Neil Oliver: Tribal attitudes have “calcified and hardened” during lockdown

Historian Neil Oliver has said coronavirus lockdown has intensified people’s opinions because they are no longer able to meet people with opposing views.

Speaking with talkRADIO’s Mike Graham, the television presenter said the UK had always been a nation of “tribes” and remained so.

Mr Oliver warned that people’s reliance on technology during social distancing, and in normal life, was limiting their exposure to different points of view.

He said: “In those isolating circumstances, your attitudes can calcify and harden and you’re not being directly challenged by meeting people you don’t agree with face to face.”

“We’ve now made our machines so smart that the machinery out there is funnelling information to us that it thinks we will agree with, so increasingly people are only hearing what they want to hear, in stark contrast with what they might need to know.”

The UK has now been under some form of lockdown for more than 12 weeks.

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