Latte liberals and coffee's conquest of Britain

Out-of-touch metropolitan elites need to stop liking nice things

There is a story about two German airmen who landed in the Irish Free State during the war and were trying to make their way back home. One spoke perfect English and was able to blend in as a local until they stopped at a tearoom (or maybe a pub) and he ordered a coffee – they were arrested immediately on suspicion of being spies.

The story is too good to check, but it encapsulates the idea that in Britain and Ireland it was once largely believed that only sinister, effete or foreign types drank coffee. Normal people drank tea, proper tea.

That has all changed now. By continental standards the British still don’t drink much coffee – about a third of the average Scandinavian consumption – but as of last year coffee has replaced tea as the most popular hot drink.

And the most popular type of coffee, at least according to a survey by the British Coffee Association, is latte, a drink which is both ubiquitous and classless, and yet is also the one most denounced by politicians as symbolising everything wrong with the ruling class.  

Just last week, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice slammed the ‘cafe latte Labour Party’, a not uncommon insult hurled at out-of-touch London elites, even though chain coffee shops selling lattes are now found across Britain, and popular in some of the most downtrodden and dismal high streets - and it’s been like that for at least a decade.

If anything, latte is déclassé because it's so fattening, up to 300 calories for a cup, while real coffee ponces – like me – drink flat whites or americanos. 

Latte was a novel drink when it first became popular in Britain in the 1990s, associated initially with fashionable areas of London and student towns, but this didn’t last long, and anti-latte rhetoric is actually something of an American import, as much as the Starbucks that began to colonise our high streets a while back.

When latte became popular in the US in the early 1980s, a good decade earlier than Britain, it did represent something of a growing class divide. Mid-twentieth century America was an unusually egalitarian culture in many ways, not just in the relative income equality it enjoyed but also in the sense that tastes tended to be more classless. To some extent, people from different social classes went to similar restaurants and enjoyed similar holidays, a sort of social cohesion that was blown away by the rise of the Bobos, who had different, often cosmopolitan tastes and even began congregating in enclaves which David Brooks called ‘latte towns’. This growing class divide is an especial source of anger among right-wing populists like Tucker Carlson, whose polemic-cum-memoir Ship of Fools laments that the ruling elite are now culturally alien, a process which he feels is linked to the disgust they feel for the masses.

This is the background behind what Thomas Frank called the ‘latte libel’ in What’s the Matter of Kansas, ‘the suggestion that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential arrogance and foreignness of liberalism’. All of which is true, to a certain extent.

He cited a 2004 advert by the conservative Club for Growth, where Democratic candidate Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, was attacked by two normal looking people who advise him to ‘take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs’. This is obviously amusing to British ears, since it’s hard not to imagine this in the voice of one of the Simpsons voice actors.

Geoffrey Nunberg’s book Talking Right was subsequently subtitled ‘how conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show’.

More recently, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich mocked then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for his ‘small soy latte liberalism’, soy being especially associated with un-masculine behaviour (and believed by some to reduce testosterone).

It is true that liberals in the US do drink more latte, according to one study, 16% compared to only 9% of conservatives, and this reflects the dominance of an educated urban elite on the left.

Frank lamented what he saw as the growth of class war in the Republican Party, noting that. ‘Class animus has been a persistent theme in the Great Backlash since the beginning.’ I would disagree on the framing of a ‘backlash’ necessarily, a name given to often quite reasonable objections to radical social changes carried out without popular consent, but the class war element is clearly accurate. It is also prevalent in Britain, where the rise of Reform represents popular anger against a Tory Party which sold out the population on immigration for their own class interests (i.e, cheaper wages).

But the class dynamic doesn’t work so much in Britain, where the upper-middle-class have never shared the cultural tastes of the masses. Here, it would also make more sense to use espresso as a derogatory term of abuse for leftist coffee drinkers, but as well as imitating American discourse in citing lattes, I suspect there is another reason; while both words come from Italian, latte sounds more French to English ears and Frenchness always reeks of fanciness and pretension while we tend to find everything Italian sophisticated and worthy of imitation.