It is not a conspiracy. Employers are not consciously excluding young people on modest means, just taking advantage of the mismatch between supply and demand. The media grandees who pump out trash they would never allow their own children to watch are not plotting to keep people stupid, just giving the market what it wants. Supporters of comprehensives believe in equality and never ask why, in eighteen years of power, Tories never insisted on a return to selection by ability in state schools.
When he was young, Tony Blair knew how the system frustrated middle-class hopes. The snag for Labour is that his behaviour is now an affront to middle-class values. He made it clear that he wanted to join the super-rich for whom taxes are what the little people pay. His party sold them peerages, his ministers’ spouses advised them on how to shift their fortune from tax haven to tax haven. So accustomed has New Labour become to the world of the wealthy that it mistakes it for the whole world. A mistake I suspect the middle classes will make it pay for one day.
New Statesman, March 2006
* The man behind Big Brother, Peter Bazalgette (Dulwich College and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge), was the great-grandson of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who designed the London sewers. ‘He’s undoing all his great-grandfather’s work by pumping shit back into our homes,’ said Stephen Fry.
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?’