Now, I’ll be honest, the reason for writing this article is purely to market my new book WHY CAN’T WE ALL GET ALONG – SHOUT LESS, LISTEN MORE. Is it relevant to West Ham or this site? Well, in part, yes. It’s all about the decline in public discourse, why it’s happened and what can be done about it. In a way, the arguments in the comment threads illustrate a lot of the issues I describe in this book. Sometimes things get overheated and people say things which they would never say to someone’s face. Social media has exacerbated this.
The book is part polemic and partly autobiographical, although it is most emphatically not an autobiography. I use episodes from my life and my career in the world of politics and the media to illustrate the points I am trying to make. Politics has always been tribal, but it’s become even more so. Football is supported by people like us who belong to a particular tribe and many of us cannot see anything good in any of the other football tribes. We live in our own little silos. And so it is in my world of current affairs. We all have a tendency to listen to those who validate our own views – increasingly so in the polemical fields of politics and current affairs.
The book was supposed to have been published on 28 May. I had invited people to a glitzy booklaunch. I had dozens of speaking bookings lined up at think tanks and literary festivals all over the country. All for nothing. Covid 19 arrived and they were virtually all cancelled. HarperCollins suggested postponing publication until last week in the hope that things would be better by now. Well, bookshops are open, but live events are still a no no, and will probably remain so for the rest of the year. I know that the sales of this book are likely to be a fraction of what they would have been in normal times, but there’s no point in fretting about it when there is absolutely nothing I can do.
If you fancy supporting a struggling author, you can order signed copies HERE (I’ll even do a West Ham related dedication!), order via Viv at the Newham Bookshop
email to info@newhambooks.co.uk or call 020 8552 9993. Or if you really have to, you can order through Amazon HERE.
It’s also available as an Audiobook. Eight hour of me reading it. A good sleep aid…
If you can’t stomach eight hours, here’s 30 minute interview I did with Stephen Nolan last week on 5 Live about the book and the themes in it.