I’ve met Kelvin MacKenzie now on two or three occasions. I’ve chatted to him on the phone about Andy Coulson. I spent an hour in the green room with him last Sunday, chatting about the Lib Dems, Rupert Murdoch phone-tapping, etc. So I’m surprised he couldn’t remember my name; or, if he did, chose not to share it with his readers. I appear in his column only as “the chap from the New Statesman” and “the bloke from the New Statesman“. Can the Sun subs not spell “M-e-h-d-i” or “H-a-s-a-n”? I’m also amused that the only other journalist I’ve ever debated with or spoken to who couldn’t remember my name, despite being told twice on air what it was by the presenter, was the Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh.
But let’s look at the substance of Kelvin’s column (and I use the word “substance” rather loosely):
The class war has taken a surprising turn. Here I was in a television studio debating obesity’s link to poverty when the chap from the New Statesman turned on me and said: “It’s all right for you, shopping at Waitrose.” Guilty as charged. I do shop at Waitrose and am now in the strange position of having to defend myself. It’s my nearest supermarket and any food retailer will tell you — thanks to their extensive research — that no customer wants to travel more than one-and-a-quarter miles to shop. It’s why supermarkets build more and more stores. But it’s the first time a shop has defined my politics. He may as well have accused me of wearing shoes. Looking at the bloke from the New Statesman, my sense is that on the same basis Lidl may be his regular haunt.
I’m a Tesco man myself, to be honest. I’ve never shopped in Lidl or, for that matter, Waitrose. But MacKenzie manages to write about Sunday’s The Big Questions, on BBC1, without mentioning the context in which I made my remarks about Waitrose. I know that most Sun columnists shy away from facts and figures — and MacKenzie is no exception — so let me try to offer some balance. There is a concept known as a “food desert“; in 1996, a British Low Income Project Team defined food deserts as “areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods”. In 2008, the Telegraph reported:
The increasing number of suburban supermarkets is creating health problems for those living in inner-city “urban food deserts”, according to research.
The proliferation of supermarkets on city outskirts has led to a decline of decent food outlets in the centre, a study published today discloses.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per monthThese “food deserts” are said to be affecting the health of the poorer sections of society as well as those without cars, who cannot easily travel to supermarkets.
As for the overall debate about the links between obesity and poverty in this country and abroad, please see this rather insightful CIF piece from last year.
Kelvin continues:
Not since the Eighties have I seen class war so prominent in public life. Bashing bankers, suggesting mansion taxes. Squeezing the rich until the pips squeak is at the centre of the debate.
He’s right — class war is “prominent in public life” and it is indeed like the “Eighties” all over again. Why? Because, as in the 1980s, a Tory-led government of multimillionaires, which is squeezing the poor and the middle classes while appeasing its greedy friends in the City, has declared class war on the rest of us.
Still, nice to appear in the Sun today, as well as the Guardian, and as for being on the end of Kelvin’s notorious rants, as a colleague pointed out me a moment ago, being accused of shopping at Lidl is hardly the worst insult he’s ever thrown at someone. At least he didn’t accuse me of urinating on the dead.
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