And, most unknowably, will we import our globalized, post-MeToo, post-BLM politics into the 2070s and beyond? I suspect not. The newest crop of pensioners, who came of age in the late Seventies and early Eighties, was as ever far more likely to vote Conservative than their younger compatriots in last year’s general election. Though each successive wave of bus-pass-holders is likely to be more tolerant — or less baffled, at least — on social issues, the inevitable slide Right is a product of shifting priorities, towards pensions, winter-fuel payments and the ability to secure a doctor’s appointment. Gen Z will not be an exception: a cynical view is that the politics of self-interest always supersede voguish causes, such as quibbling over the definitions of identity, as one heads towards the Stannah stairlift.

So what, then, will become of our most hot-topic political feeling: alienation? This is particularly apparent when it comes to questions of nationhood, as one shocking study conducted by The Times found last week. In it, we learned that just 41% of young people felt national pride, crashing down from 80% in 2004. A number of Gen Zs gave quotes to the paper about what can only be described as a sense of national cringe, with one 22-year-old woman reporting that, when she went abroad on holiday: “I sort of try to be quiet because I don’t want people to know where I’m from.” The vision of this young woman skulking around Seville, only communicating via gestures and whispers for fear of being outed as a tea-sipping, marmalade-chomping Brit abroad is really rather pitiable; after all, these are not sentiments shared by the throngs of Spanish teenagers who foghorn their way around central London every day of the week.

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It’s mostly pitiable, though, because it carries a sense of being cowed. The real shamers are not, as our hushed holidaymaker might suggest, the locals in your quaint holiday destination of choice (only the French hate us so viciously as to make it clear to paying tourists) but our peers. I’m unsure how I would respond to a survey question posed in this way — “Would you say it is true or untrue that you’re proud to be British?” — because if we’re honest, saying “it is true” is freighted with the charge of being unchic. A straw-poll survey of a few of my peers threw up similar anxieties; most of the responses were sardonic, fixated on the coolness or otherwise of the British identity; “I would rather be French”, “Everyone’s ugly”. Others cringed at the “self-obsessed” nature of patriotism, with our national “small-man syndrome” speaking to a country in managed decline, harking back to its grand but irreplicable imperial past. The vision of a proud Brit conjures sunburn, obesity, baldness and racism — basically the satirical X personality Big Rob, who hails from “norf ingerland” and punctuates his bigotry with “simple as”. What horrified thinkpieces in the wake of The Times survey have missed is that there is a question within the question here: what we are really asking is not “are you proud to be British?”, but “are you by any chance an uneducated, unfashionable swine?”.

This elision is a huge problem. Firstly, it makes such surveys essentially meaningless; most Gen Zs, asked how being British fares compared with most other nationalities on specific issues, would answer positively — about our imperfect but at least democratic political system, our comparatively tolerant values, our creaking but free-to-use NHS, our distinct national sense of humor, and so on. And secondly, it sneeringly patronizes those who do take the question at face value, and who answer earnestly that they are proud to be from the same place as the Industrial Revolution, the Beatles and Bakewell tarts. Yes, young people now are more concerned with the evils of empire — and our meddling in wars in the Middle East — than they were in 2004, when that comparison survey showed four in five were proud to be British. But I suspect these facts have far less bearing on the 2025 responses than the fact that, in a way that would be considered ridiculous 20 years ago, patriotic sentiment has become a marker of class: of course you, intolerant, pink and provincial as you are, are proud of being from this racist, rainy island. You don’t know what I know from my three years reading Noam Chomsky at Bristol, then smoking rollies outside my minimum-wage barista job in Clapton: that we suck and being proud is contemptible. Nigel Farage’s Reform has itself exploited this class-patriotism nexus by suggesting that effete, detached progressive elites “don’t care” about Britain; those progressives themselves would argue that bullish Right-wingers don’t care about anything else, a Little Englander stereotype dripping in disdain. Is it surprising that Gen Z are reluctant to pin their colors to the mast?

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All this is to say that the terms of the question of national pride are not neutral: there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and the reputational stakes are increasingly high. The only way that the closeted patriot might circumvent social suicide is by cloaking their feelings in self-hating irony, as was on full display in that god-awful viral Guardian article about “Britishcore” in the autumn. This view holds that Britain should be proud of its quintessential shitness, and that arming yourself with twee Gavin and Stacey-esque patter might soften the blow of being on a perennially sinking ship.

But Britishcore’s hyperspecificity is also its downfall. If Gen Z’s patriotic apathy continues into old age it will not be because of deeply felt spite for British culture, but its having been swamped by globalization. The Americanization of youth culture — our politics, our tastes in food, even in the most extreme cases our accents, has reinforced a vassal-state mentality in which everything British is small, crap and has bad teeth; the glamorous, bombastic and earnest pull of American culture, and in particular its politics, has engaged its conservative youth in a new MAGA wave, in a way that would be impossible to replicate here.

A further reason why Gen Z cannot grasp nationhood is because we live our lives on the internet. Online worlds are more integral to youth culture than ever; they are not so much boundaryless utopias as separate provinces of vaguely American values, of hopeless materialism and obsession with individual identity. Why would Gen Z Britons feel particularly united with their countrymen when they spend half their lives clocking up screentime on American influencers via a Chinese shortform video app? It should not be surprising that they feel more connected with others of their generation of what we once called “digital natives”, who share their online slang, meme quotability and profound sense of alienation.

Life moving online also means we are unanchored from place: we work from home rather than schlepping into town centers to mix with our communities; many move abroad and retain remote jobs, ever more disconnected from hometowns. In this, again, national pride’s class valence matters: those in blue-collar jobs are moored alongside their fellow citizens, while the ever-growing tranche of corporate, remote graduate workers are bound only by the strength of their WiFi, having no need to get out of their silk pajamas and talk to “real people”. They are sucked further into the monoculture of the internet, divorced from the office, tea-break canteen and post-work pub in which you develop local, then greater, loyalties.

So, will we still be ashamed of being British when we’re old enough to covet a Saga cruise? It depends almost entirely on whether we remain anchored to those deracinating online worlds — and whether being British will benefit us. There are many reasons why Gen Z feels let down by this country: the housing crisis and the job market have created a generation of aimless, overeducated graduates who stayed inside for two years during Covid to protect a generation of wealth-hoarders, then emerged into made-up email jobs, half of the earnings from which will go to protect their grandparents’ triple-locks. Politicians have much to offer us to address this imbalance; if they manage to do so, by the time we reach our comfortable fifties we might feel that we also have a stake in Britain. Only if we land on our feet after a period of social and economic uncertainty, and only once we inevitably grow out of caring what other people think of us, will people begin to say that they feel proud to be British. National pride is earned by good governance; if Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, both of whom commented on my generation’s concerning lack of patriotism this week, want to bring us back into the national conversation, they must make it worth our while.

Since its founding, the EU has self-mythologised as a project of peace, whose principal aim is to prevent a repeat of the two World Wars of 1914 and 1939. The basis for this argument tends to be a notion that the World Wars were caused by an excess of “nationalism”, with the aggressive and expansive German identity promoted by the Nazis held up as the primary exhibit, and that by diluting the power of Europe’s nation states nationalism will also be attenuated.

Lately, despite its convoluted and multivariate origins, the First World War has also been recruited by European leaders as a cautionary tale against nationalism. But the origin of the Second World War can just as reasonably be described as a multi-sided jockeying for power between imperial powers.

And as Yoram Hazony has argued in The Virtue of Nationalism, Hitler was less a nationalist than an imperialist, who sought to expand German-controlled territory and as such was resisted by the rival empires of Britain, the United States and other allies. That is to say, the two World Wars were arguably more driven by the competing interests of imperial players than an excess of national identification as such.

Over the horrific bloodshed that took place between 1914 and 1945, these imperial powers lost or began the irreversible process of losing their empires. The British Empire was at its greatest, not to mention most crisis-ridden, after the end of the First World War, and by the end of the Second was exhausted to the point where it no longer had either the will or the resources to sustain its imperial reach. 

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The international world order that replaced the Old World empires from 1945 until relatively recently was, in effect, an empire of American-influenced rules underpinned by American military and economic dominance. And in this new age of Pax Americana, international conventions established the right of nations to self-determination. It was no longer the done thing to invade countries halfway round the world for the purpose of grabbing resources, extending geopolitical influence and/or “civilising” the natives.

With no one overseas to colonise, what happened to the old ruling bureaucracies of the formerly imperial nations of Europe? What now for those educated with imperial dreams and a global vision, trained from a young age to run international business and political institutions, dreaming of rule across vast territories and hundreds of millions of benighted souls in need of guidance?

The solution they came up with was to colonise one another. To console themselves for the loss of the riches and ready supply of servants in their overseas colonies, the washed-up post-imperial nations of Europe agreed to pool their reach, influence and unwashed natives into a kind of ersatz empire.

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It did not greatly matter whether the natives in question liked the idea or not, as the pooling was undertaken largely without public discussion and in practice (to begin with at least) made little difference to their everyday lives. Rather, the extension of ‘reach’ and ‘influence’ was largely a bureaucratic one, harmonising rules on the kind of trade and manufacturing standards which most ordinary people care very little about.

The result provided an imperial buzz for a cadre of civil servants, who got to dictate standards on the minutiae of countless areas of commerce for hundreds of millions of people rather than mere tens (and enjoy the perks of a colossal corporate lobbying industry in the process).

Even better, they could do all this without any of the demonstrable dangers of the kind of overheated jingoism that came with the style of imperialism that ended in bloodshed with the two world wars. A kind of diet imperialism, if you like: all the fun of civilising the heathens, with none of the guilt.

Their diet empire now constituted, the post-imperial civil servants of each EU member state could enjoy something of the lavish transnational lifestyle, money-no-object pageantry and grand entertaining they missed out on by the unfortunate fact of having been born too late for a career enjoying absolute power in the colonies while feathering their own nests. Indeed, the strange disappearance of a 2014 report on corruption within EU institutions suggests the diet imperialism of Europe offers ample opportunities of the nest-feathering variety.

Those in the administrative class who missed out on the opportunities for self-enrichment in the prewar empires can enjoy instead the huge and relatively unaccountable sums of money that flow around the European Union’s various budgets.

Indeed, even when misbehaviour tips over into outright criminal activity it can sometimes go unpunished, as was the case with IMF head Christine Lagarde, who received a criminal conviction in 2016 for negligence over inappropriate payouts while in the French Government but was nonetheless installed this year as head of the European Central Bank.

The administrative empire also delivers a servant class, at a scale appropriate to the post-imperial nostalgia it serves to alleviate. The debate around the Brexit referendum was full of dire warnings about the looming loss of staff to (among other things) wipe bottoms, look after children, pick fruit and make lattes.

These laments strongly hint at the preoccupations of a colonial class reluctant in the extreme to let go of a rich supply of subaltern masses whose services were rendered affordable by the expansion of the labour market through freedom of movement.

It is not just the servants. The prospect of losing the European extension to their shrunken, empire-less British geopolitical self-image cuts to the heart of our modern governing class. As one would expect, then, those lamenting Britain’s post-Brexit loss of “standing” or evolution into a “laughing stock” (who cares?) are not the supposedly imperialist and thin-skinned Brexiters but those who wish to remain. Because in their view the only available modern source of the suitably elevated pomp, influence and imperial “standing” to which they feel entitled is our membership of the EU.

Paradoxically, in the act of accusing Brexiters of the imperial nostalgia of which they themselves are guilty, the Remain Europhiles have hit on a term which is more accurate than they realise for their Brexiter foes: Little Englanders. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the original Little Englanders were anti-imperialist, and wanted the borders of the United Kingdom to stop at the edges of the British Isles.

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The epithet tends to be used against Brexiters to imply jingoistic and probably racist imperial aspirations, but this is the opposite of what it meant when first used. And taken in its original sense, calling Brexiters Little Englanders is entirely accurate: they would like the borders of the nation to which they belong to be at the edge of the British Isles, not along the edge of Turkey or Russia.

Should they get their way, this will present the United Kingdom with the prospect of life as an independent nation of modest size. We can then look forward to a future going about our business much reduced from the giddy, extractive and racist highs of the early twentieth century but hopefully more stable, more content with ourselves and, importantly, perhaps even finally at ease with the loss of British imperial reach.

For the imperialist nostalgists of Remain, though, unable to reconcile themselves to the notion of the United Kingdom as anything but a world power, this possibility is anathema. The argument tends to be that unless we join a large power bloc we will be ground to dust between them. Gideon Rachman argued recently in the FT  that “the EU needs to become a power project”, saying that future geopolitics will be a contest between four or five large blocs including China and the US and the individual nations of Europe cannot hold a candle to these behemoths.

But must this necessarily be so? Rachman’s future is just a projection, and many projections – such as Fukuyama’s famous one about the “end of history” — have been proved wrong by subsequent events. Admittedly, a multipolar future seems likely. But any age of competing superpowers has always also contained smaller nations that managed to avoid absorption into a larger empire by one means or another. Why should Little England not be one of them?

The only thing holding us back from a post-Brexit and doubly post-imperial future, at ease with our reduction in stature and ready for a new chapter in our national history, is the imperial nostalgia of the Europhiles.