Читать книгу Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England - Nick Cohen - Страница 10

JULIAN BAGGINI SEEMS a standard member of the liberal intelligentsia. The books he reads, the clothes he wears and the food he eats match those of tens of thousands of others. He stands out because he has done what very few of his contemporaries are prepared to do and confronted England. Not by denouncing its government or letting out long sighs about its lack of sophistication, but by living among people he would not ordinarily notice in an attempt to understand the core beliefs of the England which doesn’t listen to the Today programme.

It is a simple idea, and I’m surprised no one has thought of it before. Polly Toynbee and Fran Abrams have written tender accounts of life on the poverty line, while the Sunday Times was not exaggerating when it described Michael Collins’s The Likes of Us as an ‘absolutely essential’ guide to London’s white working class. There are also thousands of academic studies of the national character—from the British Social Attitudes Survey to Kate Fox’s Watching the English.

But Baggini wasn’t interested in the poor, but the average. Nor did he follow Collins by staying in London, which is a separate country, as everyone says. He determined instead to concentrate on the mainstream English who cannot be found on the minimum wage or living in the capital, but among the homeowners of the provinces. The piles of academic research and opinion poll findings helped him, but they could not give him the feel of England. For that, he had to uproot himself mentally and physically.

He asked the computer analysts who compile demographic profiles for marketing companies to give him the postcode of the English district that was closest to the national average. They consulted their databases and told him to head to S66 on the outskirts of Rotherham. Its working-men’s clubs, eat-as-much-food-as-you-can-cram-on-to-your-plate restaurants, out-of-town shopping centres and local radio stations are indeed typical, but they are also about as far away from Baggini’s England as it is possible to get.

‘Three of the last four constituencies I lived in went Liberal Democrat at the last election,’ he said, as he tucked into an un-English vegetarian breakfast. ‘And the Lib Dems only lost the fourth by a few hundred votes. I have been in a parallel country for most of my adult life.’

Baggini expected to find sexism, racism, homophobia, celebrity worship, small-mindedness and superstitious fears. What makes his Welcome to Everytown a thought-provoking book is not that he didn’t discover illiberal prejudices in Rotherham, but that he managed to come to terms with them.

Baggini is not quite the standard middle-class liberal he appears. His mother is from the Kent working class and his father grew up in an Italian farming family before emigrating to Britain. His Italian side meant that he ‘never really felt entirely at home in this country’, while his working-class background distanced him from the public-school boys of the London intelligentsia. More important, I think, is his membership of a group of freelance intellectuals who gather round the Philosophers’ Magazine and live by their pens. None has the security of a university job, and all are suspicious of intellectual orthodoxy. (Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, two of Baggini’s colleagues, produced an attack on postmodernism, whose title, The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense, encapsulates the group’s disdain.)

His background and philosophical training gave him the intellectual honesty to be as critical of the biases he and his friends shared as of the biases of others. Even before he went to Rotherham, he was wary of the thoughtless anti-patriotism that lay behind David Hare’s cry that ‘most of us look with longing to the republican countries across the Channel. We associate Englishness with everything that is most backward in this country.’

Baggini noticed that when his friends went overseas ‘they always found something to delight in. They would tell me how wonderful it was to share a glass of wine with the old boys in a rural French bar, and not realise that if those old boys were speaking English they would probably be saying, “That Jean-Marie Le Pen, he’s got the right idea.”’

He moved to Rotherham, rented a modern house by a main road, and read the newspapers and watched the television programmes that his neighbours read and watched. He encountered many prejudices he disliked, but gradually his views on popular attitudes and culture softened. He learned to tolerate the Sun and the radio phone-ins. Only the Daily Mail remained too much for him.

The regulars of Rotherham pubs and clubs deserve credit for his softening. They did not allow the strange, bookish Southerner to sit by himself for long. But Baggini also realised that what he had taken to be idiotic views came from a comprehensible working-class philosophy.

Although the polls that report that six out of ten people still regard themselves as working class always produce middle class incredulity, Baggini says you only have to listen to the radio programmes he heard and go to the bars he drank in to realise that working-class culture dominates England. People may have more money than their parents had and holiday in Florida rather than Blackpool, but that does not mean that working class attitudes have changed. Central to them is the importance of place.

The majority of the English still live within five miles of where they were born, and the attachment to locality keeps England a country where a sense of being a member of a community underpins national values. The English want ‘local jobs for local people’, local radio, local papers and raffles for local good causes. Complementing local pride is the strong notion that you cannot enjoy England’s benefits without belonging. Baggini got into endless arguments about the Human Rights Act, but his attempts to persuade his new friends that foreign terror suspects should never be deported if they could face torture always got nowhere. The New Labour slogan ‘you can’t have rights without responsibilities’ summed up the English mainstream. ‘It’s an illiberal thought,’ he told me. ‘Liberals believe that you have rights on the basis of your membership of the human race. But most of the English aren’t liberal. They believe that you only have rights if you are a fully paid-up member of this society. That is why they will be very illiberal about Muslim preachers of hate and say, “We don’t care about their rights.” What about ours?’

Although he met a few real racists, Baggini does not see such beliefs as racist in themselves. Instead, he draws on the image of the ‘hefted’ sheep of northern fells, whose instinctive knowledge of where they can graze means they never stray from their patch of land.

People who have lived in an area all their lives are uncomfortable if the character changes because of a large influx of immigrants. But that doesn’t make them racist. They just want their locality to stay the way it was. No one calls families racist when they object to large numbers of students moving into their street or says that the residents of Hampstead were racist for wanting to live in an area without McDonald’s.

Frankly, I didn’t believe it when people in Rotherham said they wanted immigrants to fit in. That’s not quite right. If you go to Manchester or London, there are Chinatowns that advertise their differences, but no one ever says, ‘the problem with these bloody Chinese is that they don’t fit in’, because there’s no threat or no perceived threat. The multicultural agenda is that everyone must respect each other, but I don’t think that’s possible. We need to be far tougher with the minimal demands that people don’t threaten each other.

Interestingly given the current preoccupation of his class, he left Rotherham far more concerned about sexism than racism. Watching the way women tried to please men in Rotherham clubs and reading semi-pornographic lads’ mags didn’t make him think that the reassertion of traditional stereotypes after the retreat of feminism was ‘harmless’ fun. There is, he says, nothing fun about a country where most women say that they are deeply unhappy with their appearance.

Baggini refuses to adopt the declamatory style of the polemicist, and his writing is refreshingly self-deprecatory. At one point in Welcome to Everytown he says he had to leave Rotherham to visit London. Once back in Islington, he could not resist the lure of ‘proper food’. He went to an Italian restaurant, ordered pasta, olives and a glass of wine, and then buried his head in a book. Minutes later, he looked up to see another man of his age and class come in and order pasta, olives and a glass of wine, and then bury his head in a book.

In Rotherham, I lost a certain sense of superiority I had about food, holidays and the things I did to enjoy myself. I now find it hard to say that liberal middle-class culture is better than looking after your garden, going fishing and watching ice hockey. There is nothing intrinsically worse in that than in listening to opera. Some of the world’s worst people have been opera buffs.

I was glad to find that he had not overreacted and become an inverted snob. He does not pretend that he would like to spend the rest of his life in S66. He’s got his world and the mainstream has theirs. But he has relaxed.

I asked whether he felt more comfortable with his country. ‘I think I’ve learned that most people here are fine with you as long as you treat them fairly. I am very pleased that my book has gone down well in Rotherham, even though I was unsentimental and didn’t hide my disagreements. That speaks well of the people I wrote about, and so, yes, I feel more at peace with England.’

New Statesman, April 2007