Deborah Meaden, of Dragons’ Den fame, has issued a plea for the British public as they wake following England’s clash with Mexico – will you help us remedy the country’s fractures and divides?
Know your audience they say. That’s true in business when pitching an idea (I’ve lost count of the number of times great entrepreneurs have fluffed their pitch to us Dragons because of a basic lack of insight), but it’s also true when writing articles like this.
And that’s why I’m a bit nervous. Because by the time you read this, the Mexico – England game will be over, and you’ll know the result. Will you be reading this with a sore head but a spring in your step, full of excitement for the next big game? Or will you be reading this with a horrible hangover, depressed about another year of broken hopes and dreams?
That wouldn’t matter so much if I was trying to sell you toothpaste – but today I’m writing about how we feel as a country and that is pretty mood dependent.
If I were to try and summarise our mood as a nation until today – taking the football to one side – I’d say we are in a spot of bother. In fact three quarters of us feel our country is divided and a lot of the time it feels like nothing works properly. As if that wasn’t bad enough, hostile states make us feel frightened, extremists try to divide us and the online world can sometimes feel like a cesspit.
Football feels like one of the few things that still brings us together – so I pray that even if Mexico crumble before us, we can maintain a sense of national unity that little bit longer.
But even if last night was a 10-0 drubbing and Harry Kane scored a triple hattrick only for Pickford to polish it off with a bicycle kick from his own box – we can’t rely on the World Cup to provide enough glue to hold our country together. There has to be more. It’s that sense of community, common purpose and togetherness that we experience in the pub cheering on the team that makes us feel like we belong – it’s one of the most important things in our lives.
Yet our politics has failed to focus on these things, neglected community infrastructure and left us feeling fractured and divided. But while this should be at the top of Andy Burnham’s list, this is too important to leave to politicians. That’s why today I’m launching a campaign to ask you – the great British public – to pitch your idea for the things that would bring us together, connect us more deeply and unite our country.
I’ve launched this this morning on TikTok – specifically to try and get the ideas of the next generation, but everybody has good ideas. And that’s where you come in.
I’m asking you to take just a few minutes out of your day, put your depression/elation to one side for a moment and go to thenationalconversation.org.uk and share your vision of the kind of country you want to live in and the one idea that you think would bring our country back together.
I’ve seen a lot of pitches in my time, but these will be the most important. So please have your say on the country you want to live in.
