Why the BBC and most politicians are wrong about ‘real’ British people and what they want Everyone knows they don’t drink cappuccino in Darlington. The idea of liberal Londoners ignoring the “legitimate concerns” of real British […]

Everyone knows they don’t drink cappuccino in Darlington.

The idea of liberal Londoners ignoring the “legitimate concerns” of real British people has been blamed for many things in recent years. It’s keeping Jeremy Corbyn out of Downing Street, and even more portentously, it got the UK out of the European Union.

The pattern is familiar: say Corbyn unleashes a policy idea that reads as at least a little radical. Let’s say he uses the word “class”, as he did this week.

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Then a commentator unleashes a scathing remark: “That’ll go down well in” – well, anywhere. Darlington, Dudley, most of Wales, anywhere that might strike one as “post-industrial”.

It’s not what real people want. Real people want the national anthem, military spending and the cross of St George. They like their coffee totally without froth.

It’s this narrative that Joe Kennedy aims to challenge with Authentocrats, his insightful new book at how we treat “culture” – and how it affects politics.

Frothy coffee

“In the arches underneath the hall of a well-preserved covered market, facing into Darlington’s spacious, eerily featureless, often empty town square, is a small café called Il Cappuccino,” opens the book.

“It has been there since at least the early 1980s, possibly longer. The last time I went in was thirteen years ago, when I persuaded my dad to come to a football match with me on the condition that he got a ham sandwich and — naturally — his cappuccino beforehand.”

This is Kennedy’s hometown, and the point is immediately obvious: of course they drink cappuccino in Darlington. It’s 2018.

Contrast this with former Labour leadership contender Owen Smith‘s effort to pretend, at an Italian cafe in Pontypridd, that he was shocked by the concept.

“I tell you,” said the elected MP and former BBC employee who has almost definitely encountered non-instant coffee before, “it is the first time I have ever been given little biscuits and a posh cup in here […] Seriously, I would have a mug normally.”

It’s this sort of playacting for an imaginary audience of hard-nosed normal people that makes Kennedy angry.

Lumpen Britain

Is gammon a slur? “No, but it’s become useless fairly quickly as a political metaphor. The problem my book picks out isn’t that these people exist – British culture has satirised them since Colonel Blimp, at least – but that they’re now being taken as representative of what ‘the people’, whatever that means, want. Liberals used to feel fairly relaxed about mocking irate Tebbitite business owners, now they tread on eggshells around their ‘legitimate concerns’.”

“I’m from Darlington, this alleged epitome of lumpen Britain,” he tells i, “and while the town (like all towns! like all settlements!) clearly has its problems, it in no way resembles the caricature of it – and places allegedly ‘like’ it – in the media.

“There’s this cultural directive now to take provincial England seriously, but this seems to be done largely by ignoring its many internal contradictions and particularities. It makes me furious.”

It’s not even to do with class in the way we might be led to believe, with the fundamental awkwardness of a middle-class London-dweller in the media eyeing a working-class Northerner they don’t understand. In fact, Kennedy says, that’s leading us in completely the wrong direction if we’re looking to understand the divisions in this country.

“Broadsheet journalists act as if ‘the middle class’ are all Guardian readers in Stoke Newington mithering over Brexit, but that’s not remotely true,” he says.

“A pet theory I have about Brexit is that the vote was actually swayed by the antagonism between the two provincial middle classes – the professional middle classes, doctors and teachers and so on, who are often relatively progressive, and the neo-yeomanry constituted by small business owners, who tend towards social conservatism.

“Go to any English provincial small town and there’s substantial resentment between these groups.”

Andy Burnham’s gravy chips

Tests of authenticity, like the one Owen Smith felt he was facing when someone handed him a frothy coffee, do come up relatively frequently in the media. We remember the story of Peter Mandelson confusing mushy peas for guacamole in Hartlepool every time any Oxbridge PPE graduate politician is sent out around the country. Do they know the price of milk?

“This sort of attempt to seem human by reading from a crib-sheet of things humans supposedly do is killing the centre-left”

But one consistent yardstick for the realness of politicians is the obligatory Mumsnet questionnaire, where the mums of Britain inevitably ask candidates about their favourite biscuit alongside more serious policy chat.

Boris Johnson likes chocolate digestives, Scottish politicians inevitably go for Walkers shortbread or Tunnocks caramel wafers. Andy Burnham, caught between the London elite and a future as northern totem and Manchester mayor, chose gravy chips, strangely. I ask Kennedy why.

“Burnham consistently disappoints me because I’m sure that on some level he knows better, but – despite the fact he’s a Cambridge English Lit grad – the Oxford PPE way of doing things seems irreversibly installed in his consciousness,” he says.

“This sort of attempt to seem human by reading from a crib-sheet of things humans supposedly do is killing the centre-left, but politicians like Burnham – and on another level Hillary Clinton, who spent much of her autobiography talking about crisps – continue to treat this narrowly pre-internet theory of approachability as gospel.

“The only people who haven’t seen through it are a political elite who, ironically, spend half their time banging on about how the politics of Corbyn, McDonnell etc are themselves elitist.”

The problem of the BBC

What biscuit is the ideal authentocrat’s favourite biscuit, for Mumsnet purposes? “I ate two Penguins before taking my son out for a very long walk the other morning and their combination of extreme sugariness, a totally synthetic taste and eighties state-school packed-lunch nostalgia make them a perfect authentobiscuit”

When it comes to depicting the real Britain, it’s a bigger problem for the BBC than most. When a reporter is dispatched to find out what Barnsley thinks of Brexit, or when producers select a crowd for Question Time, they’re shaping our understanding of the country and its politics.

“Question Time acts as if it’s reflecting a median of British existence, but it’s actually working to manufacture a sense of what that is,” says Kennedy.

In the Blair years, before the country was declared sick of experts, booking guests for programmes wasn’t as difficult. Now, there’s more of an effort to manufacture a sense of balance and different perspectives. It might not be working, Kennedy thinks.

“In the first decade of the 21st century you felt like the only people they ever asked about anything were about three people in London who all had the same opinions about everything but were narcissistically skilled at amplifying their small differences,” he says.

“Years and years of Mark Lawson squabbling about nothing with Germaine Greer, or whoever.”

When the backlash came, it forced the broadcaster into action.

“Ultimately the BBC panicked and started to cater to their weird ideas of what ‘real’ people wanted to see; these ideas turned out to be grossly patronising, most of the time,” he says.

A Pizza Express for every town

“Authentocracy” presents a more difficult problem for Labour than it does for other parties with a more settled relationship to the groups of people in places outside of liberal centres. The question raised by pundits, often, is whether Labour is abandoning its base in northern cities and towns because of a bias towards metropolitan ideas that mean nothing to “real people”.

“Ultimately the BBC panicked and started to cater to their weird ideas of what ‘real’ people wanted to see; these ideas turned out to be grossly patronising, most of the time”

In Authentocrats, Kennedy recounts the late-Blair push to correct the problems of Blairism and two decades of the free market rampant by honing in on identity issues.

They missed the point, he argues, and were doomed to fail in their effort to retrofit English identitarianism on to their own neoliberal agenda.

“The people attached to New Labour spent the late nineties as true believers in the notion that ‘regeneration’ meant every town having a Pizza Express,” Kennedy says. “They rediscovered ‘community’ far, far too late, and they’ve gone about rediscovering it in totally the wrong way, embracing all of these nativist ideas from groups like Blue Labour and even UKIP.”

But the Blairite wing are no longer ascendant, either in Labour or, post-Cameron, among the Tories. Why do authentocrat narratives still hold so much sway, and how do we stop them? Does Jeremy Corbyn provide the alternative?

“It could be Corbynism, maybe, but Corbynism also has these weird lapses in confidence where it feels the need to triangulate with an imaginary idea of what real people want,” Kennedy says.

“I’d enjoy a cup of tea with him more than I would with Owen Smith, that’s all I know.”