What I learnt at the kitchen table
Transcriber: Bruno Cruz
Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
When I was eight years old,
I woke up one morning in a strange
house by the sea in England.
I walked out of the bedroom and
as I imagined the landing,
so did a woman in her early 40s.
She whisked my brother and I downstairs to
the kitchen where she lit a cigarette
and threw her feet up on
the kitchen table.
Later that day, the same woman took
us to the beach across the road,
armed with kitchen pots and pans,
seemingly never before used for cooking.
Well, we built sand castles
and played all afternoon.
The woman was Mo Mowlam, who was at this
point a backbench Labour MP.
And from that day on, Mo became our
stepmom and life changed forever.
Mo was warm and inviting
to us from the start,
but she seemed to be like
this with everyone.
Weekends in her constituency in Redcar,
we would visit local children’s homes
and residents and people from
the community would come
round to the house.
It was a welcoming place
and many cups of tea
and cigarettes were consumed
to our kitchen table.
Mo listened to her constituents
and invited conversation.
She wanted to help ordinary people and
she wanted to make things fairer.
As time went on, Mo campaigned tirelessly
to get Tony Blair elected leader of
the Labour Party and was at the core of
the rebrand that came to be known
as New Labour. Whilst Mo was at
the heart of creating New Labour and she
sacrificed more than anyone for it,
she never quite fitted in with
its very male controlling,
always on message kind of politics. It was
not just that she could go off piste.
She also understood the power
of emotion in politics.
She dared to give her politics
and emotional register,
which many of the technocratic,
disciplined men could not understand,
let alone reach. That’s still true today.
The left arguably can’t really do emotion.
He only does policy. And if there is
one thing we learned from Brexit,
it is the facts need to be delivered
with an emotional charge.
That is something Mo could do.
What would Labour give now for a Northern
woman MP who was an aide,
Stobart Pin-Up, and completely at
ease in a student union bar.
Mo was given the cabinet position
of Northern Ireland secretary.
She was the first woman to
ever hold the position.
I was by her side as a 13 year old girl.
The day she went to Northern Ireland.
As I sat in the car that day in 1997 and
watch Moe get out to greet people,
I watched as she hugged
and kissed everyone
as they welcomed her to Northern Ireland.
Now listen to their stories of the
past and remembered with them.
The friends and the family they
lost to the troubles.
Mo wanted to know what the people
of Northern Ireland were hoping
for in their futures. It seemed in
that moment that everyone shared
a desire to bring hope and opportunity
to the region and a belief that
a better future was possible.
Mo promise to do her best to achieve
that vision. Mo seem to me as
I watched her to be one of the people.
She was making her mission clear.
This was about them. It wasn’t
just about politics as usual.
She wanted to save lives by reimagining
and building a peaceful society.
But she also made it clear that
she couldn’t do it alone.
It was a collective mission.
These experiences that I had as a child,
an observer in the back of the car
and as a companion to my own,
her political journey have shaped in part
who I have gone on to be as an adult.
The values I hold and the way
that I view the world and
the people in it have been directly
informed by Mo´s display of openness to
everyone we ever met. Her belief
that everyone was equal,
no one was better than you and no
one was inferior either has been
a guiding force for me in everything
I have gone on to do as a filmmaker
and a storyteller. I am inspired by
everyday experiences to bring people
stories to life and to celebrate the
extraordinary in the everyday.
These stories, however, can also highlight
the other side of the coin.
Fear. And division. Over the years,
I’ve become more aware of how fearful we
are becoming of one another in society
as a whole, how frightened
we can be of different.
What is it that has led us
to become so divided?
Part of the catalyst for this more recent
fear and distrust, I believe,
has been the adverse impact of
the rise of big tech and
the way that we now consume and share
information, which platforms we use,
who we follow on Twitter, who are Facebook
communities are made up of,
whether we we’re getting all our news
from Tick-Tock or Facebook,
what videos we see on social media.
All of this is affecting our beliefs,
who we align our values with,
who we choose to distrust. And in the
extreme, who we become more afraid of.
The content we are served by
the platforms is micro targeted to
encourage us to sometimes unknowingly
behave in certain ways. We then share
that content with other like minded
people. This is the problem
of our era, without doubt.
Siloed opinion, an echo chamber
choir preaching.
I watch as this fear and distrust
is playing out in our media
and in our global politics.
And it worries me.
But I am then reminded of growing up,
watching Mo strive for a
more inclusive society.
The techniques that Mo, her colleagues,
peers and the people of Northern Ireland
employed in achieving peace,
laid the foundations for many other
global peace building exercises,
and perhaps can now offer solutions
for the challenges we face today.
Mo’s work consisted of incredibly
difficult discussions,
but at the core of them, it
became about establishing
a better understanding of one another.
Finding a commonality that could be
built upon in order to establish
a peaceful way to live and work together.
Everyone didn’t have to agree,
but they were encouraged to listen and
to hear the other side was saying,
I began asking myself, how can
we bring people together
and facilitate meaningful discussions?
How can we create an online version of
Mo’s kitchen table where everyone is
listened to, just like the discussions
I witnessed all those years ago when
I was a child? Was it possible to create
an online space where strangers
with different values,
beliefs and experiences could come
together from anywhere in the country
or even the world and discuss challenging
issues whilst retaining intimacy
and informality of a conversation over a
cup of tea around the kitchen table?
The world we now inhabit takes
us online more and more,
and so it can also create incredible
opportunities to bring people together,
not just play its part in dividing them.
Look at the last 18 months during
the Covid pandemic.
The Internet has enabled friends to get
together, families to stay in touch,
and grandparents to watch their
grandchildren grow up from afar,
not to mention teams working remotely and
schoolchildren continuing to learn,
reflecting on all of this with
some great collaborators.
We decided to create an online space,
which we have called Six Strangers,
inspired by the idea of the
Virtual Kitchen Table
This would be an intimate online space
that fought back against the idea that
the Internet had become a place
for big data gathering,
microtargeting and coercive messaging,
and instead would offer an honest
and respectful space and
an opportunity to reflect and reimagine
a better version of
a shared future together. Mo understood
she couldn’t achieve peace in
Northern Ireland alone and that she needed
everyone to come together with
a shared vision. If it was ever
going to be achieved.
Can we take some of this approach
and apply it to our world today?
What if we could connect with the people
we perceive to be different from us
and find commonality? What if we
could build a more cohesive,
less individualistic, more empathetic
society and challenge the fear
and hatred that threatens to divide us?
Perhaps the way to do this doesn’t have
to be more complicated than bringing
strangers together and allowing change
to take place through respectful,
honest and intimate conversations
and discussions.
What we learned through starting to host
these online events was that there’s
definitely a hunger for them. There’s
a lot of trauma, an upset to share.
And when people start to share,
they find they have much more in common
than they might initially have assumed.
It is also true that we live in a
time where people do not trust
the politicians and institutions, but
they do actually, it turns out,
trust one another. People do believe
in civic heroes who symbolize hope.
Look at Marcus Rashford and
Sir Captain Tom Moore,
not to mention the unnamed
heroes of the NHS.
It seems clear to me that hope will
come from us coming together.
So with all this in mind, I want to leave
you with a question and a challenge.
Who would you choose to invite to your
virtual kitchen table discussion,
or maybe you can look at it another way?
Who do you think you wouldn’t like
to invite to your kitchen table?
And maybe you should.