Fish Truthers: Keir Starmer’s fish and chips
Sir Keir Starmer is a liar who eats fish despite claiming to be a vegetarian. This is very important.
Or so Twitter would have you believe.
A Corbyn-supporting Twitter ‘personality’ made the following claim after sharing a picture of Sir Keir eating fish-and-chips: “He’s eating meat to impress the ‘Red Wall.’”
Yet, as was pointed out, Sir Keir is a pescatarian — case closed and thus Twitter should maybe take the day off.
But of course it could not be left alone. With increasing degrees of derangement discussion focused on:
(1) whether or not fish constituted meat (2) whether or not he was actually eating the said fish (3) whether or not Sir Keir was truly a pescatarian (4) and whether or not Sir Keir authentically enjoyed eating fish.
Labour, as if anyone needs reminding, is polling behind the Conservative government which has ruled for 11 years. It recently had a devastating set of English elections including a byelection in the North East which ended in catastrophe.
Instead of organising major voter drives, perhaps using the underused but excellent phonebanking tool Labour Dialogue, the Labour online membership fell about discussing fish and chips.
The Left have decided that fish and chips are a totem of working class life, despite being the third most popular food in the country (behind ‘chicken’ and ‘chips’).
The slowly waning power of the Left have set a challenge to Sir Keir who inherited a Party in tatters amongst the working class. They say he must win hearts (and, less crucially, votes) from this demographic.
Yet, their solution is a bizarre claim that working class voters only vote for Labour politicians who demonstrate themselves to be working class. Which is clearly not true.
Indeed, voices from the Left have told Sir Keir future politicians selected to fight byelections must be ‘working class.’ Well — what does that mean?
No one really knows but everyone has an opinion. Take this very odd Guardian discussion which featured reader’s comments:
‘It has everything to do with children and tattoos,’ wrote someone from London. While in Edinburgh someone explained: ‘By the way you pronounce the “a” in class.
The confusion is hardly their fault — class is liminal. Sir Keir is the son of a toolmaker, yet is now portrayed as a North London hot-shot lawyer. Is he working class, or is he a member of the upper echelons?
Corbyn was said to ‘understand’ the working class (according to no one but the Left) despite having gone to private school.
So the task set by the Left is for Sir Keir to ‘understand’ rather than be ‘of’ the working class because (1) he is from the working class and (2) their great hero was not.
And Sir Keir is trying to do this — not least by accurately landing on the ‘right’ side of statue-toppling this summer, and not visibly recoiling when seeing a British flag.
All of these attempts to appeal to the working class, however, are anathema to the Left. So fake tests are set for the leader who so comprehensively crushed their standard bearer in April 2020.
These include whether or not you are ‘authentically’ enjoying elements of working class life. One of which, entirely randomly, is whether or not you eat fish and chips regularly.
This type of gesture politics — which is truly a gesture rather than an indication of wider policy beliefs — recalls when the Labour frontbench left London on a daytrip to Greggs amid the ‘pasty tax’ row.
And yet the test to partake in the Left’s imagined working class cuisine was set, and failed. Because Sir Keir — unwittingly — ate the fish and chips. Despite the Left deciding that he was a vegetarian (which he isn’t).
The Labour Left have thus fell into total Kafka-esque lunacy: Sir Keir must appeal to the working class by, for reasons unknown, eating imagined ‘working class’ food. Yet by doing so Sir Keir reveals himself as a liar because he doesn’t eat fish, despite the fact he does.
Does your head hurt yet?
The Left have fallen into a belief system where identity is performative. ‘I am working class because I wear a flat cap/have an accent/eat fish-and-chips.’
This is clearly not the same as ‘I need to appeal to the working class by waving flags (not Palestinian) because I want to appear like I like the country I want to lead.’
But this subtle difference in the nature of gestures might be too confusing for a group of ‘Keir fishtruthers.’
The Left have failed to understand it is gestures which appeal to the desires of the working class, not gestures which reflect an (imagined) working class reality, which win working class votes.
It is why lawyer Blair ousted ‘working class kid from Brixton’ Major. Why Etonian Boris destroyed the Red Wall, while a North East doctor failed to win a North East byelection amid a health pandemic.
Until the Left understand this there will be more days spent on Twitter hearing talking-heads sound off about fish and chips.
NB: To be fair: the Left were most angry about the perceived nature of ‘inauthenticity’ around Sir Keir’s decision to eat the fish and chips.
Yet the Leader of the Opposition does eat fish so it wasn’t inauthentic, and nor was it a performative gesture (a la the Greggs-run) because it is literally the most popular meal in the country so it is almost certain that he is a regular eater (like the rest of the entire country) of such a dish.
In short: it was a very odd day on Twitter and a lot of people doubled-down on their initial claim that it was inauthentic because that was better than acknowledging how utterly bonkers the whole discussion was.
