We spent 10 years talking to people. Here's what it taught us about Britain
If you do the kind of political journalism that involves talking to the general public, something faintly magical can sometimes happen. As events swirl around and you try to make sense of huge, complicated themes, a single conversation will bring everything into focus. And not via words alone: facial expressions, gestures, and the way individual words are emphasised can give you a vivid sense of how people think, and the way their feelings could create political change. The encounter might be fleeting, but a connection can be made; as one side understands, the other feels heard.
Since 2010, we have been responsible for the Guardian video series Anywhere But Westminster, in which we try to explore the gap between high politics and life as it is lived. With so much political coverage now based on opinion polling, we are interested not just in how people might vote, but what is behind their political choices. Vox pops have long been a crucial part of what we do.
In the summer of 2014, our travels brought us to the town of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. The local Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, had resigned from his party and joined Ukip, then led by Nigel Farage. For us, the resulting byelection was a reason to visit the neighbourhood of Jaywick, which government statistics showed was the poorest place in England. It was here that we first got a sense of something potentially seismic. At that point, Ukip were largely understood as a new presence on the political right, who were appealing to habitual Tory voters. But things were shifting.
When we arrive in a new place, the drill goes something like this. Find a location: a high street, or shopping parade; maybe a residential street, or the entrance to a railway station. Acknowledge the awkward nature of what you are about to do, but get over your nerves, and grit your teeth. Survey the people you can see. Then find your first potential interviewee, switch the camera on, and begin: “Excuse me. We’re making a film. Do you mind if we talk to you for a bit?”
In Jaywick, sitting on a bench on a raised step outside his house, was a retired man who had once been a railway worker in east London, and a member of Aslef, the train drivers’ union. We shared his company for a quarter of an hour. Just about everything he said highlighted the unexpected turns politics was suddenly taking, and we have returned to the footage we shot time and again. Sometimes, we don’t ask for people’s names (it can make people feel a bit like they’re being interrogated), so we have always referred to him as “Step Man”. Our exchange began when we showed him one of Carswell’s campaign leaflets.
John Harris: “So you’ve had one of these through your door?”
Step Man: “Yeah.”
JH: “What do you think of him, and the fact that he’s left the Conservative party?”
SM: “Good for him. It’s about time somebody got up and spoke.”
JH: “Right now, what’s wrong with Britain?”
SM: “Well, nobody’s doing anything are they? It’s all going around in circles. They do bugger all.”
JH: “Have they done anything for
Jaywick lately?”
SM: “Nothing gets done for bloody Jaywick.”
JH: “What needs doing?”
SM: “Everything. Look at the roads. Look at the state of it. The alleyways, look. Look at it all. We’re a backwater, aren’t we? That nobody gives a shit about.”
JH: “And do you think [Carswell], and Mr Farage, are any different?”
SM: “I’m hoping so.”
JH: “Who did you used to vote for in the past?”
SM [Emphatically, before the end of the question]: “Labour. Always voted Labour.”
JH: “And what changed?”
SM: “Well, bloody Blair. Let’s face it, he did sod all for this country … And now he’s in Europe, pissing about there, making millions. He went more Conservative than the Conservatives.”
JH: “But this fellow [Carswell], until a week ago, was in the Conservative party himself. And now you’re going to vote for him!”
SM: “Well, yeah. But he wants to make a few changes.”
JH: “Do you think he’ll help Jaywick?”
SM: “I bloody hope so.”
JH: “Time was, Labour was the party of the working man, eh?”
SM: “Course it was. Course it was.” JH: “What happened?”
SM: “Bloody Thatcher got in – destroyed it, didn’t she? Done the working classes, didn’t she? Pissed the miners off. Done the railways. She pissed us all off, big time.”
JH: “But Ukip’s full of people who think Mrs Thatcher was the bee’s knees.”
SM: “Nah … ”
JH: “They are! They’re all Thatcherite… [Carswell] wants to shrink the state. He’s no fan of the trade unions and the working man.”
SM: “I don’t suppose he is. Nobody is, are they?”
JH: “But somebody with your politics shouldn’t be voting for him.”
SM: [Defiantly] “Yeah, course they should.”
Vox pops have a long history. A US radio series of that name began in 1932, sampling people’s opinions about the presidential election that would bring Franklin Roosevelt to power. In 1961, an influential French documentary titled Chronique d’un été(Chronicle of a Summer)based a whole film around asking people on the street a simple but provocative question: “Are you happy?” Vox pops were popularised on British TV by the trailblazing presenter Alan Whicker (“I went out with my cameras into the monstrous avenues of Houston, stopped passersby and asked whether they owned a gun – I discovered it wasn’t a question of yes or no, but how many,” he once said). By the time we started doing them, they were an established part of TV news packages – the bit that usually comes near the end to show some “extra views of the subject matter in hand”, to quote one set of BBC guidelines.
But Step Man represented something different. In the footage of our conversation, interviewer and interviewee are sitting at the same level, instead of a TV crew being ranged in formation against their quarry. The interview turns into an exchange between equals, and by the end, the power structure is reversed. In effect, Step Man told us not only that the old political certainties are dying, but also that a different kind of political journalism is called for. Reporters needed to go to places outside the traditional centres of power. The story must be dictated, not by a script they bring with them, but by what they find when they get there.
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The initial spark for Anywhere But Westminster was the headache-inducing tedium of covering party conferences. The first time we worked together, in the autumn of 2009, we walked out of Labour’s annual gathering in Brighton and asked members of the public what they thought of the party’s sudden fixation with a group of voters termed “the squeezed middle”. In response, people talked about their exasperation with such phrases (“I’m working-class,” said one man, “why’s it always about the middle?”), and their overwhelming sense of distance from an event that was happening only a few minutes away.
With the arrival of the coalition government in 2010, we believed there was a damaging estrangement between politics and the public. We decided to put this alienation at the centre of our work, and started travelling around the country, talking to ordinary people in places that were rarely visited by journalists, TV news crews or political reporters. The after-effects of the financial crash of 2008 had yet to make an impact on British politics, and the UK seemed locked into certainties that had prevailed since the 1990s. Viewed from on high, a lot of voters seemed either uninterested in politics or sufficiently becalmed that they would behave mostly as the main parties expected.