I’m sitting in the darkness waiting for the fireworks. I mean this quite literally. I’m on a grassy hillside in Butchart Gardens, one of Vancouver’s premier tourist attractions. There are thousands of other people waiting, mostly Canadians. They are sitting patiently counting down the minutes to the display. People are calm, there is no shouting, no swearing, no drinking, no smoking.
The fireworks are worth the wait and people applaud appreciatively afterwards. As we leave there is no pushing, no shoving. The crowd calmly file out and disperse into the evening. It had been a great day. Hours earlier I had marveled at a humpback whale and her calf journeying through Salish Sea and then enjoyed the world class gardens before the superbly choreographed pyrotechnics.
But as I laid down that night, it wasn’t the whale, the gardens nor the fireworks that resonated. It was the people in this nice, respectful country I found myself in. Now, I appreciate that when you’re on holiday, you’re relaxed and your glasses may be rose tinted, especially after a day like that. But my experience of Canadians had been positive from the outset. Polite, patient, respectful, helpful and tolerant. Qualities that are shared by many people here in the UK but they seemed so much more evident in Canada. A country without the divisions of Brexit, a place that, on the surface at least, appeared more settled, less chaotic and more appreciative of its environmental riches.
Before I left for Canada, I felt a weariness about life in the UK. Our society and our politics is divided by Brexit. It has become deeply unpleasant and saturation coverage has really stoked the fires of discontent on both sides. Outside of Brexit, you can see schools and hospitals and other social services are still suffering from years of austerity and a mental health crisis that is becoming increasingly difficult to deny. Zero hours contracts are now a norm for many people as is food bank dependency in certain areas.
But against this backdrop, I know there are great people doing great things within our communities. People, who are doing things to support others and give them a voice. Kind people, selfless people who care little for anything other than helping their own communities. But their contributions are often over looked or drowned out when evaluating the state of our nation.
If Parliament and the people are wedded then Brexit feels like the mistress, the ex that won’t go away. And all of the frustrations, the language and the anger from this affair filter down into daily life. The tension remains at the expense of other more pressing matters.
As the drum for climate change beats ever louder, an inspirational young girl finds her voice. Greta Thunberg might well be one of the most influential people in the world right now. And horribly, people attack her. Aron Banks, the money behind the Brexit party, wishes for her death in a sailing accident. Katie Hopkins, Julia Hartley Brewer and others fire off tweets to discredit the teenager. I wonder if they are frightened of her?
She represents a brighter, cleaner future for the next generation and yet people seek to undermine her. Her parents are exploiting her they say, she has Asperger’s they say, as if that should somehow diminish her and her argument. Thankfully, in the eyes of reasonable people this doesn’t hold water. In fact it does the opposite. It elevates her.
The vitriol aimed at Jeremy Corbyn is something else that disturbs me. There has never been a more smeared politician. He’s an anti semite, an IRA supporting terrorist sympathiser. He’s the problem with Brexit…Inevitably much of the mud has stuck.
You never hear that he led the anti war march on Iraq and was one of the most prominent critics of it. Nor do we hear how passionately he campaigned against apartheid. His campaigning for nuclear disarmament is often held against him as an unwillingness to defend the country because he won’t ‘press the button.’ But it’s not the fact people don’t like him or don’t agree with his politics that bothers me, it’s the hatred in the voices of people when they speak about him. A hatred which only unites his supporters.
The same can be said of the Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage as they attempt to swerve the country right to No Deal. They invite and incite criticism knowing it will only harden their core support.
I’m not going to speculate how Brexit will play out nor what our society will look like in its aftermath but I think we need to focus on the fundamentals that preserve our communities and maintain our collective mental health. Strengthening our social bonds, developing a closer relationship with the natural world, getting involved in community initiatives and guarding against our obsessions with social media.
Can we rediscover our tolerance for one another or will more people be drawn away from these shores to places like Canada?
