'Distant and weird': The Guardian's John Harris on political journalism's failures and Britain's future
Harris's Anywhere But Westminster series foresaw the wave of discontentment that gave us Brexit and Trump. What does he see for the future?
In the weeks before the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union in June 2016, John Harris and John Domokos toured the country, visiting among other places Merthyr Tydfil, Herefordshire, Birmingham, Manchester and Northampton, speaking to people about the issues facing their communities. They spoke to people for and against Brexit, who had different very priorities and concerns on divisive issues like jobs, pay, welfare, immigration, deindustrialization, gentrification and more. But what seemed to unite most people they spoke to was a sense of political disaffection. “Really starting to get a sense now of how, like all referendums, this one is about much more than what’s on the ballot paper,” Harris tells the camera at one point. Days later, Britain voted to leave the EU.
For many in the UK’s centralized political world, this was an abrupt shock. To Harris it wasn’t. He saw it as part of a realignment he’d been picking up in British politics since at least 2012. Since Harris and Domokos started the Guardian’s Anywhere But Westminster video series, they’d picked up anger and discontent at stagnant wages and cuts to local communities, distrust of politicians’ promises, and a loosening of the ties of tribal politics — towards something more volatile and unpredictable. They detected this undercurrent ahead of the political class because, frankly, they went and looked in the places the media wasn’t paying attention to. The series, which was a finalist for the Orwell prize, turned political journalism on its head and took the voices of ordinary people seriously.
Before the UK general election was called, I spoke to Harris about his reflections on the series, and where the media — and the country — goes from here. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
JB: I want to start with Anywhere with Westminster, which began over ten years ago. Looking at those videos it feels, even then, that there was a feeling of disillusionment with politics, a belief that almost nothing could fundamentally change. After more than a decade of that project, how do you reflect on it?
We don’t do it as frequently anymore, but at the beginning, it was going to places that the news media didn’t go to, trying to give a sense of why people felt politically disconnected. The whole idea was to give a rounded portrayal of a place and the people living within it. In terms of how it began, initially all we knew was that we didn’t like covering party conferences. Me and John Domokos, the co-creator, were told to go cover the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat party conferences and make films. I probably had the odd romantic delusion that this was the peak of political journalism, striding around the party conference somewhere. And of course it wasn’t. It was hell. There’s no natural light. You’re either drunk at night or hungover in the morning. It just had this air of pointlessness about it, it was quite surreal. We’d make a film-a-day for three days. On the third day, we thought, ‘Okay, we’re going out into the world now.’ These films would start with me leaving through the conference security barrier. I can remember the first one in Brighton. We were road-testing cliches from Labour conference about the ‘squeezed middle,’ asking people in the street. And some of the replies were really good. There was a guy fixing telecommunications cables who said ‘I don’t think of myself as middle-class, I think of myself as working-class,’ and we thought ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ as an antidote to the view from party conferences.
By the aftermath of the 2010 election [when Conservatives returned to government for the first time since 1997], we were barely interested in politicians. At first, we thought we were making a series about austerity. We did a film in my adopted hometown in Somerset, about the cuts coming in, a film about library cuts in North Yorkshire. It started evolving. By 2011 or 2012, we began to see there was this other politics kicking around — which subsequently became Ukip and Brexit and Scottish Independence, the things that suddenly exploded after 2014 — and we were picking this up. Then I understood what this project was: it was about a political realignment based on the yawning gap between mainstream politics and people’s lives.
I was rewatching some of the early ones and you said a kind of secret motto of this series was, ‘It’s fucking complicated.’ Can you elaborate on that?
Well, John and I didn’t know each other before we started making films. But it turned out that politically we were quite similar. We were both rooted on the political left, concerned about massive inequality, poverty, regional imbalance, who had purchase politically (and who didn’t). But at the same time, politics on the left and right was getting very doctrinaire and polarized. We didn’t really like that either. And it seemed like our jobs to challenge the preconceptions of the people watching our films. That came into its own with Brexit, where we were saying, ‘Look, I know you think this, this, and this, but it’s a lot more complicated.’ That’s what we meant. It seemed to us increasingly that our job was to say, ‘No one fits whatever stereotype has been pushed onto them,’ and whatever the political parties response to issues were — be it regional imbalance, poverty, social exclusion — it’s never as straightforward as you think.
It’s really remarkable to hear you talk about spotting that wave of despair and discontentment as early as 2012, because even in 2016 — where we had the Brexit referendum, and Trump in the US, and there seemed to be a big realignment of politics — most of the media corps seemed to miss it.
Yeah, they did.
Why do you think you managed to catch it — what was it just literally going and looking?
It wasn’t a formally conceived project. It just so happened, inevitably, that the best way of finding out where things were going politically was by asking people open questions about their lives .The most illuminating conversations never started the way average broadcast media vox pops start, which is where you’ve got a camera the size of a house, you go up, throw someone against the wall and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, what do you think of Jeremy Corbyn?’ It’s an absolutely absurd false circumstance. You don’t get anything when you treat people like that. We wanted to have conversations we enjoyed, that didn’t make us feel embarrassed. We’d say, ‘How are you doing? How’s this town doing? How do you feel about your life? What do you feel about the future?’ You’d talk for a while. And then you’d say, ‘What do you think of politics?’ That way you’d find how everything locked together. If they were politically disconnected, you’d have a context for it.
We didn’t know it then, but what was happening was an inversion of the rules of politics, the rules deployed very successfully by New Labour. It was the upturning of the era of supposed genius political spin doctors, like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell. They thought you could manipulate voters, divide them into different demographic groups, send out different messages — and be so skillful you could orchestrate political outcomes. But just before the financial crash, all that got turned on its head. It seemed to us the electorate was more volatile, more willful, and more cynical about politics. And suddenly, the politicians didn’t know what was going on. They were running after the electorate.
Well, I wonder if that disenchantment — with the political system, with leaders, with institutions that became remote and felt like they weren’t speaking to people — do you think the media’s failure to connect with audiences and keep track of inequality and poverty was an extension of that problem?
Yeah, to some degree. We went to America for the primary season in 2016, and went to a Donald Trump rally in Evansville, Indiana which I think used to be a steel town. It’s very different culturally, but the essential economic conditions are not that dissimilar from being in south Wales or northeast England. At the rally, the TV networks outside were so slickly turned out and scripted. It was like, outwardly, you look like you’re involved in exactly the same game as politicians. I projected that back home, and realized that when people appear on 10 o’clock news outside Downing Street, saying, ‘What I’m hearing from sources in No 10,’ to the average person that looks every bit as distant and weird as a politician. They look part of the same team. That reinforced the idea that we had to do things differently.
The other thing driving us mad was the tyranny of chat and ‘debate’ on TV news. This idea, that’s now absolutely rampant, that you get some professional mouth-almighty from the left and from the right — usually people who are notorious on Twitter — and make them have a big barney, and that passes for coverage of an issue. We thought, that’s not it. And neither is pitching up to a place for two hours and superficially asking people their thoughts of the party leaders. It has to be much more involved and immersive.
One thing that strikes me about the Anywhere but Westminster series is you bring yourself to the interviews in a way that deconstructs the journalistic myth of the ‘objective’ onlooker. I’m thinking about the episode you did on the two Kensingtons, in London and Liverpool. There’s a point where you break into tears on camera when you visit a Sure Start center with young parents. How much were you thinking about to what extent to put yourself in the videos?
I was hesitant about it. We didn’t want them to turn into polemic, because of our mistrust of that. But John Domokos in particular was very keen to do things differently and innovate. Secondly, it was just unavoidable. He quite rightly thought that, if one of us had a strong reaction, particularly me because I was presenting, it went in the film. He had a word for it. He’d say, ‘Give me a reactos,’ and I’d say how I was feeling. Or if we came out of encounters with differing points of view, those arguments went in the videos too. That was part of our unintended commentary on news and politics — that it’s okay to talk about how you feel. If I get really teary talking to these mothers having their Sure Start shut down, it seems really odd that you wouldn’t include that.
Yeah. It strikes me as a much more honest way of doing broadcasting and journalism. I want to change tack to the last couple of years and the cost of living crisis. You’ve done some videos in the past couple of years, and it seems like traveling across the UK there’s persistent dissatisfaction with things introduced during the austerity years after 2010. Things like the ‘bedroom tax,’ the two-child limit, the benefit cap, which have disappeared from the headlines because they’re just in place now, but they’re still having a monumental impact. How do journalists keep covering those things, when they’re still super important to people, but they’re no longer new and fresh?
The answer is, when you come across it, you have to keep saying, ‘This is still here. It’s very important. It’s having a dramatic impact on the way that people live.’ Politically, it’s a long time since [former chancellor] George Osborne brought in the benefit cap. I wrote about someone recently who was receiving £1,500-a-year less due to that. Even though it’s ostensibly a long time since that [policy] came in, you still have to point it out. Films we’ve made in the last few years have frequently mentioned the ‘bedroom tax’ and we’ve made sure that stays in. You have to do that. Partly because, as someone was telling me the other day, the Conservative party has changed leaders so many times, they want us to do the Great Forgetting. We have to remind the audience these things are as relevant now as when everyone was kicking up a stink about it. It’s not like the salience of benefit sanctions, for instance, has ever gone away.
We’ve got an election in the UK this year, we’re still in the cost of living crisis, we’ve had a once in a century pandemic (which was largely widely seen as bungled by the government), and there was a stat that came out recently that said the Conservative prime minister has got the lowest approval rating since 1978. In the context of all of that, why does it feel to people like there’s no opposition party offering a radical new direction?
I think it’s often overstated how much the general public gets excited or animated about a change of power. I’m old enough to remember 1997, and I was politically partisan enough to be worked up about the idea that the Tories were on the way out, the Labour party was coming in. New Labour seemed quite interesting to me, I swallowed some of it. I knew that was a minority sport, I think that’s always the case, and what makes it even more of a minority sport now is people’s sheer level of exhaustion. I include myself in that. Even if you're not living in precarious or insecure circumstances, we’ve had the crash, followed by Brexit, followed by the pandemic, followed by the cost of living crisis, God knows how many elections and referendums. People feel very worn down. And so those broad, big picture stories about politics and political change seem even more distant.
How do we recapture a sense of hope? Because in 1945, when the country was on its knees, the UK did some of the most drastic things — it built the welfare state, built the NHS, remade society. I wonder how we get out of this hopelessness that people feel trapped in?
The fact that I’ve said all that doesn’t mean that the story out there is wholly and overwhelmingly bleak. It’s just that we live in a political reality in which people don’t feel very deep loyalties to one party or another. We don’t live in a country of Labour people and Tory people anymore, and all of it broadly mapping onto class. For better or worse, that world is gone. People are much more skeptical in their view of politics and politicians. That’s compounded by the way they get their information. The idea that [the political system] could convey a stirring, visceral sense of hope is somewhat misplaced.
Where I see the hope that keeps me going is locally. It’s the stuff we’ve made a point of putting in our films. Ostensibly, no matter how downtrodden, deprived and disadvantaged [an area] might be, there are brilliant people trying to do brilliant things. Community spirit is a cliche. But it's a real thing. Its manifestations can be really creative and fascinating. Sometimes that’s hard to convey. We found a woman in Walsall who’s running a furniture bank or food bank, making sure kids have books to read, and she started off with just her van — there are innumerable stories like this. In Edinburgh we found an organization called Helping Hands that didn’t like what it called the ‘poverty industry,’ of thinking charity or government are the only answers. They did the most amazing food bank collection, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen outside a Hibbs game. It was about giving people a common sense of purpose.
The question then becomes: when does that take big-P ‘Political’ form? Where does it go? Because it was almost like you’re watching the formation of a Labour party all over again in a different way, which grew out of the trade unions and friendly societies and miners’ welfare groups and the nonconformist churches — and that, eventually, had a political expression. Now, when we look at a lot of these community initiatives at the grassroots, you think, ‘Well, where’s this going to go politically?’ It’s probably too early to tell. But that’s what I look for.
Coming onto the UK election, what lessons do you hope the media will learn in terms of covering it better?
I’m not sure I can answer that. Because it looked like after the Brexit result, things changed a bit — broadcast news bulletins were spending longer than ten seconds speaking to people, telling you who they were, giving a fuller portrait. But I don’t think that lasted terribly long. I think we’re still, really, where we ever were. It’s the person outside Downing Street, everyone’s got a suit on, talking about the horse race of who’s up and down. It sometimes feels that’s the only way a lot of the broadcast media knows how to do it.🗨️