How do you like your progressive politics? Are you net-zero left or anti-identity politics left? A “legalising drugs” kind of radical or someone whose public sector solidarity includes police? Nato or Nat-no? The reputation for infighting in lefty spaces – where policy disagreements harden into personal tests of morality – needs neither introduction nor encouragement.

But reading about the left-on-left battle at Master Poulet, a French chicken chain that just opened its first UK branch, I found myself mulling a question that felt more than a little personal: am I chicken shop left?

OK, OK, this might just be a me problem. I’ve always had an interest in chicken shops. Maybe it’s personal: chicken shops, offering cheap halal takes on mainstream fare, have long been a pursuit of south Asian immigrants who hoped, like my own family, for a better life in this brave new world (talk about a wing and a prayer). But they are also bound up in Black British youth culture: neighbourhood incubators for music, affordable places to hang, landmarks of “the ends”. Chicken shops tell the story of a mixed, working-class Britain, with all its whimsy.

There’s Morris Cassanova AKA “Mr Chicken”, the late graphic........

© The Guardian