michael:There's a radical agenda, Rob.
Rob:There we go.
Rob:We have a plan for moving forward.
Michele:I'll
Clark:go with them.
Clark:I'll go with them.
Clark:As long as they buy the beer.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:It's been great talking to you.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:Thank you.
Rob:Thank you everyone.
Rob:It's a big issue.
Rob:Not one we can get answers from, but insights maybe.
Rob:Thanks everyone.
Rob:Thanks.
