The chatterati of Walthamstow saddled up their stallions this week and rode their high horses through the streets of north east London to protest at the planned opening of a new Gail’s on Orford Road.
It wasn’t that their chocolate and tahini bites, their muffins and their babkas are a little too posh and pricey for Waltham Forest. And more than the worry that this 135-strong chain of bakeries would, as a petition read, “dismantle the character and diversity crucial to Walthamstow’s charm”. It was the politics of the business’s chairman that irked most. As one local, Lucy Barnes, wrote on the petition: “This man’s narrative is the exact fuel that feeds the far right. We do not want them in our Borough.”
She was referring to Luke Johnson, chairman of Gail’s. And she was joined in her views by a local barista called Adrian Spurden, who said of Johnson: “he is very different to the people here. His views are not the same.”
You see, Johnson is a capitalist in the traditional conservative mould. He is consistently anti-lockdown, he has called climate activists “alarmist”, has bashed the “wokeness” of universities and was pro-Brexit. He is, to me, on many issues a sane voice of reason in the lefty sewer that is Twitter/X.
But, say residents brandishing their petition, Walthamstow backed Remain in 2016. Their MP is Labour MP Stella Creasy, who won her seat this year with a majority of 30,862. So you can’t possibly have a bakery in the area run by a Tory supporter (their party only won 12.3 per cent of the vote).
Thus welcome to the Walthamstow ghetto, where the only acceptable cakes are those baked by socialists. And so it must be, surely, if you’re a newsagent, or you’re selling furniture or mowing machines. There’s no strimmer, pair of jeans, bottle of gin, pint of milk or box of matches of any worth if it’s sold by a Tory.
What kind of McCarthyesque era does Walthamstow wish to usher in when it is your politics that decides if you can sell your bread rather than your baking skills?
Should I now enquire within the fabulous deli of my nearby town of Wiveliscombe, before I purchase one of their delicious quiches, as to whether they support the policy of imposing VAT on private schools? “I’m tempted by those chocolate coated almonds but could you tell me if you’re in favour of renationalising the railways?”
How complicated is this approach, how pompous and self-righteous? In Britain, our tradition is supposed to be that we vote privately and we unify on the issue of the weather.
But not in Walthamstow where, it should logically follow, if you’re Lib Dem or Green (and you came respectively third and fourth in the General Election) neither shall you present a shop on Orford Road.
Walthamstow should pay a heavy price for this lunacy. For their priggish attitude, they deserve their streets to be now littered with Greggs, KFC, Sports Direct, Costa Coffee, Wilco, Subway, Claire’s, Candy Kingdom, Candylicious and Kingdom of Sweets. Not to mention a Gail’s at either end of Orford Road and an invitation to Mr Johnson to switch on the Christmas lights.