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JONATHAN MOSS: My name is Jonathan Moss. I'm an Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Sussex. And my research focuses on British political history

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with a specific interest in how popular understandings of politics have developed since from the end of the Second World War through to the present.

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It would be difficult to identify any sort of period of history that doesn't have something interesting in it. But I think what's distinctive about the 2010s is that

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it's particularly chaotic, turbulent, and unpredictable. And we can think about this within the realm of formal party politics, the fact that between 2010 and 2019, there were four general elections and two referendums,

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the EU referendum in 2016 and the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014. So just to put that in perspective, throughout the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s,

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there were only two general elections. There were four prime ministers. There were numerous party leadership contests as well. So there was lots of politics, I guess,

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going on throughout the period. And I think as well, you see this growing polarisation within British politics. I think the 90s and 2000s are often thought as of an era

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of depoliticization, certainly where the main parties often converged on the same ideological terrain, happy with free market economics and stuff. And I think we see movement away from that in the 2010s,

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particularly with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn when he becomes the leader of the Labour Party in 2015 and the movement known as Corbynism around that, the rise in popular support for Jeremy Corbyn.

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And you see ideas like socialism that hadn't necessarily been associated with the Labour Party since the early 1980s back on the kind of mainstream political agenda for the first time.

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And obviously on the right, you see the growth of the UK Independence Party led by Nigel Farage who win the 2014 European Parliamentary elections which was the first time that had ever happened, a party that wasn't the Labour or the Conservative

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party to win an election within British politics. And then in the 2015 general election, they had over three million votes and, yeah, nearly 13% of the popular vote.

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So obviously, that has a real indirect influence on the Conservative Party when David Cameron's Prime Minister, which leads to him calling to have an EU referendum, the referendum on Britain's membership of the EU

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in 2016. So again, we're seeing these really quite significant transformations in British party politics. Beyond party politics, we might want to think about the wider

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context in which this takes place in terms of why the 2010s is an interesting decade. Clearly, this is the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. And we see after the election of the Conservative and Liberal

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Democrat coalition government, the implementation of austerity. And with that, we begin to see an increase in inequality, a decline in living standards. There's a significant increase in terms

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of things like homelessness, the number of children growing up in poverty. Wages stagnate. They grow at a rate that's the lowest I think it's

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been since the Napoleonic War. So there's a real sense of economic decline and austerity in the aftermath of the financial crisis. And with that, we can think about wider transformations

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in how we communicate with each other, how we interact with each other, our sense of community, how we use social media. I think Instagram, Facebook, I think it's 2006.

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But then Twitter was around 2006. But then you have Instagram in 2010. And we can think about how that really transforms the way that people engage with politics in terms

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of their everyday lives, the way they encounter political information and how that also then has potential beneficial sides for political engagement in the sense of this can be used by social movements

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or political parties to mobilise people and stimulate political participation. But equally, we can think about how this also leads to concerns around things like misinformation,

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fake news, and this idea that we now live in an age of post-truth politics, I guess. So I think that's another really significant technological transformation, along with the economic change that forms

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the backdrop, the context for the 2010s and the political turbulence that we see. And we might also want to think about growing awareness around climate crisis, prominent global disasters

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starting with the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, things like that, the rise of wildfires in California, significant hurricanes that take place throughout the decade. We can think about rising temperatures

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and also protest in response to this, thinking about-- the Extinction Rebellion are formed in 2018. There's the protests by school pupils throughout England connected to Greta Thunberg.

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So with this, there's just this rising awareness of climate emergency. And we can think about how that transforms what were fairly niche concerns in the past.

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Maybe niche isn't the right word. But the idea that people would be concerned about single use plastics or meat consumption or electric cars, that type of thing become part of everyday conversations

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in a way that I don't think was the case, necessarily, before this decade. And I think finally, I started off by talking about the role of formal politics

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in terms of how this frames what is a period of turbulence, chaos, crisis. But we might also think about, as I've kind of already alluded to, how this stimulates other forms of political engagement

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as well. We can think about that in the aftermath of the-- in 2011, you see riots throughout London and other cities in the UK, initially

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in response to the murder of Mark Duggan. But you're seeing that is often connected to underlying social tensions and concerns about things like the implementation of austerity.

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I've already mentioned Extinction Rebellion, students, school pupils going on strike. But we could think of other social movements like Black Lives Matter, although that doesn't become

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quite as prominent until 2020. It's initially formed in 2013 in Britain. # #MeToo movement from 2017 on-wards clearly shifts public debates about feminism, gender politics.

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And again, I haven't mentioned this yet. But obviously, in terms of global politics, we see Donald Trump elected in the United States in 2016. So you see widespread protests in response

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to Trump's visit to the UK. And again, there's lots of protests and events. In the aftermath of Brexit, you see lots of protests taking place throughout the country

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as well in the aftermath of that. So we go from an era of what's often thought of as being depoliticization, perhaps to one of re-politicisation.

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And again, we can think about how that kind of turbulence, that chaos, that sense of crisis really contributes to where we are today in 2025. We're living in a time where, as I currently talk about,

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Nigel Farage and Reform UK are according to the polls the most popular party in Britain. I don't think many people would have predicted that in 2010. So yeah, I think it's that sense of turbulence, chaos,

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and unpredictability that make the 2010s quite distinctive and certainly interesting to study. The 2010s is a significant decade that we need to understand due to the fact that it leads to arguably

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unprecedented political, economic, social, and cultural change. In terms of formal party politics, we see four general elections and two referendums,

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often leading to results that were unpredictable and defied conventional political understandings at the time. We need to recognise this takes place in the backdrop of widespread economic crisis and turmoil in terms

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of the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the implementation of austerity and the way that that impacts on everyday life in terms of things like rising economic inequality transformations

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and people's experiences of work, even things like homelessness, for example. Again, we might want to think about wider social, cultural changes, particularly in response

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to technology. Smartphone use becomes ubiquitous, the rise of social media companies and how that transforms the way that people

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communicate with each other, share information, and engage with politics. We might want to think about growing awareness of the climate crisis and think about how what were once niche concerns about

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airplane travel, eating meat, use of single use plastics become staple parts of everyday conversation and thinking about behaviour. And again, we might want to think about how that in itself

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is a response to wider protest and the emergence of social movements, things like Extinction Rebellion, Occupy movement, student protests against tuition fees. This rise in protest, I think, is something else that makes

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the 2010s really distinctive and potentially transformative and essential to really understand if we want to know why we are where we are today in 2025. The Mass Observation Archive offers really unique insights

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into how people experience these wider political, economic, social, and cultural changes in the 2010s, I think because, firstly, it provides a window into how ordinary people experience these events in their everyday lives

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in a way that we don't quite get access to from other sources like opinion polls or surveys. The fact that Mass Observation is biographical, it's an example of life writing, enables

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you to situate what people thought or felt about these issues in relation to their wider life experiences, personal histories, in a way that you wouldn't get from simply looking at an opinion

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poll, for example. I think the other thing that Mass Observation does that's interesting is it enables you to situate these responses into the wider

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historical context. What else is going on at the time in terms of news stories, public debates, in terms of how that influences things like political attitudes, but also personal relationships

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with family, friends, work colleagues, and thinking about how that also works to shape people's political attitudes and understandings. More specifically, if we were to think about how Mass Observation

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can help us understand the 2010s, we can think about how it asks people to write about a lot of these key transformations that I've already alluded to. So for example, in 2011, it asks respondents

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to record their feelings about climate change. I think another directive in 2011 asks people to offer their views on crime. In 2015, there's a directive that

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asks people to give their views on the immigration crisis. In 2018, there's a directive that asks people to record their feelings about protest. I know that there's other directives throughout the decade

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that ask people to talk about their experiences of the internet, and particularly things like online communities. There is a directive that asks people to record

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their views on sex education. And of course, Mass Observation asks people to record diaries and asks them specific questions about politicians and party leaders at all four of the general elections,

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as well as the EU referendum in 2016. So I think you gain access from Mass Observation to people's attitudes towards formal political parties and politicians.

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But through asking all these questions about things like crime and climate change, gender politics, you also get access to people's broader world views, I guess, which makes it unique.

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Generally, I think Mass Observation has been used in two ways. And this is something that's been picked up on and identified by Tony Kushner.

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He's a historian who used Mass Observation to write about popular attitudes towards race and ethnicity. And the first way is to use Mass Observation what he describes as horizontally, where you basically

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look at a wide range of responses to a specific directive that tackles a certain issue like party politics, Brexit, or something like the NHS, immigration, climate change.

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And what you're essentially doing there is looking at as broad a range of responses as possible to that specific directive and trying to identify shared stories, popular narratives,

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public discourses that individual writers are drawing on to make sense of that particular issue. To give you a specific example of this, in my work with Nick Clark when we were looking at how

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people's popular attitudes towards politics changed over time, we found in the 1940s, you'd find-- there was an old woman in Southwick outside Brighton in her 60s who was describing politicians as gasbags.

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And we found-- there was a working class man I think in Glasgow who made a similar case. There was multiple people from multiple different backgrounds and geographical locations who were referring to politicians

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as gasbags, which made us feel fairly confident that this was a shared cultural resource that people were using to make sense of politics. I think other researchers in sociology,

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in history, have used Mass Observation in a similar way, where they've been able to identify these shared stories and narratives to make sense of specific issues. The other way of using Mass Observation

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is to look at it vertically, where you would then follow some individuals over a period of time and think about how their ideas and attitudes have evolved as they've grown older.

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So there's a really nice study of voluntary work and volunteering in Britain by Rose Lindsey and Joe Moran which follows a group of about 40 people writing for Mass Observation and considers how, basically,

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their experiences and attitudes towards volunteering changed from the end of the 20th century through to the beginning of the 21st century. This is something that the historian James

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Hinton has done in his history of modern Britain. He followed individuals, I think about seven individuals across time in order to try and identify wider-- how they responded to wider cultural and political changes.

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And then this is something that myself and Nick Clark are working on at the moment, looking at how people's political attitudes changed as they grew older, from the 1980s through to the present.