Welcome to Everytown - A Brexit Comment

Julian Baggini has written an original work, Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (2007).  Formally trained with a doctorate in philosophy, he chose to set up shop for six months in Rotherham, Yorkshire, judged by him as the typical community in England by virtue of its postal code, in order to live in immersion among its residents (many of whom he later identifies as friends). On a steady diet of the two main tabloids (Daily Mail and Sun), he finds England’s core culture to be fundamentally working class, whose game is football - not cricket (no surprise here), and where “tolerance” of different minorities is considered the only option available.[1]

Baggini (who was born in England to an Italian father) already thinks of himself as an outsider, and he gets to the heart of English difficulties with multiculturalism in his excellent chapter “Culture Shocks,” important reading if one wants to understand the mind of the typical Brexit voter.  My only concern (as the author readily admits) is that he might be accused of being an “apologist” for the intolerance he encounters.[2]

 

The next chapter, “Illiberal Democrats” looks at Rotherham’s communitarianism (the most polysyllabic word you will find in the book) which, as the author simplifies, is a philosophic anti-abstraction combining attenuated rights with local responsibilities.[3]  If this definition is still unclear to the reader, allow Baggini’s discussion of the remainder of his stay in Rotherham to convey an underappreciated way of political thinking in England - often considered the fountainhead of liberalism instead because of its so-called traditional freedoms.

There is much more wonderful analysis of working life available to the everyday reader in Welcome to Everytown, including chapters on gambling, holidaymaking, and the proverbial English pub.  Overall it seems reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) which, as that novel’s title suggests, depicted the social differences between the gentrified South and commercialized North in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.

 

Given England’s past “greatness” – memories of Empire, and all that - one might see its current Brexit predicament as the culmination of the logic of postcolonialism, as Scotland and Northern Ireland now might have motive to leave the United Kingdom.  How could such blundering come to pass?  One might begin modestly by peering into the minds of Englishmen north of the metropolis of London, as Baginni so eloquently does in the microcosm of Rotherham, well before the fact.

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[1] Julian Baggini, Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (London: Granta Books, 2008), p.72.

[2] Ibid., p. 57.

[3] Ibid., p. 83.