How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

For twenty-five years I’ve been made to feel welcome in Woodhall Spa Conservative Club: drinking there and playing snooker with Dad, Mark, Andrew and their friends. My public support for Labour has been discreetly overlooked. It’s recognition that community is more important than politics, even as the best political disagreements are often about how best to maintain a community. Dad made exceptions for me just as I made exceptions for him. His views on snooty, Champagne socialist, metropolitan, formally pan-affectionate, middle-class Oxbridge luvvies had to take a step back when he noticed he had one for a son. And my views of baby-boomer, non-college-educated, slightly racist, deeply sexist, angry white working-class Tories were tempered by having one as a dad. This is the kind of forced empathy that villages, not just families, are rather good at. Given the divisiveness of the Brexit vote and the Trump presidency, I think it’s worth saying that it’s precisely these exceptions, these accommodations we have to make with each other, that create cracks in the wall of mutual suspicion and make possible a politics of civility – cracks which the algorithms and self-policing identity groups of Facebook and Twitter hastily try to paste over.