It Can't Just Be Me - Why is the country so angry? With Jordan Stephens

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

Ahead of the series' full relaunch, join Anna and the multi-talented musician, actor, and author Jordan Stephens as they unpack the emotions surrounding the recent violence that has gripped the UK. In this mini-episode, after his heartfelt response went viral online, Jordan shares his insights on why he thinks people are experiencing such profound anger and why that anger is misdirected.It Can't Just Be Me returns on Wednesday August 28th.If you have an It can't Just Be Me you would like discussed then get in touch with Anna by emailing [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Anna Richardson. So we've had a bit of a break from releasing episodes of It Can't Just Be Me, but I'm excited to say that we're going to be back with a brand new series of the show next Wednesday, the 28th of August. In the meantime, though, we wanted to do something a little bit different because over the last few weeks, I'm sure you, like me, have been totally shaken by the violence and rioting that we've seen across the UK. And it's left the It Can't Just Be Me team with loads of questions about how on earth we got here

and what comes next. Jordan Stevens is a musician, actor and broadcaster best known for being one half of the band Rizzle Kicks. I interviewed him following the release of his new book, Avoidance, Drugs, Heartache and Dogs, which you'll hear in full next week. But it was after seeing his response to the UK riots go viral on social media that I wanted to spend some of our time together exploring his reaction to what he thinks is happening in the UK right now. So in this special episode of It Can't Just Be Me, take a listen to that chat. Now Jordan, congratulations on your new book, Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak and Dogs, all of which I have lived to the extreme. We're going to be talking to you about your experiences with addiction and ADHD.

But before we delve into that, I want to talk to you about the situation that we've all witnessed on the news over the last couple of weeks in the UK. And of course, that is the rioting, the racism, the shocking scenes that we've seen and that we're trying to sort of come to terms with um you did a video that went viral on social media in your view what do you think is going on in the uk at the moment well i think the uk is uh is as an entire nation is responding to probably the worst living standards that we've had for a while. You know, I think this year seems to be the first year post-COVID where people have started to really understand what on earth is happening post-Brexit to everything kind of happened at once.

And a lot of people are angry about that and their anger is easily redirected. But like, you know, when I think about some of the decisions that have been made, and when I think about the fact that even the inflation we've just been through, which I don't think people are really even understanding how detrimental that's been, the increase people defaulting on their mortgages. What you mean post Liz Truss's disastrous premiership i actually don't know yeah i don't know the ins and outs of like who specifically was making specific economic decisions all i know is that we have a complete

and utter discrepancy between the living wage and the ability to live you know like there's the opportunity to rent i mean god forbid own property exist by food like you know travel it's hundreds of pounds to get the train right now in the uk you know and people are talking about mick lynch lays it very bare where the money is going who's hoarding the money the the growth the growth and inequality in our society is very real has very real consequences and it's actively happening so yeah i made the point in my viral video that sure like every issue there is in the world there is space for discussion you know there'll be a rooting there'll be a semblance of of yeah okay in this specific instance um why is this person in the country or in this specific instance

you know are we paying attention to this i'm sure but largely speaking all of the issues in the country around the health service and transportation and the living wage has absolutely nothing to do with illegal immigration it really doesn't and so i was frustrated because you end up in these disputes or you end up seeing like a particular uh demographic of people who i think are actually being manipulated and abused by those in charge you know they're being with with figureheads like faraj or whoever else had been feeding this idea that it's the 0.18 of the country that are responsible for 100 of the issues so i mean that being a legal by the way rather than the one percent of rich people which you could argue actually are responsible for the issue exactly so obviously we've had whatever it is 14 years of of tory

government rule up until now uh we've had austerity we've got the cost of living crisis as you say yeah we've had brexit we've had covid so people's tolerance is just it's done isn't it yes we are angry well we as a society are angry but one of the things that i think is baffling to me which i do mention is is it seems to be that if that the the working class or people who are on the what would you call it the breadline or whatever the way our system is set up is that you are kicked to shit it's fucking awful we live in a world where you get charged just think about this charged money for having no money like that's the world we live in do you know what i'm saying betting shops don't exist in wealthy areas people will say oh that's

because they're already rich but that doesn't make any sense like surely they'll have more money to throw it at you know on a on a race and i'm sure rich people do bet for fun but why are they on every fucking corner of strip of places where people can barely live and everybody is is part of this everyone's complicit in this bet like betting companies will sponsor sport events beer companies sponsor football do you know what i mean you have beer that's like the antithesis of football is beer you know the actuality of playing it but you know there's this we we completely are all into this culture of drinking and and um and listen i understand that going to the pub sure within moderation i'm

not trying to be like everyone should be this angelic sober but we know what i'm talking about you know and you see a reflection of this because when someone has fucking nothing they have barely anything coming in they have they feel like rubbish because they have no sustenance they have no way of understanding what to eat or what to drink they're just at all their all the opportunities for them to get themselves out the situation that they're in are consciously taken from them and then they just sell them one dream they go yeah but you're british you're english you deserve to be here like this is your you have this sense of entitlement some echo of empire and and then boom you have this you know coalition of people running the streets fuming about the fact that people aren't in keeping with

a concept an idea so this this explosive rage basically is being targeted completely in the wrong way yeah of course for you having experienced racism yeah how triggering is that for you to witness this i can only talk on behalf of myself yeah yeah like everybody has very different experiences of racism i've grown up at a time incredibly like unbelievably different to my dad my dad was the only black black boy in finchley in the 70s like it was fucking shit he had he had rocks thrown at him and his parents when he turned up at school that was the vibes then you know so comparatively i've had a pretty decent time do you know what i mean i don't yes sure people would say things to me but it was always in the context of them feeling hard done by football matches when i was a kid i was good at football so i'd do something good in football

and someone would say something racist for me it's pretty clear cut why they said that i'm not going to lose sleep over it you know you feel that you've been embarrassed whatever else you're trying to reach for whatever weapon you can go for and in that moment it was some sense difference yeah i'm more obviously concerned for my community but i just feel like disappointed and embarrassed that people can be pushed into such an illogical way of approaching inequality you know and also it's it's there are just so many examples of times where if if we're to believe that the the chant is to save kids or or to protect people in in our country then how do they feel about you know the little boy i think was killed with a sword recently you know their babies killed on account of one woman you know

there's there's basically many examples of of of things that have happened that could spill into some form of i mean how about you know energy companies hoarding everybody's money again and making it so that people have to pick between fucking electricity heat and food in the winter like why are we not on the streets then? You know, I just, that's my main frustration. The racism element of it, I think is, again, it seems to be like this leftover shite from being raised in empire.

I'd be confused if I was white, raised in England, being told that we used to run the fucking world, but I've got no fucking money and I'm miserable. I'd be confused. I'd feel like i should be on top of the world but it's spilling out isn't it into all minority groups because if you think about it there's been the the rise in anti-semitism the rise in islamophobia racism it's just people are fucking miserable yeah people are miserable i think well we'd have to take them case by case because I'm not sure there's been a recent rise in Islamophobia for sure but I mean Islamophobia conversation is just like that stresses me out so much because being Muslim has been a real struggle for a long long time post 9-11 it's been a fucking joke when people talk about assimilating into

culture i know people who have come from just places that where you know the middle east or not even necessarily the middle east they might be from south asia and just look like if they grow a beard they might look like this brown idea of and you know people will change their names we live in generations where people will literally rename their child so that they're more accepted into british culture you couldn't get on a train with a beard if you were brown for like six seven years like it was a seriously seriously stressful stressful time so you have this this period of time where you know being brown you know and then it gets me to think like this has all happened this then led into a war in the middle east right if i have say groups of british people chanting save

our kids do you know who killed the most kids in in my recent memory in this country will be whoever led us into a war in the middle east that we lost for what do you know what i mean to secure oil who knows to create stability what are the stories we told all i know is thousands of young men boys often working class boys who have been told there's no other opportunities have been coerced into fighting for their country it's just died been mutilated this you know i mean fighting for their country just died been mutilated this you know i mean for for who for a few people in power who would never step on the front line themselves what's the reaction been like to your to your video on instagram i think that it's important for me to state that like my my frustration in the video was just based off of the fact that this

has always been a problem of rich and poor like you know and i'm not the first person to say this at all you know they're an incredible voices in this space loki has always been on top of of understanding the political connotations of of racism and the social politics of of the money and economy um george the poet is an incredible voice in this space akala was very clear about the origins of racism on Question Time with Tommy Robinson years ago. The understanding that racism is essentially a tool used by the rich to distract those poorer than them, to distract them from the reality

that they're really the ones stealing everyone's shit. It's just age old. So yeah, of course I was frustrated. I saw a video of a man being jumped the black guy being jumped and by the way it wasn't even necessarily that important in that it was the color of who's what it felt more loaded on that basis because suddenly i'm there thinking really like are we really doing this based off of like fucking skin color and then that fury fuels me into we should know these people the one thing that people don't want who are in power you know who maintain control over the masses they don't want the working class to unite based off of their living circumstance they need them divided based off of

like ridiculous things like race and culture because the second that everybody can understand that we're all in the shit yeah and then we look up there that enemy that's when they're in trouble so of course they're going to sow all the seeds possible to keep that division there so what do you want to see for for the uk for britain for our culture what do you want to see i want to see the anchor directed towards those responsible for directed towards those responsible for our economy now i will say that i am not a trained economist i don't know nearly enough to make any um like predictions on the economy or understand i understand that there'll be inner workings there'll be dealings there'll be like the actual maths of inflation will probably be more sobering if i was to know all the details but surely surely we can't continue to live in a world where nearly every single job that's based off of the goodness

of people's hearts is put will put someone into a state where they can barely exist that's youth workers nurses teachers why on earth are we putting these people in spaces where they can barely exist you know i'm saying why are we paying hundreds of pounds to get on a train if we're talking about having greener futures like why can i why does it cost me 200 quid to go to manchester like it's insane you know again mick lynch will talk about this the the facts are there you know i mean gary's economics my friend gary his channel is called gary's economics he is he worked in a city this is a boy raised in east london that now a man genius mathematician really understands patterns and of behavior he's talking about this there are actual tangible ways of in terms of ways we can

adapt tax and ways in which we can adapt our economy to to ensure that people aren't fucking sunk into homelessness on i was on a plane and i got speaking to the woman next to me recently and she was telling me she works in rehoming rehousing what she's the family she's seen driven into poverty now it's a homelessness now as a result of inflation a heartbreaking do you know i mean everyday families and people the fact that people can can think that's anything to do with immigration is beyond me those houses are being those assets are being sucked away by people with more money and more power that's it middle-class families who spend their whole life earning enough money

to buy a property their their the mortgage goes up by five percent they can't afford to pay it boom who buys the house? It's not an immigrant. It's not an illegal immigrant coming over going, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna buy everyone's flats in West London. Like, what are we fucking talking about? Like, where, do you know what I mean?

Like, where were we at right now? That's, those are the kids I wanna save. Do you know what I'm saying? And I'm not gonna do that by shouting at a fucking hotel. Like, it's beyond, there's reason for people to have anger i understand but you're it's going into the wrong place 100 his full it can't just be me episode kicks off our new series next wednesday and i can't wait for you to hear it it

really is fascinating i'd love to hear your thoughts and reflections on that conversation. So email me on hello at it can't just be me.co.uk. And remember, you can find us as well on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. Just search for it can't just be me. If you've been affected by anything we've discussed, there's advice and guidance available via the link in our bio on socials, and also in the description of this episode.