A foreign correspondent, in my own country

Previous, fanciful, blog posts have referenced the role of the foreign correspondent in general, and the war correspondent in particular.  The musings have been on the correspondent abroad, the foreign being the country in question being other than the UK, rather than a foreign correspondent visiting the UK.  This despite all those posts being written in the UK.

The posts in question are usually stimulated by my staying in a hotel, and the mini bar.  My residence in hotels is an infrequent occurrence and still an occasion of a sense of novelty.  I adore miniature toiletries almost as much as I adore mini sauces, an adoration well documented in this blog.  Who cannot find a tiny bottle of shampoo or body wash charming, and who could fail to be thrilled by using a tiny bar of soap, a tiny bar of soap that starts out being the size of a bar of soap that most bars of soap end up being at home before they are discarded as being impractical?

My affinity with foreign correspondents probably begins and ends with sitting in a hotel room banging out words.  There are other, definitive, measures of a foreign correspondent, none of which I comply with.  Putting aside any kind of talent, experience or journalistic rigor, the hotels I stay at rarely, if ever, have helicopters landing on the roof, journalists and generals in the bar and militiamen sitting in pick up trucks in the lobby.  Nor do I sit round campfires getting interviews with, depending on your point of view, terrorists or freedom fighters, enjoying a supper of an animal that, back in the UK, would be the lead character in a popular cartoon programme for younger viewers.

Following the Brexit referendum though, there is a whiff of something unsavoury in my own country.

Arguably, the only platform that bigots should be permitted one with a trapdoor that swings open to a shark pool.  Following the Brexit referendum however, it would appear that the sort of people who previously confined their views to themselves, their ‘journal’ (also home to their conspiracy theories), a ‘group of like minded patriots’, or the internet consider that they have license to take a tilt at those whose opinions do not exactly align with their own.  This used to be foreigners, now it’s those who did not vote their way in the referendum.

The remainers consider those who voted leave to be a bunch of ignorant, racist, xenophobic, bigoted, narrow-minded little Englanders.  They are confident of espousing this view not just because they are right, but also because the remainers are in the minority.  They are the plucky underdog, facing down fear, ignorance and the rise of politicians who were merely ‘characters’ before the referendum when they had little or no power, but are now auditioning for despotism.

The leavers also consider themselves the plucky underdogs, the patriots who against all the odds defied the political establishment to throw off the shackles of oppression.  They think that this is the time for bold, decisive action and if that means expelling the immigrants who keep our social services running, so be it.

The battleground is social media and the airwaves.

The language is increasingly of division.  Students of history are probably awaiting somebody, probably a Tory, declaring himself (it’s always a bloke) the Lord Protector just to put the civil war on a formal footing.  Certainly, Brexit has divided families, communities and the country like no other crisis since somebody who wasn’t white won ‘Bake Off’.

Foreign correspondents are used to filing copy from the bars of hotels that, before the disputed result of a vote, used to serve the best cocktails on that continent and are now the last place with booze and electricity in a country where the leader is in hiding and the opposition has seized control of the national broadcaster.

We’re not quite at the point where combat boots, one of those Middle-Eastern scarf things, and a laptop are now the accepted dress code at the bar of the Athenaeum, but judging by the content of teevee, radio and the papers, extremists from both sides may have already seized control of the national media.