A small insightful piece in
the Guradian today by A Chiles:
There are plenty of thoughtful, pragmatic remainers and leavers. They’re just not getting any airtime
Just after the referendum I made a Panorama documentary in the West
Midlands asking people why they had voted the way they had. The leavers,
the majority, thumped their tubs in triumph. The remainers hung their
heads in despair at the simple-mindedness of the leavers. Standard
stuff....Two and a half years later, for Radio 4, I went back to speak to some
of the same people. Having been told – and even blithely said myself –
that we were all at war with ourselves, I prepared for the worst. My
interviewees’ positions would surely have hardened...But I didn’t need my political flak jacket at all. All but one of the leavers were studies in pragmatic moderation...The remainers – even more encouragingly, to my mind – weren’t giving it the old I-told-you-so.
The sobering thing for me was the realisation that I only heard these
moderate voices because I was stuck with them – this being the whole
point of the programme, to go back to those I had heard from before. In
the normal run of things they wouldn’t have made the cut and they would
never have got on air. What good is a moderate, considered voice in a
news vox pop?
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