Theresa May entered Downing Street pledging to stitch a divided Britain into one nation, but it turns out we’re still a long way even from one household.
Writing in Campaign magazine, Emily James, chief strategy officer at creative agency RKCR/Y&R, details how she went through YouGov’s tracking survey – which monitors about 1,200 brands – and cross-referenced the data with how individuals voted in the EU referendum, to arrive at a wildly different top 10 list for each tribe.
The results suggest that leavers favour slathering Bisto and HP Sauce on their plate of Cathedral City cheese-topped Richmond sausages bought from Iceland, flipping between Sky and ITV News to check their numbers on the Health Lottery (and with that diet, maybe they need to).
Meanwhile, the remainian family at the bottom of the road never eats. These glowing bulwarks of technological progress simply waft around on several of Steve Jobs’ finest interfaces: looking up iPlayer programmes they have read about on bbc.co.uk, putting an anodyne playlist on Spotify and tweeting furiously about being on the losing side, as they book a holiday to Tuscany via Virgin Trains, London Underground, EasyJet and Airbnb.
Clearly, these two will never sort out their differences about the role of the common agricultural policy in subsidising nicotinamide pesticide use in Spanish agri-business – they can’t even agree on what food is nice.
However, James does suggest a way through the middle. Leave brands, she points out, are “traditional, straightforward, simple, down to earth, good value and friendly”. On the other hand, the uniting stripe of the top 10 remain marques is that they are “progressive, up to date, visionary, innovative, socially responsible, intelligent”.
The obvious answer for James is that any prime minister in a hurry should make their basic ideas simple, trad and down to earth, but in a progressive, innovative, smart way. She points to sites that were ranked equally by both groups – Money Saving Expert, the NSPCC, TK Maxx and M&S. Money Saving Expert, for instance, presents intelligent analysis in a way that is also very straightforward. M&S offers the soul of simple, quality, olde worlde Britishness, with the marketing vigour of a cutting-edge supermarket.
The answer seems clear. James doesn’t say as much, but it’s obvious how Britain’s culture wars can be resolved by a leader whose very initials imply trademark licensing. We’re imagining the following key planks in Theresa’s nation-suturing manifesto:
• Let’s kick out foreigners. But let us do it via a tracker that shows their location at every point in the deportation process.
• Let’s ban the burqa. But let’s replace it with a hi-tech graphene material that can detect the amount of sexual tension in a given situation and darken accordingly.
• Let’s give everyone a council house. But ration the initial allocation via a popularity app where you can swipe each potential citizen in need left or right based on the amount of neediness they exude in their photos.
• Let’s bring back bobbies on the beat. But kit them out with an Occulus Rift headset that simulates tedious deskwork.
Nation solved.
