Joyce McMillan: Bitter taste of pie in the sky politics

THE class of well-heeled elite that runs the UK are too out of touch with the population to be able to help

THE other day, I popped into my local branch of Greggs, hoping to buy a loaf. I’ve bought loaves of all sorts in there before, and very nice too. This time, though, I was out of luck; the branch is small, the time was late morning, and the loaves were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the place was packed with people buying instant lunches; sandwiches, take-away cuppas, sticky cakes, and, of course, the iconic hot sausage rolls and bridies. You may even be able to purchase pasties in some shops north of the Border. Historically, the great British people have always been fond of hot takeaway food, from fish and chips to mutton pies.

One of the under-researched consequences of affluence, though, has been the rise of the takeaway from its traditional status as a weekly treat, to a central position in the diet of millions of Britons who no longer see much need to cook at all.

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The strange love-affair between the current UK government and millions of ordinary British voters might have survived their attack on welfare benefits, outlived their abject failure to bring the banking classes to heel, and even squeezed past the generally negative response to last week’s Budget, with its now notorious “granny tax”.

The government’s attempt to impose VAT on hot pasties, though, has apparently become the puff of wind that finally blew the relationship onto the rocks. The Sun newspaper has downgraded the Prime Minister to the status of “pasty plonker”, following his claim to have bought a recent pasty from a stall that in fact closed several years ago. Former Tory cabinet members are to be heard on the airwaves warning the government that they need to recruit ministers from a wider range of social backgrounds, if they want to stop sounding like a bunch of overprivileged asses who don’t know their pasties from their polenta. Nor, alas, are the Conservatives the only party now suffering from the widespread perception that they live on a different planet from most ordinary Britons. This week also saw the publication of a hilarious picture of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls leaving a Greggs bakery in Redditch. Balls looked comfortable enough in this folksy setting, but Miliband managed to achieve his usual air of a friendly Martian trying to learn the ways of the earthlings. And the uneasy image captures an inconvenient truth about 21st-century British politics; that the growing income inequalities endemic in our society mean that even those with modestly successful political careers are likely to be earning at least four or five times more than the average British worker.

Professional politicians therefore join the rest of Britain’s elite in inhabiting a completely different world of consumer and cultural choices from most of the nation; and it’s difficult to avoid the impression that this culture gap is now steadily widening. This week, I went south to Newcastle to watch the premiere of I Dreamed A Dream, the new stage show about the life of Britain’s Got Talent star Susan Boyle. And in this thoughtful treatment of her life, co-written by Elaine C Smith and Alan McHugh, it’s hard not to catch the sense of a story which has unfolded almost entirely under the radar of Britain’s economic and cultural elites, from the moment of Susan’s birth into a hard-pressed former mining community in West Lothian, to the night when she shot to global fame through a television show watched by millions, but widely condemned by most critics as both trashy and exploitative.

And it’s when we consider the detail of this huge culture gap that we begin to understand the tragedy it entails. If it was simply a matter of a vibrant popular culture thumbing its nose at an out-of-touch elite, there would be nothing to mourn. The truth is, though, that most of the consumer choices open to lower-income earners today are ruthlessly shaped by huge corporations that have much to gain from selling them junk, and nothing to gain from creating products that really nourish the body or the mind.

It is probably “elitist” to say that Britain’s Got Talent is cheap, garish television, and often nasty with it. And that the cheap booze on which the UK government is now trying to impose a minimum price is the kind of rot-gut that should probably be banned outright. And that a diet of hot pasties is not the best recipe for health, in a country facing a serious class-related epidemic of obesity. The tragedy, though, is that the “elitist” tag doesn’t necessarily mean these judgments are wrong; it just means we now lack the social cohesion, and the credible structures of authority, to be able to do much about the relentless promulgation of products that are addictive and harmful, as well as popular. When the temperance campaigners of the late 19th century stood up to rail against the demon drink, they often provoked violent reactions; but at least most of them were working men or women, who understood the temptations of cheap drink, and the damage it could do.

Now though, our political class is so narrow in social composition that any regulatory shift it proposes inevitably sounds like a bossy attempt by an out-of-touch elite to clamp down on the pleasures of the masses. The phrase “nanny state” sticks, because it reflects a wider truth about our increasingly unequal society. In so distancing themselves from the people, in other words – in losing contact with their roots, in becoming dependent on the support of the wealthy, and in allowing themselves to become part of a privileged management class – our mainstream politicians have lost the moral authority and political weight that they need, if they are to protect society against the worst kinds of commercial exploitation.

And we are left in a bleak looking-glass world, where the politicians who are supposed to represent us become our most visible enemies; and where the idea of “freedom” is therefore increasingly conflated with the right to drink yourself to death on dirt-cheap supermarket booze, or to live on a diet of stodgy takeaway snacks, grow fat, and die young.