Coffeedrinkers, wonks and Ed Miliband

By Conor Pope / @conorpope

I did something for the first time the other day. I texted the actor Mark Ferguson* asking if they wanted to get “a coffee”. I’ve never drunk coffee in my life. I’m more of a teadrinker. In fact, I am actively not a Coffee Drinker. It’s not just the taste; it’s everything about it. I don’t like how Coffee Drinkers have to know so much about coffee and what beans they like. I don’t like that they seem to treat it with such reverence, like members of a weird cult. I don’t like the way Coffee Drinkers can’t function without it. And I really don’t like the way coffeedrinker (as one word) doesn’t look like a word in the way that teadrinker definitely does. ‘Teadrinker’ looks like it could feasibly be a thing. You could buy one. It would be grey and say ‘Teadrinker’ on the side in a 1970s font. Your grandma would have one in the corner, but she’d never use it. They would be made by a company that Ed Miliband would describe as “a good business”.

But Coffee Drinkers are definitely a thing. A concept. They are a broad, self-defined group of people. You can drink coffee and not be a Coffee Drinker: you are merely someone who drinks coffee. Coffee Drinkers are serious about it. They drink things like light soya frapuccino dark with an extra shot and sprinkles. They are mid-twenties to mid-thirties graduates with city-based office jobs and aspirations.

At the last election, they didn’t vote Labour.

Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t studied any polling data. But describe a Coffee Drinker to a wonk and I bet they’ll be able to tell you how they did vote.

Wonks, however, won’t think of a group of people like that as Coffee Drinkers. They have these boring names for different groups with numbers and letters. So coffee drinkers would, in polling data, would be BC1 or something. But no one thinks of themselves as being social grade C1. This, I reckon, is becoming a problem.

When you start thinking about a group of people in terms of a label they that haven’t ascribed to themselves, especially something as dispassionate as ‘social grade D’, you run the risk of forgetting that it’s people you are dealing with. Not a block of people with the same views, who act in a uniform style, but real, different people.

When people say that politicians are all the same, that politicians don’t care about us, this is what they mean. It’s because politicians can forget that people are more than numbers.

Take Diane Abbott’s reasoning for sending her son to a private school, for instance. One reason was that such and such a number of black male teenagers get involved in gangs when at school. Some people will think this is responsible parenting. She has seen what happens when people get involved in gangs and has seen a way to prevent that happening to her son.

Others will not have thought that. Others will have heard this reasoning and will have seen a politician who has made a decision based entirely on figures. What they’ll think is that she has seen that X amount of black boys get involved in gang culture at state schools and viewed her son and the state schools he could have gone to as part of those figures. On these terms, it looks like an equation, removed from emotion. A Politician’s Decision.

I’ve not met Diane Abbott or her son, and I’m not attacking her parenting skills. This is just an example of how people view politicians and how they think decisions are made.

Ed Miliband, of course, is a massive wonk. That shone through in his speech on Tuesday. It felt like different parts were aimed at different NRS social grades rather than at different people. Potential voters rather than persons.

I’m not asking for fewer wonks. I’m not asking wonks to not be wonks. I love wonks! I think wonks are great! We need you, wonks! Hell, I would be a wonk if I could, but you have to be smarter than I and have more of a passion for graphs and stuff than I could ever muster.

What I’m asking is for us to think about people. Think about the Coffee Drinkers. And before anyone pops it in the comments, I’m not talking about Motorway Man or anything like that. The Motorway Man does not exist, except possibly as a 1930s German comic book hero. No one thinks of themselves as a Motorway Man. I want us to think about the Coffee Drinkers, the Sopranos watchers, the iPad owners, the KFC eaters, the Dappy fans. The Teadrinkers.

*Mark is, of course, not an actor. He is the editor of LabourList. But he was once described in The Independent as an actor and prefixing it to his name gives a very pleasing rhythm to proceedings. Also, I get the impression he doesn’t like me doing it.