Lowri Griffiths on Why the Stereotype of the Islington Dinner Party Is Both True and Unfair and Why the People Who Use It Have Usually Not Been to One

The phrase ‘Islington dinner party’ has entered British political language as shorthand for the out-of-touch liberal metropolitan elite who discuss the real world from a position of comfortable remove while eating things with pulses in them. As someone who has attended approximately forty North London dinner parties in the past decade and hosted perhaps twelve, I want to offer a partial defence, which is not the same as an uncritical one.

The stereotype is accurate in the ways that stereotypes are accurate: as a description of a mode that exists and that occasionally tips into the self-parody that the parody has prepared you to expect. I have been at dinner parties where the food was very good, the wine was excellent, and the conversation was about housing policy with the specific energy of people who have solved the housing problem conceptually and are waiting for the political class to implement the solution they have identified over the lamb shoulder. I have seen the expression cross people’s faces when they catch themselves doing this and feel briefly the gap between the analysis and the position. It is a real gap. The stereotype is earned in these moments.

What the Stereotype Misses

What the stereotype misses is that the dinner party is also, frequently, where the actual work of civil society gets organized. The North London dinner party table has produced, in my direct experience, funding conversations for local charities, introductions for campaigns, job leads that changed people’s trajectories, support networks that operated for years after the initial dinner, and the specific informal accountability that happens when people who care about the same things meet regularly and ask each other what they are actually doing rather than what they are planning to do. The Guardian readers at those tables are the people staffing the free legal clinics, volunteering for the food banks, and serving on the school governors. The caricature does not encompass this and is less useful for not doing so.

I am also aware that writing a defence of the North London dinner party is exactly the kind of thing someone at a North London dinner party would do. I offer it anyway. More North London observations at The London Prat.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK