I woke up this morning thinking about being human.
Not left or right.
Not black or white.
Not gay or straight.
Not immigrant or native.
Not rich or poor.
Not one of the ever-growing collection of words we use to explain who somebody is before we’ve even spoken to them.
Just human.
Perhaps it is nostalgia. Perhaps it is age. Perhaps living for 56 years simply gives you enough road behind you to recognise things you’ve seen before.
But lately I have found myself looking at the world and wondering:
When did we become so determined to put one another into boxes?
Because when I look backwards, I remember the people before I remember the labels.
I am a child of the seventies and eighties
I grew up in a working-class mining village in Yorkshire.
And we were poor.
Not the softened, nostalgic version of “we didn’t have much, but we were happy.”
Actual poverty.
I queued for free school dinners.
Some of us wore identical uniforms provided through schemes because our families couldn’t afford them.
And each morning at primary school, we were given a little bottle of lukewarm milk.
For me, that milk was often breakfast.
There wasn’t always breakfast in our house.
I didn’t necessarily have the language then to understand that as deprivation. It was simply life. You accepted what there was, went without what there wasn’t and carried on.
So when the school milk disappeared, it wasn’t simply the disappearance of a little bottle of milk.
For children like me, it could mean losing the only breakfast we were having.
I understand that differently now.
We were poor.
But I don’t remember spending my childhood thinking of myself as poor.
I remember being a child.
Four pounds made us rich
And there was joy. So much joy.
Our annual holiday wasn’t two weeks somewhere exotic.
It was Cleethorpes.
Once a year, around fifteen coaches would line up outside our local working men’s club, packed with families from the village heading excitedly for the seaside.
We children had perhaps £4 spending money.
Four pounds!
For that one day, we were loaded.
Kiss-me-quick hats, sugar dummies, sticks of rock, penny arcades and fairground rides competed fiercely for our fortune.
Cleethorpes might as well have been the Caribbean.
We came home exhausted, probably sunburned, carrying cheap plastic treasures that meant everything to us.
We didn’t have much.
But we had people.
Before community became a buzzword
Neighbours meant community.
We children ran errands for bread and milk for the old folk and, in those very different times, occasionally fags for old man Pat.
We washed cars for 50p.
We babysat for a whole £2.
We played outside.
Adults knew whose children we were.
Doors were knocked without appointments.
Things were borrowed and returned.
People argued.
People gossiped.
People helped.
It wasn’t idyllic.
There was violence behind some doors.
Alcohol.
Poverty.
Prejudice.
Unhappiness.
Secrets.
Abuse.
I don’t want to romanticise the past, because that would be dishonest.
But there was also community.
There was belonging.
There were people.
And for a while, I was an immigrant
From 1976, part of my childhood was spent in Zambia.
I was the immigrant then.
We arrived legally into somebody else’s country, and I understood, even as a child, that this was their home.
We were the newcomers.
We respected the country, its people and its culture, and I remember Zambia as a beautiful place that gave me memories I still carry today.
But I also remember things I didn’t understand.
Almost from the day we arrived, local people came knocking at our door asking for work.
“Garden boys.”
“House boys.”
Those were the words they used then.
Even as a child, I found it strange that another human being might be employed to do ordinary chores we would have done ourselves.
Something about it troubled me.
It seemed unequal. Unfair.
I couldn’t understand why one person should clean up after another simply because of where each happened to sit in society.
Yet there was another side that I was far too young to properly comprehend.
This was employment.
People were standing at the door asking for an opportunity to earn money for their families.
Was providing that employment helpful?
Was the inequality that made it necessary unjust?
Could both things be true at the same time?
I didn’t have those words then.
I was a child.
I simply knew something about it didn’t sit comfortably with me.
Looking back as an adult, I have questioned many things about what I witnessed. I understand now that history, poverty, economics and power can sit behind seemingly ordinary interactions in ways a child couldn’t possibly unravel.
But perhaps that discomfort tells me something about the child I was.
I noticed people.
I noticed when something didn’t feel equal.
And I didn’t need to fully understand somebody else’s circumstances to wonder whether they were being treated fairly.
Among my childhood friends were Priscilla Malulu and Sammy Comolonda, both Zambian – beautiful souls, both left a lasting impression on me.
They weren’t representatives of another race or culture to me.
They were my friends.
And perhaps there is something else Zambia gave me that I didn’t recognise until much later:
the experience, however briefly and under very different circumstances, of being the person who had arrived in somebody else’s country.
The outsider.
The newcomer.
The immigrant.
And knowing that being welcomed into another country did not make that country mine to disregard.
Respect mattered.
People mattered.
People before categories
Back in Britain, I worked for a while on a YTS scheme with Dr Patel and Dr Tripathy.
Again, they weren’t representatives of demographic groups to the teen that I was.
They were people with names.
People I knew.
People I respected.
That doesn’t mean racism didn’t exist.
Of course it did.
Britain in the seventies and eighties could be racist, homophobic, sexist and brutally class-conscious.
People experienced things I didn’t experience, and I would never want my memories to erase theirs.
I can only tell you mine.
And my experience was that I learned very young that people could look different, sound different, come from different countries and live very different lives without somehow becoming less human to me.
And what a soundtrack we had
Then there was the music.
Lionel Richie had us Dancing on the Ceiling.
Billy Ocean filled the radio.
Salt-N-Pepa told us to Push It.
Shirley Bassey gave us Goldfinger.
Boy George appeared in make-up, braids and gloriously flamboyant clothes singing Karma Chameleon — and Britain sang along.
We didn’t need everybody to look alike.
Some of the people we admired were wonderfully different.
Our sporting heroes included Daley Thompson, Fatima Whitbread, Tessa Sanderson, Seb Coe, Steve Cram and Steve Ovett.
Zola Budd ran barefoot, Torvil and Dean’s Bolero blew our minds.
We waved our Union Jacks.
We shouted ourselves hoarse.
We celebrated.
At the cinema we laughed with Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, cried watching Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple, and some of us developed a lasting appreciation of Denzel Washington.
Later, the United Colors of Benetton deliberately put faces of different ethnicities together across its advertising.
Difference was visible.
Sometimes celebrated.
And I don’t remember sitting there thinking:
That’s a black person.
That’s a gay person.
That’s a white person.
I remember thinking:
I love that song.
She’s incredible.
Look how fast he runs.
That’s my friend.
Perhaps children sometimes understand humanity more simply than adults do.
Then I watched my community break
The eighties taught me another lesson entirely.
I witnessed the miners’ strike.
Where I lived, this wasn’t an academic argument about economics or industrial relations.
It came down our streets.
It entered homes.
It divided families.
Suddenly, two little words became enormously powerful:
Picket.
Scab.
A label could supposedly tell you which side somebody belonged to.
People who had worked together, drunk together, raised children alongside one another and lived on the same streets found themselves divided.
And the scars lasted.
But underneath those labels were human beings frightened of losing many of the same things.
Their jobs.
Their homes.
Their communities.
Their ability to feed their children.
Their future.
People made different decisions while trying to protect the same precious things.
And I learned something then that I have never forgotten:
Once we stop seeing the person and start seeing only the label, division becomes frighteningly easy.
Then I became one of society’s statistics
When I left home, I didn’t step neatly into adulthood with savings, qualifications and a career plan.
I became a young single mother living on a housing estate where almost nobody seemed to work.
Unemployment was everywhere.
Addiction was rife.
Poverty wasn’t something being debated on television.
It lived next door.
And wherever poverty existed, there always seemed to be somebody prepared to make money from it.
Subprime money lenders and high-interest sellers circled communities like ours.
Buy now.
Pay weekly.
Borrow a little to get through.
Then pay considerably more because you were poor enough to need it in the first place.
Looking back, they seemed like vultures circling people in need.
But the people themselves?
Salt of the earth.
Perhaps despite their difficulties.
Perhaps sometimes because of them.
People who had almost nothing could still find something to give someone who had less.
There was addiction.
There was dysfunction.
There was violence.
But there was also humour.
Generosity.
Loyalty.
Resourcefulness.
Humanity.
Life taught me again:
Never confuse someone’s circumstances with their worth.
I wanted something different
By eighteen, I was a single mother on Income Support by 20 I was living with domestic violence.
I felt like part of an underclass.
Forgotten.
Unimportant.
Unprotected.
Nobody was coming to rescue us.
Yet somewhere inside me, I wanted more.
Not because I believed I was better than the people around me.
I wanted a different life.
For myself, yes.
But particularly for my children.
Less stress.
Less struggle.
More security.
More possibilities.
And getting out wasn’t as simple as somebody saying, “Get a job.”
The benefits trap was real in my experience.
When every penny is already accounted for, even inadequate security is still security.
Taking employment can mean gambling that certainty before your wages are sufficient to replace it.
The rent still needs paying.
Children still need feeding.
Childcare has to be found.
Shoes still need buying.
The electricity doesn’t care that you’re trying to better yourself.
I remember being advised that working could actually leave me financially worse off.
And for a while, it did.
That’s something we sometimes miss when talking about people “getting themselves out” of poverty.
Sometimes stepping upwards first requires stepping away from the only secure ground beneath your feet.
And when children depend upon you, that isn’t simply ambition.
It’s a gamble.
I took it.
I found someone to look after my children while I worked evenings caring for the elderly as I had learned to do as a child, often while my children slept.
I budgeted.
I studied.
I worked.
I worried.
I kept going.
Eventually, when my children were at school, I was able to move into what I thought of then as a “proper job”, working with Social Services.
There wasn’t a single dramatic moment when somebody announced:
You’ve made it.
Life changed slowly.
One decision.
One qualification.
One wage packet.
One frightening risk.
One difficult month at a time.
I was stronger than I knew
Looking back now, I realise something.
I was stronger than I ever gave myself credit for.
For years I told my story according to what happened to me.
Poverty.
Domestic violence.
Fear.
Struggle.
The things I didn’t have.
But there is another way to tell the same story.
I survived.
I raised my children.
I protected them as best I could.
I learned.
I worked.
I studied.
I changed direction.
I built something from circumstances that sometimes gave me very little to build with.
I survived.
And I never forgot the people who lived alongside me.
I have lived amongst people whom society might easily have called the “underclass”.
I was one of them.
But I knew their names.
Their humour.
Their generosity.
Their struggles.
Their children.
Their stories.
I remember the people.
Which brings me to the world I see now
Perhaps all of that explains why the state of the world troubles me as much as it does.
Because once again I see ordinary people becoming labels.
Left.
Right.
Woke.
Bigot.
Racist.
Fascist.
Snowflake.
Immigrant.
Native.
Trans.
And sometimes I hear echoes from a mining village.
Picket.
Scab.
Different words.
Different arguments.
Different times.
But I recognise the danger of deciding that one word tells us everything worth knowing about another human being.
It doesn’t.
I am tired of seeing disagreement automatically interpreted as hatred.
I can believe migrants and refugees should be treated with dignity while also believing that countries need secure borders and functioning legal immigration systems.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive to me.
I can respect another adult’s identity and their right to live their life while still believing we should be able to have careful, compassionate conversations about safety, about children, development, identity and safeguarding.
I don’t have to hate somebody in order to have questions.
And someone doesn’t have to agree with me before I recognise their humanity.
In fact, perhaps that is when recognising one another’s humanity matters most.
There should be room for becoming
I am 56 years old.
I was well into adulthood before I really began understanding who I was beneath everything life had taught me I needed to be.
Some of the most important parts of myself didn’t make sense to me until my forties.
Perhaps that’s why I believe there should be room for becoming.
Room to wonder.
Room to grow.
Room to question.
Room to change our minds.
Room to get things wrong.
Room to discover ourselves.
Room for children to be children.
And room for two decent human beings to disagree without deciding that the other must therefore be a bad person.
Suffering doesn’t need to compete
When Black Lives Matter became a global movement, I found myself reflecting deeply.
My instinct throughout my life had always been that every human life mattered.
But I can also recognise that believing human beings are equal doesn’t mean everybody has always been treated equally.
Those are different things.
I don’t need to deny somebody else’s experience of racism in order to tell the truth about my experience of poverty.
Their suffering doesn’t diminish mine.
Mine doesn’t diminish theirs.
There shouldn’t be a competition over whose suffering is legitimate.
A black child experiencing racism deserves protection.
A white child going to school hungry deserves protection.
A refugee fleeing war deserves humanity.
A pensioner frightened about changes in their community deserves to be heard.
A struggling single mother deserves dignity.
A man sleeping on the street deserves dignity.
A frightened child trying to understand themselves deserves patience, compassion and safety.
Human suffering doesn’t become more or less legitimate according to the political category of the person experiencing it.
Pain is pain.
Fear is fear.
And people are people.
The flag I remember
I sometimes find myself puzzled by what the Union Jack appears to communicate to different people today.
Because I remember waving mine.
I remember athletics.
Royal celebrations.
Street parties.
Sport.
Someone representing our little collection of islands achieving something extraordinary and millions of us shouting at the television.
I didn’t wave my flag against somebody else.
I waved it because it represented home.
So when I see someone holding a flag today, I don’t automatically assume I know what’s inside their heart.
Perhaps they’re proud.
Perhaps they’re frightened.
Perhaps they’re angry.
Perhaps they’re protesting.
Perhaps they simply love their country.
There’s a remarkably simple way of finding out.
Ask them.
Talk to people.
Listen.
Be curious.
The human being underneath that flag is probably considerably more complicated than whatever label we are preparing to give them.
I see the same thing now
Our world feels frightened.
Wars rage while ordinary families pay the price.
People worry about migration, housing, jobs, identity, inequality, poverty, community and whether their children will ever afford homes of their own.
Communities are changing.
Technology is changing – fast.
The way we communicate is changing.
Information arrives faster than our nervous systems were ever designed to process it.
And frightened people look for certainty.
We look for someone to blame.
Governments.
Migrants.
The rich.
The poor.
The left.
The right.
Boomers.
Gen Z.
Men.
Women.
And before long, complicated human beings have been divided into opposing camps.
I’ve seen something like this before.
I watched what happened when a mining community was split into pickets and scabs.
The subject was different.
The circumstances were different.
But I remember what division did to people.
And I don’t want that for us.
Perhaps we need to stand further back
Maybe what I have learned after 56 years is that we cannot understand one another while we are constantly reacting to one another.
Sometimes we have to stand far enough back from the argument to see the people inside it.
Not to surrender our beliefs.
Not to pretend differences don’t matter.
Not to silence legitimate concerns or difficult conversations.
But to become curious enough to ask:
What does the world look like from where you are standing?
I learned something about that in a mining village.
Picket and scab could look like enemies from opposite sides of the line.
Step further back and you could see two families frightened about how they were going to survive.
I learned it in Zambia.
I was the immigrant.
I was the person who had arrived in somebody else’s country.
I was welcomed into a culture that wasn’t mine, and even as a child I understood something about respecting the country and the people whose home I had entered.
Understanding somebody else’s perspective doesn’t mean adopting it.
Empathy isn’t agreement.
It is simply being willing to look at the world from another person’s position long enough to understand why it might look different from there.
English. Yorkshire. British. Living in Scotland. Female. Human.
And life continues to remind me of this now.
I am English.
I’m Yorkshire.
I live, love and work in Scotland.
Scotland is part of Britain, and I am British.
But I’m not Scottish.
Does that matter?
Not to me.
I can love Scotland without pretending to be Scottish.
I can treasure Yorkshire without believing being born there makes me better than somebody born somewhere else.
I can wave a Union Jack without waving it against anyone.
I can have deeply held beliefs and still listen to yours.
I can disagree with you without despising you.
And you can disagree with me without deciding what kind of human being I must therefore be.
Perhaps we have become too reactive.
Too quick to answer.
Too quick to categorise.
Too quick to defend our side and condemn theirs.
Sometimes we need to step back far enough to recognise that the person standing opposite us has a history we cannot see.
They have parents.
Children.
Losses.
Fears.
Memories.
Beliefs.
Reasons.
Perhaps even wounds that explain why they see the same world so differently from us.
Understanding their perspective doesn’t require us to adopt it.
It simply requires us to remember that there is a human being standing there.
Being human
That is the standard I want to live by.
I am human.
A mother.
A grandmother.
A wife.
A counsellor.
A Christian. Spiritual.
Working class.
A survivor of poverty and violence.
All of those things have shaped me.
None of them, individually, can tell you who I am.
And none of your labels can tell me everything about you either.
So before all of them, I am human.
That is how I try to meet other people.
And it is how I accept being treated in return.
With dignity.
With curiosity.
With respect.
Nothing less.
Perhaps that little working-class girl whose breakfast was a bottle of lukewarm school milk, who once thought four pounds in Cleethorpes made her rich, understood something the 56-year-old woman she became is determined not to forget.
Before the categories.
Before the politics.
Before the hashtags.
Before somebody tells us which side we are supposed to be on.
Stand back.
Look again.
See the person.
I remember the people.
And in a world increasingly asking us to choose a side, I choose something much simpler.
I choose to see the human being first.