Pretending to eat pasties

A hot pie is just a hot pie; it's not a cultural totem of the working classes.

A hot pie is not a basic human right. Wrap that up in your soggy grease-lined paper bag and take a big bite.

It’s taken the possible slight increase in price of mechanically reclaimed sludgemeat in pastry to wake us from our slumber. Now we care. Now it’s about our RIGHT to stuff our hungry fat faces with minced-up pigs for the lowest price possible, we’ve decided it’s a very big deal indeed.

This isn’t about class warfare, although it’s an understandable mistake to make, since most of the things this Government does are about redistributing money from people they don’t like (the public sector, people on benefits, people in general) to people they do like (anyone who can afford a £250,000 supper round at Dave’s gaff). But this isn’t one of them.

Look, I like a pie as much as the next person — probably more than the next person, judging by my ever-expanding waistline. As a self-confessed problem eater, I am here to tell you that pies are nice.

But for God’s sake. A hot pie is just a hot pie; it’s not a cultural totem of the working classes. It’s a treat, it’s not a basic foodstuff. It’s not something that people should be seeing as a staple of their diets; it’s a fatty, greasy, meaty, sloppy load of bad food. Delicious, sure, but come off it: there are alternative foodstuffs available, which are better for you, and which cost less.

Why are we even talking about pasties? Well, there are a lot of very wealthy people who stand to lose a bit of money if their production-line pastry becomes less enticing; entirely concidentally, they don’t appear to have paid for a rather more nutritious dinner at No 10 Downing Street, though of course that wouldn’t have affected policy towards their industry in any way whatsoever.

Additionally, some of these companies have a substantial advertising presence in newspapers, which are coincidentally taking up the sausage roll baton to fight for the right to have a hot pastry at lunchtime.

And then there’s Ed Miliband. Watch the footage of him in Greggs, if you can, shuffling up in the queue as Ed Balls, finger in his jacket hook-loop, orders sausage rolls.

Not so keen to batter David Cameron on things like privatisation, which his party broadly supports, he’s on safer ground when it comes to pasties and pies. It’s just an easier thing to do. Come along to Greggs and stand by the meat slices — it’s a sure-fire winner.

This, then, is our political discourse at a time when immeasurable change is being done to the country: posh men arguing about which one of them is more “down with the voters” by pretending to eat pasties.

I could make a tedious analogy between the rather tasteless, homogenised produce in your local bakery branch, and the kind of unpalatable pale slabs of meat who shout at each other in the House of Commons, but what’s the point?

This is the way we want it; this is what we have created, and what we respond to. This is the crap they’re serving up — and it’s not going to get any better.