Like many of you, I’ve been hearing a lot of “this is not who we are” in the past few days. But the hard part is that this IS who we are. This is the Britain in which we now live, where migrants and Muslims (and especially those who are both) have been demonised for decades, where our newspapers have thrilled to share yet another story of yet another migrant misdeed, as if there weren’t plenty of atrocities perpetrated by ‘true-born Brits’. Brady & Hindley, anyone? The Wests? Huw Edwards?! Or do we want to go back further, to Tate & Lyle, James Cook and the potent combination of colonisation and slavery? And so much more. Our (increasingly) right wing media has fed this, as has all that time of Tory divide & rule.


And no, I don’t have the solution. Any solution. But I think it involves talking. And listening. Listening to the stuff that is hard to hear, stuff that is mean and dark and gets swallowed down to emerge in collective, misplaced rage.


From the time she was 18, my mother lived an incredibly difficult life, war, losing three different homes in bombing raids (flats in shared houses, not whole houses). They were poor, they didn’t lose heirlooms, they lost home. She survived a stillborn child towards the end of the war, late miscarried twins not long after, her first husband’s breakdowns after his own traumatic war experiences, and later the death of her adult daughter and her beloved grandson.


I once asked her why she thought so much of her adult life had been so difficult. She answered, “I was a butterfly. Until I was 18 (in 1939) I was a butterfly. And then the war happened and I saw what was really going on. What had been going on while I wasn’t looking.”


Bear in mind that this was a woman whose own mother was in service from the age of 11, whose paternal grandmother likely worked the docks in Deptford (the court records from when she was tried for the murder of one of her many sick & hungry children said that she was a ‘charlady’ working from 9pm to 6am) and my mother herself started work at 14 because, with two younger brothers, the daughter wasn’t going to have money spent on her uniform – even though she did get into the grammar.
That is, of course she’d known hardship. It just hadn’t felt that way until 1939.


I’m scared we too are being butterflies. Pretending the rise of fascism isn’t happening again. But it is. And this time, the propaganda machine is social media.
This is who we are. And that means we can change it. Let’s not be butterflies.