For at least a decade, social media has played host to a particular stylistic affectation – we might call it “Brits online”. To be a Brit online is to perform a sort of relatable, makeshift crapness – the recreated inner world of a GCSE student on a rainy geography trip, or of someone curing a hangover at Greggs. On the open plain of the English-language internet, which springs from America’s flashy and ahistorical Silicon Valley, one must set themselves apart. Now we are in the midst of the first TikTok election, and the warring parties have fallen into the clutches of the very British meme.
When it isn’t vlogging from the battle bus (Brits on tour!) the @uklabour TikTok account communicates by way of the British meme. There is the ‘What a sad little life, Jane’ monologue from Come Dine With Me, except it has been reoriented to attack the Tories; there is Cilla Black in the 1980s doing Surprise Surprise (“POV”, goes the caption, “Rishi Sunak turning up on your 18th birthday to send you to war”). The Daily Mirror’s original Liz Truss lettuce, which made a campy digital spectacle out of a public servant’s incompetence, was peak Brits-online. In pulling a late reproduction from the battle bus fridge, Angela Rayner signals her quirky allegiance to the Brits-online cause.
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