Listen up, working class people – Costa Coffee, like a living wage and social mobility, is no longer for you

The Conservatives are the sort of party that thinks a £450,000 home is affordable but a high street coffee will break the bank and one sip should exempt you from access to the welfare state

Antony Calvert, the Conservative candidate in Wakefield, criticised a working class man for entering a Costa Coffee (Twitter)

Apparently Costa Coffee is a magical elixir, one that can turn even the most weathered working class person into Hyacinth Bucket, a proper middle class lady who ought to know that if she can afford a cup of coffee, she can afford to vote Conservative.

This, according to the Tory candidate in Wakefield, Antony Calvert. Yesterday, he tweeted about a working class man loudly (and rightly) criticising him before walking into a Costa, implying that you’re not really working class if you have £2.50 to spare.

As an American, the notion that Costa is premium coffee is both baffling and infuriating. My country doesn’t get a lot of things right, but we do get coffee right, and Antony, mate – Costa is crap. I’ve never been to Wakefield, but I’m sure there’s a proper coffee house somewhere on the high street. Please, I implore you, have a visit.

And then read that paragraph again, because that’s a middle class statement. It’s full of the snobbery, condescension, and an aversion to anything that isn’t organic or locally sourced. If it were any more pretentious it would be overheard in Waitrose – a Facebook group that Calvert’s comments could easily have come from, they’re that aloof and baseless.

The Tories have this nasty habit of assuming that anyone who has any small joy in their life isn’t really poor. You see it constantly in the policing of how benefits are spent. They’re clutching their pearls anytime someone on jobseeker’s allowance buys a can of lager. If you’re poor, you should suffer, they reason. Whether it’s because of some moral failing on your part or simply as penitence for sucking off the teat of the state, they’re unsure. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But unless your poverty is Dickensian, you’re not deserving.

This isn’t simply snark, nor a stereotype. This fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation of poverty and income inequality has translated into policy. Last month, Panorama aired a jarring and bleak look at life under the benefits cap. In it, Minister for Welfare Delivery Caroline Nokes and Alex Wild from the right-leaning Taxpayers’ Alliance spend an hour smugly defending the policy and suggesting (or outright stating) that people on benefits shouldn’t be able to live well – as if anyone on benefits has ever lived as well as these two toffs.

The people included in this documentary are skint and struggling, from a grandmother who is raising her grandchildren to a single dad who can’t find childcare to get his job. They’re trapped in a vicious cycle of the Tories’ making, yet the Tories are blasting them, or people like them, for having a caffeinated beverage? Spare me.

The majority of people on benefits are in work, which means they’re grafting just like the Tories bang on they should. But the fact is wages have stagnated and actually declined under the Conservatives – something they laughed about last month – and even the “living wage” isn’t a living wage in London – and won’t be, nationally, by 2020. The working class are getting poorer while corporate profits are getting larger. Income inequality isn’t going to be solved by saving a few quid by cutting out a Costa habit.

Thing is, though, the Tories don’t seem much interested in the causes of poverty or income inequality. They’ve done nothing to address generational poverty because they don’t understand what that is. It’s why they push ahead with tuition hikes, or grammar schools, which are shown to benefit the middle class, not lift up the working class. These policies make it impossible to break the cycle of poverty and climb the ladder of aspiration, confining another generation to reliance on low-wage jobs with declining earnings and what remains of the welfare state.

A host of other Tory policies, from the bedroom tax to school funding cuts just how out of touch the Conservative Party is with the working class. They don’t understand the realities of working class life, nor do they seem to care.

This is the party that thinks a £450,000 home is affordable but a coffee will break the bank. It would be absurd if it weren’t so dire. Tory contempt for the working class cannot be allowed to continue. The poor and working class shouldn’t have to suffer just because they’re poor and working class, which is what the Tories promise.

After all, if they’re drinking Costa, they’ve clearly suffered enough.