Cut-glass populism
The posh boys who found their inner white van man
18 August 2025
Have you noticed how the most outspoken defenders of the working class all have cut glass accents these days? Check out the various podcasts from the grifters at the New Culture Forum, for example. Peter Whittle, Harrison Pitt, and Connor Tomlinson all sound like they went to Eton. I can’t imagine any of them rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi at a cockney boozer, let alone donning a hoodie and driving to work in a white transit. Yet theirs are the loudest voices championing the rights of the unwashed masses.
A deep affinity with the proles
Ten years ago, these are the sort of people who would have sneered openly at white van man. Now, they have suddenly discovered their deep affinity with the proletariat. The reason for this astonishing feat of class consciousness? They have, rather belatedly, grasped something that other fascists noticed a century ago. As Hannah Arendt put it:
Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest. . .they exist in every country … politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls … indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention … This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached … indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority.
Arendt highlights how “the masses” are not defined by a common class interest, but by their political indifference and estrangement. They are the people whom traditional parties ignore or dismiss, but who can, paradoxically, be mobilised en masse through new propaganda techniques and alternative media. Media like right wing podcasts, for example, thrive in this condition. They translate complexity into soundbites and dog whistles, furnishing listeners with emotionally charged narratives that bypass reasoned debate and mobilise fear, resentment, and (false) hope.
The genius of Whittle, Pitt, and Tomlinson, like that of Donald Trump, lies in presenting themselves as both insiders and outsiders: hijacking the attention of the chattering classes while maintaining the posture of anti-establishment rebellion. Like Trump, they speak directly to insecurities of the white masses — demographic anxiety, fear of decline, disorientation in a globalised world — and turn them into a narrative of both grievance and redemptive action (“Make America great again!”, “Stop the small boats!”).
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They also exemplify Francois Debrix’s notion of “tabloid realism”, in which “the media is reality”: ordinary existence becomes insignificant unless refracted through spectacular, sensationalist narratives. Under this condition, the appetite is not for sober analysis of everyday politics, but for narratives that dramatise events as exceptional, scandalous, or cataclysmic.
My people
Listening to Whittle, Pitt, and Tomlinson reminds me of my days at the London School of Economics, when I would occasionally sneak into the cosy little library of the anthropology department on the top floor of the Old Building for a siesta. Dozing in one of their comfortably upholstered armchairs, I would sometimes awake to the chatter of PhD students and post docs just back from their fieldwork in the far flung regions of the empire. “How are your people?” I would hear one of them ask. “Oh, my people!” another would reply; “they are doing very well, thank you,” as if he had personally discovered a lost tribe in Papua New Guinea rather than just annoying some villagers in Gujarat with his intrusive questions about kinship systems. But at least they admitted the separation: there was no pretence that they were the tribe. They knew very well that they were going to write an article in Current Anthropology — not muck in on the cassava harvest.
Contrast this with our neo-Trumpists of the podcasting circuit, who insist that they are the people. They do not merely study the “white working class” as an exotic specimen: they embody it, even while sipping their flat whites and sharpening their vowels to a point fine enough to prick a witch until she bleeds. Peter Whittle would probably get hives if forced to buy his groceries in Lidl, yet somehow we are expected to believe he communes daily with the spirit of Whitechapel market. Connor Tomlinson, for all his posturing, seems less like a man who’s ever hauled a sofa up a council flat staircase and more like one who’d faint if he chipped a nail on a Waitrose trolley. And Harrison Pitt? His name alone sounds like a minor character in a BBC costume drama — “Lord Harrison Pitt of Shropshire, Keeper of the Second Drawing Room.”
Their trick, of course, is to perform a pantomime version of “authenticity.” A carefully curated rage, a contrived plain-speaking tone, a dramatised empathy for “the man in the street.” The irony is that the man in the street does not listen to their podcasts — he’s too busy working, or maybe winding down with some football highlights and a few cans of Stella. The actual audience is a different demographic entirely: the anxious middle-class, furious that the world no longer resembles a 1950s postcard, desperate to be reassured that their own fears and prejudices are not reactionary but righteous.
So the grifters put on their hard-hat rhetoric and go prospecting in the cultural coalfields, convinced they’ve tapped into the authentic voice of Britain. In reality, they are just the latest in a long line of posh ventriloquists speaking for the working class while ensuring nobody from that class ever gets within a mile of the microphone. And we, the supposed public, are meant to be grateful for this benevolent service — that the men who would once have sneered at white van man now deign to represent him. One imagines them practising in the mirror, whispering to themselves in their cut-glass tones: “I am the voice of the people. I am the common man. Pass me my cufflinks.”
What Arendt saw with terrifying clarity was that the “masses” — the politically indifferent, the atomised, the disenchanted — could be conjured into a movement not by the usual tools of persuasion but by spectacle and affect. Whittle, Pitt, and Tomlinson are merely bit-part actors in that old script: the bored suburban masses are invited to feel exceptional simply by being told that they are under siege, that their boredom is actually resistance, their prejudice actually patriotism. It’s not politics; it’s pantomime with delusions of grandeur.
Inverse snobbery
And so here we are again: the sons of privilege cosplaying as tribunes of the people, discovering in the “apathetic masses” a convenient raw material to be shaped into a mob. They don’t need the people to think, only to feel; they don’t need them to act, only to react. Every tabloid headline, every podcast rant, every soundbite about “the boats” or “woke elites” is a little spark in the tinderbox of resentment. The great trick is to make apathy look like mobilisation, to make a disaffected shrug resemble a clenched fist.
The result? The same dreary authoritarian theatre we’ve seen before, just updated with better microphones and a Patreon account. The masses are not empowered — they’re ventriloquised. And the voices we hear are not the people themselves, but the polished tones of their self-appointed guardians, forever insisting they alone speak for the nation, while secretly terrified the nation might one day speak for itself.
