A YEAR OF DIVISION
By the time this book is published I’ll be sixty. I can’t believe it. I felt really low on my thirtieth birthday, because although I had travelled extensively, done countless great gigs and met lots of great people, I felt as if I’d hardly done anything. I spent that birthday telling everyone that zero to thirty had gone so fast, and if I did that again I would be sixty, and that’s really old. So now I’m nearly really old, and I’m tempted to look back over the years, like old men do, but that’s a little difficult at the moment because I’m still trying to get over 2016 – a year notable for the number of high-profile people who died. Everyone has their personal list but for me it was David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Billy Paul, Carla Lane, Fidel Castro, Zaha Hadid, Phife Dawg, Muhammad Ali, Jo Cox and Maurice White, to name a few. Then, at the end of the year, I went to China to get away from Christmas, and while I was there George Michael and the Birmingham poet Yussef Ahmed died within days of each other. It was a terrible year in many ways.
In June 2016, the referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union was one of the most divisive times in British politics that I’ve lived through. In the past, politics around race have been divisive; fox hunting, sexual and gender debates have been divisive, but there was something unique about the EU referendum. I think it’s because it was a stark yes or no referendum – two campaigns that led to an event, the vote.
For all of my political life Tony Benn had been the greatest influence on my thoughts about the EU. I had heard him talking about his distrust of the European project on television long before I met him, and by the time I got to know him his views had not changed. Of course, I thought about it for myself, but after hours of talking to Tony, and thinking it through, I had come to the conclusion that we should leave. Leading up to the vote there was so much misinformation and many – not all, but many – of the loudest voices on the leave side were those of the xenophobes and the racists.
I really didn’t want them to distort my view of the debate and the debaters, so when asked to do Question Time for the BBC, The Agenda for Independent Television (ITV) and other TV programmes, I was neutral and listening intently to all sides of the debate, but in the end my views changed and I voted to remain.
I strongly believed there were some really important left-wing arguments for leaving the union, but those views were not being aired. In the end, 48 per cent of people who voted voted to remain, and 52 per cent voted to leave – the Brexiters winning for the most part on a platform of racism and scaremongering.
Lincolnshire, where I live, had the biggest leave vote in the country, and didn’t I know it. People would start conversations with me by saying, ‘I’m not a racist but . . .’ and anyone at the listening end of a conversation that starts this way knows the person talking will go on to express their deeply felt but cleverly disguised hatred for you.
Some people used the result of the vote to shout racist remarks at me. One drove by and shouted, ‘The Europeans are leaving, and you’re next, nigger.’ The worst things were finding a note in my letterbox telling me to get out while I’m still alive and having a ‘packet’ of human excrement thrown over my gate, with a note! The extreme right rose up and racist attacks all over the country increased around this time, so it’s difficult to know how far my experiences were representative of other people in Lincolnshire, but I have to say I felt very lonely and vulnerable then.
If there were another Brexit-type vote held in Britain that asked, ‘Should black people be in this country or not?’ I think we’d be out. I consider myself to be patriotic, because I care about England, and I care about the UK, but I don’t feel the need to wave a flag. If I wasn’t patriotic then I’d leave, like certain sports stars who want to live the luxury life elsewhere since they’ve become famous. I’ll live with my people and die with my people. But it’s impossible trying to explain to a racist how a black man can be a British patriot because he doesn’t see you as rightfully British in the first place. There’s still so much work to do out there.
Lincolnshire is one of the few places in the world where they still call black people ‘coloured’; it’s one of the few places in Britain that still has a shop that specialises in selling golliwogs; it’s also one of the only counties in Britain where you will find many people living in the house they were born in, and where people will tell you with pride that they have never left the county.
There’s a part of me that says Brexit wouldn’t be so bad if the government knew what it was doing. But Theresa May is probably going to go down as the weakest and worst prime minister in British history. I want to ask the people who voted leave, ‘Do you think this is going well? Is this what you expected?’
In universities a lot of students are worried. There’s panic in the research community. A lot of funding for research into things like cancer comes from working across borders, pooling resources across universities. What began as a posh politician’s arrogant gamble was decided by the kneejerk reaction of an electorate who had lost faith in politicians. These people were not interested in the full picture and statistics, and many hadn’t thought it through. They just wanted to give Cameron a bloody nose. They made their decision on a really simplified issue – the Daily Mail version of being English or ‘foreign’. I don’t think I’ve met a university student who voted to leave. Anyone who is thinking about their future is seeing their options closing down.