St Helens

I’m in St Helens, which I think is in Lancashire. It might be in Cheshire. It’s a fairly grim, unremarkable sort of place, which could be any number of Midlands or Northern towns. When I see a place like this, I start to truly understand what it feels to be invisible. So much is being said and written about representation at the moment. I watched a bit of BBC Breakfast with interviews with Emma Thompson talking about being a woman and a young, deaf rapper talking about his work. A gospel choir (quite rightly) sang the show out with a tribute to Aretha Franklin (although I do feel it showed laziness on the BBC’s part to feature the choir from the recent royal wedding as though there were only one gospel choir in the world.) Diversity is one thing - but if you keep offering up the same faces, you’re hardly creating opportunities.

Anyway, I started to wonder when I’d last seen a Midlands, middle-aged, working class person being interviewed about their life, except as a quiz show contestant, or as part of a vox pop about Brexit or a grisly murder, where the task of the white, working class Midlands woman seems to be to say how worried she is about the children. Northampton county council has recently gone bust. It’s a big Midlands story. But on the day the council announced massive cuts, the BBC took itself to a town in the South West, where, apparently, another council was in trouble...

Get a rapper in from the Midlands and allow him or her to speak openly and honestly about their life, listen without prejudice (without accusing him of transphobia, homophobia or racism) and you might truly understand what a different form of invisibility feels like. Listen, I have deep sympathy for ANY community who feels undervalued or under-represented, but there are some communities whom I genuinely feel are demonised in this country and told to shut up every time they speak. And let me tell you something: right now, their lives aren’t a barrel of laughs. They’re angry, and they have the power to elect the first charismatic, right wing despot who sticks his head above the parapet and gives them a reason to believe that they matter. Which is, let’s face it, a basic human right.