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
‘For every professional woman who is able to go out to work because she has a Polish nanny, there is a young mother who watches her child struggle in a classroom where a harassed teacher faces too many children with too many languages between them. Wanting a better deal for her child doesn’t make her anti-immigrant. But if we can’t find a better answer to her despair then she soon will be.’
TREVOR PHILLIPS,
2008
Celebrity Chefs and Invisible Immigrants
WHEN I APPEARED IN MY HAIRNET and apron in the kitchen of the Gay Hussar, the cooks were less shocked by the sight of a customer choosing to roll up his sleeves by than by my nationality.
‘I’m Nick,’ I said cheerily.
‘Your name is Ick?’ asked one.
‘No, Nick.’
‘Nick?’
‘That’s it. N-I-C-K. Nick.’
‘Nick. You’re saying you’re English?’
‘Er, yes.’
He looked bewildered. Everyone else looked at me as if I were lying.
Zoltan from Hungary tried to clear up the matter. ‘Are your parents English?’ he asked, as if trying to make an inexplicable phenomenon understandable.
‘Yes, they’re English, too, from Manchester. You know: Bobby Charlton, Alex Ferguson, Wayne Rooney…’
I mumbled myself to a halt, as baffled at my reception as my new colleagues were by me. Only later in the morning did I understand the reason for their surprise. Most had never met an Englishman or woman in a London kitchen. One old hand said he remembered an English cook at the Gay Hussar, but he had left some time in the nineties. Since then, they had talked about how to prepare food and handle fussy customers in a pidgin English used across London kitchens by every nationality, except the English.
Maybe, I thought, Conservatives had a point when they laughed at Gordon Brown’s pretence to believe in the Protestant work ethic, and decried his BNP-ish slogan of ‘British jobs for British people’ as so much flam. Perhaps Brown had created a welfare system so riddled with poverty traps that jobs went to foreigners while the natives drew benefits and stewed at home.
The Gay Hussar was not the best place for such Tory thoughts. If you’ve never been, you’ve missed an old Labour institution. Of course, not only the left eat at this remnant of Mitteleuropa in the middle of London. All kinds of people who have never argued about the reasons for the Russian Revolution’s descent into tyranny come: actors from the nearby theatres, Soho admen plotting campaigns and tourists looking for a good night out are attracted by the echoes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The faded red wallpaper, book-lined dining room, wood panelling and framed pictures of long-dead politicians are not only for the politically committed.
Nor do you have to be left-wing. John Wrobel, the Polish maître d’, won’t ask you to leave if he overhears you carelessly saying to your companion, ‘Let’s face it, entrepreneurs are the real wealth creators’, while tasting the wild-cherry soup. Upstairs from the main restaurant are private rooms in which politicians of all parties have conspired. The Conservative ‘Wets’ met in one in the early eighties to discuss their doomed conspiracy against Margaret Thatcher. The Eurosceptic ‘bastards’ followed in the nineties to conspire against John Major. Tory, Labour, right, left, wet, dry…everyone is welcome.
Yet when all the caveats have been made, the restaurant still belongs to the vanishing world of the twentieth-century left. Martin Rowson has covered one wall with cartoons of the regulars, and they are overwhelmingly Labour politicians, or Labour journalists—nearly all old, nearly all men. This is the closest they have to a Pall Mall club: a mixture of a drinking den and canteen.
Victor Sassie, a Hungarian refugee, opened the Gay Hussar in the fifties, but there was a leftish restaurant on the site long before then. Michael Foot remembers taking the Soviet ambassador to its predecessor in 1939 and begging him to tell Stalin not to form an alliance with Hitler. Somewhat naively, the future Labour leader did not understand that if the Soviet ambassador had whispered a word out of place, Stalin would have murdered him and everyone associated with him.
John becomes melancholy as he repeats the story, and for good reason. The Hitler—Stalin pact that the young Michael Foot had tried to stop carved up his native Poland and started the Second World War. His father’s parents had to flee advancing German troops who burned down their home, and his mother’s parents had to flee advancing Soviet troops who burned down their home.
The catastrophe of European