Healing the Nation
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the last three and a half years, freedom has clashed with fraternity, families have fallen out and friends have become foes. What happens next is – the Prime Minister promises – “a moment of real national renewal”. Post-Brexit Britain is not yet a week old and there is much left to negotiate about its future relationship with the EU, but at last we have certainty on one thing: we’re out. Inevitably there are still die-hard remainers re-branding themselves as ‘rejoiners’ and continued shouts of “You lost, get over it!” from their victors, but the tired rhetoric of both sides is now being tempered by hopeful talk of “healing the nation.” What exactly does this mean? It must surely begin by identifying the sickness: poisonous politics, an inability to engage with opposing views, abuse directed towards MPs, women, minorities and religious groups? Then we should try to determine whether these symptoms are acute or chronic. Are we witnessing an hysterical spasm that will pass away in time or are we entering an historic period of irreconcilable cultural divisions? And what about the prescription? Is all the talk of ‘coming together’ and ‘common visions’ well-meaning waffle? Or is the language of healing crucial if we are to recover the art of compromise and civility? History tells us that it often takes a crisis to provoke a cure and that the deepest divisions can eventually be reconciled. But wounds can fester and usually leave scars. Can the past offer us hope for a more united future?
Guests: David Goodhart, Diarmaid Maccullough, Jane Robins and Jennifer Nadel.
Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:04.4 | Good evening. In the end, the political process of Britain becoming an island again proved markedly less cataclysmic than its physical detachment from the continent 8,000 years ago. |
| 0:14.1 | That happened in minutes, thanks to a tsunami, seven stories high, travelling at 80 miles an hour, which wiped out all the Stone Age Britons anywhere in its path. |
| 0:22.7 | Brexit, by contrast, took three and a half years and was marked by the Prime Minister with a dinner gong |
| 0:27.3 | and patriotically English sparkling wine and finger food in number 10. |
| 0:31.9 | It was not the end, of course, but it was the point of no return for the foreseeable future, at least. |
| 0:37.1 | Rather low-key, perhaps, given the rancour and recrimination |
| 0:39.7 | that had divided the country in such new and ill-tempered ways. |
| 0:43.9 | Boris Johnson said it was time to start healing the wounds. |
| 0:46.8 | But what does that mean when Brexit exposed such profound differences |
| 0:50.4 | over identity, outlook, culture and tradition? |
| 0:53.6 | Two nations, really, the one seeing itself as cosmopolitan and connected, the other overlooked and |
| 0:58.9 | undervalued. |
| 1:00.2 | What common vision can we share? |
| 1:02.7 | Is it possible to move on from the debate which mostly seems to have been characterised by |
| 1:06.6 | mutual contempt and return to the compromise and civility we fondly imagine we used to have in |
| 1:11.8 | our public discourse. And how do we go about it? That's our moral maize tonight. The panel, |
| 1:16.1 | the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo, and McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, |
| 1:21.1 | Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh University, |
| 1:25.5 | and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser. |
| 1:27.8 | Giles, have you lost friends over the way you voted? |
| 1:30.4 | Oh, God, I reckon I could have lost about half of my friends over this, which is like, |
... |
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