Abstract
The other week I got perilously close to letting an internet scamster into our online banking when he posed as a BT Open Reach problem-solver. Gullible me. Don't trust any caller who asks you to install the Team Player app, even if it is your brother.
But why am I burdening you with my folly? Because I may not know much about software villainy, but I do know how to turn a nasty scare into half a column. Even before we unpicked (fingers crossed) the scam, I was wondering if I could describe Boris Johnson as a Brexit internet scamster in my next New European column.
You know the sort of thing. “He comes on the phone or TV sounding concerned and plausible. He has a line of patter about reducing your costs while providing you with greater freedom and less bandwidth overcrowding. But what he's really after is your password: TakeBackControl2016. Once he's hacked it, hey presto, Brexit Boris can play with your mind. There's no knowing what the rascal will get up to before you find you've been robbed…”
What a shocking thing to say, even about Boris. But it's not my first offence. In the wake of the June 23 referendum result I could barely spot a tattoo on the street without muttering “Brexit voter”. British holiday makers claiming compensation for food poisoning that afflicted no other nationality in the same Greek hotel? “Brexit voters.” Whiplash injury to which British motorists are uniquely prone? You get the idea.
This is not a healthy outlook. If we are to live together in relative harmony after some kind of Brexit has been implemented, we must rein in that impulse to call those who disagree fools, liars, traitors even. Why? Because civil strife is a terrible thing that can easily get out of control. As Bertrand Russell wisely observed, the Duke of Wellington vehemently opposed the 1832 Reform Act, but the crusty old Tory did not raise his sword against it because he'd witnessed grim civil war in Spain and wished no part in another.
Both Brexit and Remain partisans, the kind who routinely call each other “remoaners” and “racists”, “enemies of the people” and “xenophobes”, might do well to ponder the Duke's wisdom, not least in Fleet Street, where the late Paul Dacre set a very low page one bar with “Crush the Saboteurs” (Remain Tory MPs) and “Enemies of the People” (Supreme Court judges, some of them women or gay).
Yes, I know feelings are high, on both sides. Mine remain high, though apathetic compared to some of my 24/7 outraged fellow Remainers who condescend – yes, they do – to “ignorant” Brexit voters and are accused of doing so even when they don't.
It's the wrong tack. You don't persuade people by calling them ignorant racists, Little Englanders, fascists, Trumpites, ignorant or stupid, even if a few people are some or all of those things, Nigel Farage or self-styled Tommy Robinson. People get killed when hatred flares. Jo Cox got killed. Gina Miller (“ex-model”) gets death threats.
And vice-versa, of course. Mutual disdain goes hand in hand with incomprehension and an alienating sense of “otherness”. I should be able to laugh at “metropolitan liberal elite” jibes coming from rich Etonians such as Jake O'Mogg, the Dublin asset manager. But the joke soured once Donald Trump had persuaded swathes of Middle America's left-behinds that a hereditary New York property tycoon could be their champion.
The trouble is that angry attitudinising is infectious. It's always lurked on the fringes of polite society, but now it's spread by social media, a new force in politics, commerce and wider society that we understand as little as late medieval society understood how rats spread the Black Death. Judging from his feeble commitment to policing his global platform, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to understand his creation either.
Social media and the internet provide wonderful opportunities for shared knowledge and human cooperation, just as Zuckerberg/Frankenstein promised. But they also set an ugly tone which mainstream media (what click-baiter Trump calls “the dying newspaper industry”) feels obliged to follow in ways it would have hesitated to do until very recently. Can you imagine Telegraph headlines suggesting that “treason” and “treachery” was being committed by prominent Conservatives when Charles Moore or gentle Bill Deedes were its editor?
As is slowly being documented (take a bow, Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer and other brave souls), there's a lot going on here. It's not all about algorithms, Brexit or new Cold War Kremlin bots, because the toxic stew bubbles away everywhere in wholly different political and economic circumstances.
Honest public officials seek to regulate the online Wild West and make it more transparently accountable while dishonest ones seek to manipulate and control. When honest ones make a mistake, they get bawled out – rightly – but when dishonest ones get caught, they double down on the lie.
The goal is to destroy trust in traditional institutions so that “they're all as bad as each other” (they're not) becomes the reflex response of millions to challenging questions and choices. So let's agree that we live in fast-changing times and that such times are uncomfortable. Militant Islam, anti-semitism, inequality and tax avoidance, bank fraud, rigged sports matches, the list of divisive, trust-corroding issues is a long one, getting longer.
Especially so when most people can see in our wired-up, interconnected world whether their own family or community is on the rise or in decline, whether they are members of the new middle class in the coastal cities of China or of the declining working class in decaying cities of Ohio or Lancashire textile towns.
The fractures are cultural as well as political and economic, though they go hand in hand. Do you hire immigrant labour or do you compete with it for low-paid work? For high-paid work and expensive schools and houses in nice neighbourhoods too, of course, but the better-off are better able to adapt and survive.
That's my biggest worry about Brexit. Not that Kensington won't rise to what Boris J calls the wonderful opportunities out there, but that Keighley or Carlisle will fall further behind and get even angrier with those smug, multicultural elitists they see on TV programmes for which they're forced to buy a licence fee.
I come from Cornwall, one of those places where the same smug “down from London” types buy holiday and retirement homes, pricing the locals out of the market. No wonder Cornwall voted Brexit on vague promises of a better deal for agriculture and fishing which are unlikely to be met.
“Idiots,” I mutter. But I shouldn't. I get where Brexit voters are coming from. I understand their grievances over immigration, sovereignty and taxation, illusory or mistaken though I think most are. I would have done so without Twitter's megaphone in my ear. Nigel Farage name-checked me for doing so in his memoirs.
It's just that I never read articles or watch interviews that persuade me that the tangible downside of Brexit is outweighed by the speculative gains, especially when promoted by the speculating classes. I wish I could and travel in hope that the Brexit reality – it's going to happen – will be better than I fear, though inevitably not as good or bad as extreme partisans predict.
Is that good enough, will it do? In the meantime, as Theresa May's Chequers white paper stumbles towards Brussels to be born (or not), can we tone down the abuse that impugns each other's motives? That goes for me too. Sorry.
