Since Nawrocki’s win, commentators of all stripes have been eager to pigeonhole the election as a win for Russia, as the MAGA-fication of Poland, or as the nail in the coffin of Poland’s warm relationship with Ukraine. In truth, it’s none of those things — politics here is never so simple. The razor-thin margin of Sunday’s election, and indeed the divided, hamstrung government that has existed here for the last 18 months, is emblematic of a deeper fight about the nature of Polish identity in the 21st century. Caught between a future at the heart of the EU, and the familiar, reassuring hearth of traditional Catholic values, Poland is scrabbling for its future, even as it faces the old security challenges Piłsudski knew so well.

In the first place, Nawrocki’s win has crystallized the resurgent ascendancy of the country’s Right, this time with a new anti-establishment cadre of Gen Z acolytes at its back. It’s true, of course, that the guiding star of this quintessentially Polish brand of nationalism lies not in Europe: but in Trump’s America. Not only do its true believers take a “Poland First” approach on immigration and security, but their views on taxation, government regulation, and gun ownership are much closer to Trump’s than those of the PiS. Having posed with Nawrocki during his visit to the Oval Office in May, Trump hailed him this week as an “ally” whose victory had shocked “all in Europe”. But regardless of what Poland’s populists do next, what the country has achieved over the last three or four years cannot be undone. Behind Nawrocki’s win lies the simple fact that this country has left its mark on Europe, becoming indispensable to the very stability of the continent no matter who’s in charge.

The seeds of Poland’s modern-day dualism were sown long before Donald Tusk, the country’s embattled centrist prime minister, took power in 2023. Rather, they stretch back to the twilight days of communist rule. In 1989, after years of chaos and martial law, the country’s Soviet-backed regime agreed to sit down for discussions with Lech Wałęsa and other Solidarity leaders. The talks were ostensibly to diffuse tensions — but in practice ended up setting the stage for the collapse of communism right across Eastern Europe. Alongside Wałęsa, Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński also attended the meetings, with the twin brothers going on to form the PiS in 2001.

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The PiS emerged from the ruins of Solidarity Electoral Action, a diverse coalition of parties created as the political wing of Solidarity in the mid-Nineties. Civic Platform, led by Tusk and supported by Wałęsa, was another party to emerge from the ashes of Solidarity Electoral Action. Though Tusk and the Kaczyńskis had common roots in Poland’s anti-communist center-right, in other words, by the early 2000s their paths had diverged. Civic Platform set its sights on EU membership, while the PiS defended the Polish social conservative tradition.

Over the next two decades, both parties led governments in Poland, while drifting further and further apart. After joining the EU in 2004, Poland reaped enormous economic benefits, not only becoming the fastest growing economy in Europe, but also gaining the rare distinction of being the only country on the continent not to experience recession in 2008. But in the eyes of the PiS — and the growing number of Poles who saw traditional Catholic values as central to their identity — the boom came with trade offs. Like other conservatives in Europe, they felt that on the road to European integration, something deep within the national soul had begun to slip away. Soon enough, they began to castigate Tusk, Civic Platform, and all liberal-minded Poles, dismissing them as foreign interlopers intent on selling the country out to the old German nemesis. For their part, Poland’s liberals returned the favor. Centered in the cities and more Left-leaning areas in western Poland, they characterized the PiS as the party of backward, provincial cultists, holding the nation back from fulfilling its ambitions.

The pivotal moment came in 2015, when the PiS won a majority in both houses of parliament and secured the presidency for Andrzej Duda, giving the party broad control over the country’s institutions. In the name of completing decommunization, the PiS reordered Poland’s courts, stacking the constitutional tribunal with loyal judges, all while tightening abortion laws, politicizing state media, and cracking down on LGBT rights. Amid the battles with Brussels that followed, Poland’s liberals no longer saw themselves merely as pro-EU advocates fighting to pull their country out of the prejudices of the village — they were now freedom fighters trying to save Poland from a hostile internal takeover.

Into this tumult stepped Russia. In 2021, when with Russian backing Belarusian dictator Lukashenko began luring migrants to the border of the EU, before forcing them to cross into countries like Poland, the PiS was catapulted into the European spotlight. The party was now not only defending Poland’s national character from the scourge of liberalism, but Europe itself from Putin’s hybrid warfare. The fact he chose migrants as his weapon of choice made things even more convenient — its fight against European multiculturalism had become intertwined with Poland’s ancient struggle with the Kremlin.

The start of the war in Ukraine further enhanced the PiS’s role on the European stage, taking Poland as a whole along with it. The party’s leaders became the face of Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, and the facilitators of Ukraine’s defense, as Warsaw got its first real taste of international prestige. But the moment also gave Poland something else — an opportunity to merge its EU aspirations with its traditional anti-Russian animus. Now, rather than challenging the European order, Polish nationalism was something the EU and NATO not only commended but actually demanded. In other words, then, the PiS had got the best of both worlds, and for a brief moment had bridged the divide that had been growing in Poland since Tusk and the Kaczyński brothers went their separate ways.

Yet before long, things fell apart once again, this time with help from a new brand of populist Rightists — for whom the PiS was an inadequate guardian of Polishness. Fueled by farmers’ protests over Ukrainian grain imports, anger over perceived preferential treatment of Ukrainians refugees, and a good dose of historical grievance over the unresolved massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War, the Polish far-Right, led by the Confederation Party, pushed the PiS to adopt an ever-harsher line on Ukraine. Not that Ukraine is the only issue these new nationalists care about. Worries about immigrants from non-European countries do too, even as Confederation also calls for economic libertarianism and continues the familiar refrain that Poland’s business interests and political future are being outsourced to Brussels insiders.

Even so, Ukraine has risen to become the essential issue of Polish politics. To be sure, rearming at home and backing NATO abroad are still causes that unify almost everyone from Warsaw to Wrocław. But for Confederation, and increasingly for the PiS too, they are no longer the Europeanist projects they once were — even as they have increasingly begun to see Ukrainians in Poland as an impediment to Polish sovereignty rather than a boon.

The pivotal moment in the PiS’s shift took place late last month, after the first round of voting, when Confederation’s candidate Sławomir Mentzen came third behind Nawrocki. That led Mentzen to invite his PiS rival to appear on his YouTube channel and make his case to Confederation’s voters ahead of the runoff. Without hesitation and on camera, Nawrocki signed a document in support of Confederation’s agenda, notably pledging to oppose Ukraine’s NATO membership. The PiS’s fellowship with Confederation was sealed, and the tactic largely worked: over 88% of Mentzen supporters in the first round voted for Nawrocki in the second. Whatever happens over the weeks ahead, it seems clear that Poland is headed for a PiS-Confederation coalition in 2027, with Tusk’s fragile coalition probably splintering.

For now, though, Poland will remain in stasis, with political gridlock set to continue. It’s ironic, then, that the very voters who ended up delivering Nawrocki his victory were those who’d once yearned for a more dynamic political landscape — and for more options outside the PiS-Civic Platform duopoly. Driven by frustration with the establishment, Mentzen’s effective and direct social media presence, and a desire to return to traditional Polish roots, a slim majority of young people voted for Right-wing populist parties in the first round of the election, subsequently supporting Nawrocki in the runoff. By embracing their desire for more radical ideas and aligning itself with Confederation in the long-term, the PiS may well reinvent itself too, ensuring the tug-of-war with Poland’s liberals remains as energetic as ever.

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For its part, Civic Coalition has had to adapt too. Despite his reputation as an urban progressive, Trzaskowski ran a more conservative campaign than expected, even going so far as criticizing some social programs for Ukrainians in Poland. Though it clearly didn’t help him, he won’t be the last liberal to appeal to the increasingly conservative masses before the decade is out. Having already moved Rightward on migration, Tusk is also flexing his conservative muscles on the European stage, for instance rallying against the Green Deal earlier this year by framing it as a threat to European competitiveness. In a testament to how much Poland has moved the needle on the continent, meanwhile, many other countries are now following Tusk’s lead.

We shouldn’t exaggerate here. Though his own days as prime minister are numbered, Polish liberals are unlikely to wholly cave to the rising Right anytime soon. The record turnout of Sunday’s vote proved that despite the country’s polarization, and despite the obstacles in their way, pro-EU Poles will continue to be a force to be reckoned with so long as there remains space for Poland at Europe’s top table.

Cliché though it may be, Poles are capable of overcoming their differences and banding together in the face of adversity. Back in the interwar years, Piłsudski shaped the country’s trajectory as he saw fit, but the Poles themselves were never able to get over their indecisiveness until the Nazis and Soviets came knocking in 1939. In today’s Poland, though, waiting that long may not be an option — a synthesis in national identity will necessarily have to emerge, not only for Poland’s own national security, but if Europe wants to defend itself against whatever Russia has in store for NATO’s east.

Poland’s longtime political divisions haven’t hampered its rise so far, but as it enters a new arena of geopolitical competition, the rules of the game have changed. If it hopes to expand its influence in Europe, solidify its brand — and resist Russian imperialism all at the same time — it will have to break through the glass ceiling currently limiting its rise. Once it does so, a vision that unites forward-looking Europeanism with a positivistic nationalism will be Poland’s only ticket in town. Even in the interwar years, Piłsudski understood this well. “Poland will be great,” the marshal once said, “or it won’t be at all.”

The result had been, I felt, leaders on autopilot, and a waning capacity for self-government. It might be too late to reverse this trajectory, but those of us who take civic nationalism and engaged democratic politics seriously ought to try.

This was the message condensed into the successful Vote Leave campaign message: “Take Back Control.” So there I was, doing my bit for an exercise in mass democratic engagement. We all know what happened next. Like my daughter, the Leave victory is now six years old. So how’s it going? Have we taken back control? Leaving aside Covid and the wrangling over how (or whether) to leave, there’s one clear measure where we can assess our leaders’ scorecard on returning democratic accountability to the British electorate: immigration.

If for me, supporting Leave was about democratic accountability, for many Brexit voters it was much more practical. Thanks to EU free movement rules, many felt the level of low-skilled immigration to the United Kingdom was too high, depressing wages. Many Leave voters sought to return immigration to British national control, in the hope that politicians would then use the powers they now possessed to lower immigration in line with the desires of voters.

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On this metric, Brexit has spectacularly failed. ONS statistics this week are expected to show that net migration has in fact more than doubled from the pre-Brexit level of 336,000 to over 700,000 in 2022. Some are predicting net migration for a single year could top one million. In the wake of these revelations, just 9% of Brexiters believe Brexit has been a success.

Where, then, is the “control” the Brexit campaign promised could be taken back? In truth, the real question this raises goes deeper than whether or not political leaders have betrayed their voters since 2016. It’s a question that was raised, or at least gestured at, by many at last week’s National Conservatism conference in Westminster, to shrill horror from the self-appointed Virtuous People in the press. Namely: what even is a nation? What, and who, is it for?

If you’d asked me this question while I was waddling around small-town England in 2016 with a bag of “Take Back Control” leaflets, I’d have said something to the effect that nation states are the generally-accepted modern scale for the governance of a people in a particular place. That in modern times this governance usually (though not always) happens via some form of electoral democracy. I might have added that nations tend to map partly, though not exclusively, onto a culture, language, and history — and that over time they often have a reciprocal structuring effect on that people’s idea of themselves as a collective with common interests.

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I might have said that the history of patriotic feeling that attends this marriage of language, culture, history, geography, and democratic citizenship is sometimes criticised for its propensity to spill over into chauvinism or hostility toward outsiders. But that we should set this against the fact that to work for its citizens, as a democracy, a self-governing nation must have a sense of who is and is not a citizen, and what if anything is due only to, or expected only of, those citizens. And, at the most concrete level, everyone there needs a good idea of where this applies: in other words, a nation needs clearly marked geographical boundaries.

Everything I did in 2016 was predicated on these things still being true and the proper way to govern a place. But though it gives me no pleasure to say so, and though I was a speaker at last week’s National Conservatism conference, I’m no longer sure this is the case. My worry is structural: that the nation-state form as such is now desired only by those at the bottom of the social scale, and no one with an iota of power cares what they think. Worse still, no one with an iota of power even cares who they are, or what nation they do or don’t in principle belong to.

The whole point of a democratic nation state is that we agree who The People are and what The Place is, and that we agree to abide by the electorate’s decisions (with some qualifications) on important matters concerning that people and place. But this week’s numbers reveal that the Tories, despite routinely making hostile noises about immigration, are not listening. They’re determinedly deaf to the majority view among Britons that immigration is too high: a view held by 57% of voters overall and 75% of Conservatives: so much so, that the Cabinet recently blocked all but one of Suella Braverman’s proposals for lowering it. And as pollster Matthew Goodwin set out last week, this is hardly the only policy area in which the Tories are obdurately cloth-eared.

Meanwhile, if the meaning of “listening” is ambiguous where the Tories are concerned, for Labour so too is the meaning of “electorate”. The week before NatCon, Keir Starmer floated a proposal to extend UK voting rights to tax-paying EU citizens living in the UK, as well as to sixth-form schoolchildren. In other words: citizenship doesn’t imply a bond of belonging or loyalty, but is instead more like a gym membership. Anyone who pays the subscription can join. And perhaps this doesn’t matter, because clearly the franchise doesn’t do much. Otherwise Starmer wouldn’t be proposing to extend it to children deemed too young to buy cigarettes.

In other words: if you ignore what our leaders say, and watch what they do, it’s clear that there is now very little elite support for the geographically- and politically-bounded, democratically-governed nation state that Brexit voters sought to defend. One party harrumphs about “boat people” while treating the UK’s physical borders as an obstacle to growing the economy. Meanwhile, the other party cheers this on, albeit purportedly for humanitarian reasons, and views the franchise as obsolete, too: little more consequential than a Strictly phone-in. But perhaps this is to be expected. We’re some distance beyond Britain’s industrial era now. And I’m not sure you can have democratic nation states in a post-industrial country: for the idea of mass democratic participation as such only came into being with the urbanisation and industrialisation of working people.

For most of 19th-century Europe, as A.J.P. Taylor shows in his classic 1941 history, for example, much of the land between Italy and Russia was governed by the Habsburg dynasty. In these territories, a dizzying array of languages, national cultures, and class interests interpenetrated. Under those circumstances, nation states simply weren’t a thing in the modern sense. With Habsburg rule as a kind of political emulsifier, shared linguistic or class interests sometimes weighed more heavily than geography. The Habsburg territory known as Bohemia, for example, is now part of the Czech Republic but also contained (among others) Poles, Hungarians and a great many German-speakers, a fact that Hitler used to justify its annexation in 1938.

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It was industrialisation, and with it the bleeding of power from the ancient aristocracies, that drove the shift from these more porous polities toward nation states as we know them. Wealth bled from farming towards mercantile elites. Tractors replaced peasants, who flocked to the cities and demanded industrial work. And many of the disputes in this turbulent age turned on such contests of power, between the old, landed gentry and newer centres of power.

Critics of last week’s NatCon conference often treat liberalism and nationalism as antonyms — but this would have made no sense two centuries ago, when the liberals were the nationalists. When students took over Budapest in the 1848 revolution, for example, what they demanded was not a million miles from what most Brexiters wanted: a voice, in a defined nation bounded by geography and citizenship rather than elite privilege or nativism. That is, in A.J.P Taylor’s words, “a democratic constitution with universal suffrage […] and equal rights for the nationalities”.

At this point in the story, such political possibilities were just emerging. Writing on Christopher Clark’s new history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, Daniel Zamora Vargas shows how this period also saw the emergence of the public political sphere— and with it, of the kind of engaged mass polity without which you can’t really have a democracy in the sense Brexiteers sought to preserve. It was, Vargas suggests, the inception-point for “political parties capable of disciplining their members” and of “binding them to commonly agreed positions”. In the wake of this febrile time, he writes, “the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades”.

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In his forthcoming book End Times, the political scientist Peter Turchin describes a similar — though less chaotic — process of electorate-formation in 19th-century Britain. As Turchin describes it, the mid-19th century in Britain saw a “messy” negotiation between the old landowning aristocracy, emerging mercantile elites, and working-class people, over what was due to whom. This culminated in the overturning of protectionist measures for British farming, reform to welfare provisions for the poorest, and in 1867 the Second Reform Act which granted all adult male property owners the vote. And it was in the course of that negotiation that the British polity became aware of itself as such: a trajectory that would culminate, in the early 20th century, in the universal franchise.

In other words, the age referenced by National Conservatism — the age of nation states — has its beginning point in the push first by the landless bourgeoisie and then by the industrial working class for a political voice within modernity. But we might also argue that it had its end point in two global conflicts between the resulting nation states accompanied by an orgy of industrial hyper-productivity, via total civilian mobilisation for munitions manufacturing.

Since then, we’ve been living in the ashes of the nation state order. Having read Taylor since 2016, I now understand a little better why the nations of Europe might respond to that catastrophe by seeking to replace the clearly somewhat combustible nation state format with the EU: a new emulsifier, with clear structural echoes of the Habsburg empire. Britain was never part of that empire, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that many in the British Isles should view this as an alien imposition. But it’s not as though we can return to the material conditions of the Habsburg age either, however wishfully the “post-liberals” may imagine doing so.

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Our situation now is a troubling one: a Europe that is largely post-industrial and, at least as far as its elites are concerned, functionally post-national. And this means, in the terms that emerged during the industrial era, post-democratic. For if working people gained a voice by dint of being indispensable to manufacturing, events since Brexit demonstrate that they may safely be ignored now high finance has replaced making things, without the wheels coming off the state.

Thus emancipated from any meaningful working-class ability to hold their feet to the fire, it’s all too predictable that those in a position to do so should opt for what Turchin calls the “wealth pump”: that is, abandoning rule for the public good, in favour of pursuing their own narrow class interests. In this case, that means turbo-charging finance and property via mass immigration, while running social solidarity infrastructures into the ground, and looking to others of the same post-national class for political, cultural, and ideological solidarity as they do so.

It’s hard to say for sure what forms of large-scale governance will emerge from this febrile situation. A considerable amount of power is already vested in international governance and NGO networks, for example, while capital has been radically post-national for some time. Meanwhile, the masses who once found a voice in aggregate via electoral politics, in the bounded nation state, are on their way to being as radically disempowered as prior to the franchise.

The fact that one side emits platitudes about “the most vulnerable in society”, and the other invokes the aesthetics of the nation state past, is neither here nor there. The nation is over. But the reaction is just beginning.

Although he was technically convicted for treason under Article 75 of the pre-war penal code, everyone grasped that the cocky, clever and pro-fascist editor, columnist and novelist faced the squad essentially thanks to his “crimes of opinion” on platforms such as the noxious anti-Semitic paper Je Suis Partout. From judges and civil servants to industrialists, battalions of high-powered collaborators saved their skins. Brasillach, about whom Simone de Beauvoir later argued that “there are words as murderous as gas chambers”, served as an iconic scapegoat during France’s post-liberation Purge — and proof that his country still took the written word with deadly seriousness. As his biographer Alice Kaplan puts it: “Writers knew that words counted in a court of law. This was both an intimidating and an empowering knowledge: they mattered.”

In France, they still can. Cut to spring 2022. Another wittily provocative right-wing writer — no, never a fascist and, as a Jew, no anti-Semite either — stands consistently at third place in the polls ahead of April’s presidential elections. In the wake of the Ukraine war, Éric Zemmour — until late February a loud Putin admirer — has a microscopically small chance of progress to the second round of voting on 24 April. Probably, his rival Marine Le Pen will carry the hard-Right’s standard into the run-off. If so, she will suffer a steamroller defeat at the hands of Emmanuel Macron — with, as in 2017, an ominously high toll of abstentions.

Although destined to fail, Zemmour’s campaign has proved his ability to convert decades of mordant fringe polemics into a sustained grip on 12-15% of the electorate. The ideas-driven reactionary nationalism voiced by Brasillach and his collaborationist peers did not die in the chilly courtyard of the Montrouge fort. Zemmour, by the way, has sought to exonerate the Vichy regime and its figurehead, Marshal Pétain. He has argued that it worked to protect French Jews while sending their non-citizen co-religionists to the death camps.

You can hardly sanction ideas more sternly than by shooting their champions. In France, though, mystic and militant nationalism is the repressed that always returns. Far-Right activism with a literary or philosophical tinge has coloured French politics at least since the Dreyfus Affair convulsed the country in the 1890s. Zemmour merely fronts the latest edition of a well-thumbed publication.

Its features do change. Notably, hostility to Muslim migration has neatly filled the yawning space occupied for so long by anti-Semitism. Still, the editorial line robustly endures. Alien powers have corrupted the true genius of France, abetted by a traitorous liberal and cosmopolitan elite. Formal citizenship granted as an empty, bureaucratic right has supplanted the affinities of blood, soil, language and culture that should define the nation. French identity itself is in grave peril. Behind the changing face of the enemy within — Jews, Protestants and Freemasons a century ago, Muslims and other non-white incomers now — stands the omnipotent malice of global finance. In France, hard-Right and far-Left may enjoy tearing each other apart. They can readily agree a truce on the demonic iniquity of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism.

Le Grand Remplacement, a 2011 polemic by the prolific novelist-turned-activist Renaud Camus, functions almost as the Communist Manifesto for this newest wave of the nativist Right — and a rhetorical cornerstone of Zemmour’s campaign. Long ago, Camus was a scandalous gay icon thanks to outspoken fiction such as Tricks (published with a preface by Roland Barthes). Recently, he has seen his nebulous theory that a top-down strategy of “replacement” aims to substitute the native-born French population with an alien army of non-white, non-Christian incomers go viral, and go global. It reached the American alt-Right by the time of the fatal Charlottesville riots of 2017. A few weeks back,  Zemmour’s centre-right rival Valérie Pécresse uttered the trigger phrase during a stump speech.

Read Le Grand Remplacement, though, and you soon grasp that its allure lies not in reasoning or evidence — beyond the gut feelings of the author — but in the impact of a few key images. It displays the craft of a rhetorician of visceral, subjective experience. But for Camus, race has now replaced sex as the transmission-belt of fear and desire. Camus is haunted (obsessed, indeed) by the figure a veiled woman on a TV chat show. Despite “speaking our language badly, knowing nothing of our culture and, more seriously, overflowing with vindictiveness and animosity, not to say hate, towards our history and our civilisation”, she can sit there and say pleasantly that “I’m as French as you are” (my translation). “If this woman is right,” Camus continues, “being French is nothing: it’s a mockery, a failed joke gone sad, a rubber-stamp on an official document”. He declines to mention the colonial history, with its incorporation of overseas possessions as parts of France itself, that the “I’m as French as you” claim legitimately reflects.

Camus, like his imitators, longs to reclaim an uncomplicated sense of national pride. He speaks in the plangent, self-pitying terms that run like a streak of bitter tears through the language of the French right. “I’ve a nostalgia,” he frankly admits, “for a simple, self-evident belonging, which isn’t perpetually forced to interrogate itself.” These days, however, being French has to be “as ‘problematic’, as ambiguous, as being Belgian”. Self-evidently, no fate could be worse than a Belgian’s…

Camus’s imagery revives a crucial ideological distinction between the “pays legal” of abstract, bloodless state rules and the “pays réel” of authentic identity and belonging. That polarity has driven the cultural right in France ever since Charles Maurras headed the Action Française movement at the turn of the 20th century. This deep flow of what we might call French Powellism (Camus himself has introduced a translation of Powell’s “Rivers of blood” speech) long preceded modern Fascism. It merged with the Fascist mainstream in the Vichy era, and paid the price after the Liberation. Tried in Lyon, the elderly Maurras escaped the firing squad in 1945 but got a life sentence for his collaborationist record.

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Famously, Maurras cried as he stepped down from the court: “It’s the revenge of Dreyfus.” Yet the revenge proved incomplete. After the Purge, the Maurras current of ideas resumed its winding but still-influential course. De Gaulle’s shrewd and robust formula for a presidential monarchy managed both to channel and neutralise it. Nativist thought retreated to the noisy margins of “New Right” philosophy and journalism until Jean-Marie Le Pen and his clan brought France-for-the-French activism back into the electoral spotlight. Le Pen senior has honoured both Brasillach himself — and the Resistance fighters who sought his execution.

The great French gloom of the Noughties, its “declinist” spirit exported globally thanks to the morose satires of Michel Houellebecq, cleared plenty of space not just for the prix fixe populism of Le Pen. It boosted the more upmarket gourmet menu on offer from Renaud Camus, Zemmour and the media-friendly philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut. So Zemmour’s political ascent drew fuel from decades of renewed attacks on multicultural modernity.

Older reactionaries often claimed to be saving the inclusive revolutionary ideals of 1789 from later deviations. In spite of his roots in a Jewish Algerian family, Zemmour has changed course. He has sailed on the tide of nativist feeling as it turned from civic towards ethnic nationalism. His 2022 manifesto scorns the idea of a hybrid, hyphenated or cross-cultural national identity. It insists that “if it is possible to assimilate individuals, it is not possible to assimilate peoples”. In this perspective, multiculturalism can never speak French. In his superbly lucid study of cross-Channel cultural habits, How the French Think, Sudhir Hazareesingh notes that Finkielkraut and his comrades show “how far the declinist obsession has pushed French thought away from its Rousseauist and republican heritage”. Once more, blood, not paper, counts above all.

For sure, the national populism of Le Pen père exploited working-class fears about non-European — above all, North African — migration. As does that of Le Pen fille. Yet a strain of republican universalism marked their movements. I recall, in the early Nineties, reporting on a Front National rally in Nice and noticing the genuine cheers that greeted his local Maghrebian, Caribbean and Indo-Chinese supporters as Le Pen welcomed them on stage. Stooges, maybe — but the inclusive optics mattered.

Zemmour, in contrast, has stirred up the ancient soup of salon prejudice that nourished Maurras, Brasillach and their ilk. Don’t dismiss his appeal as a mere side-show of the plebeian resentment felt in left-behind provincial towns. Posh racism, gussied up in intellectual fashion, has lurked in the background of French cultural life since the anti-Dreyfusard heyday of Maurras and his colleague Maurice Barrès. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu supplies an acidly witty running commentary on the rise and fall of anti-Dreyfus opinion, as the wrongly convicted Captain slowly wins his freedom.

In the aristocratic salons of Paris, being chic and well-born means sharing the reflexes of the xenophobic right. “Personally, you know that I have no racial prejudice,” burbles Proust’s super-snobbish Duc de Guermantes in The Guermantes Way, “all that sort of thing seems to me out of date… but damn it all, when one goes by the name of ‘Marquis de Saint-Loup’ one isn’t a Dreyfusard; what more can I say?” Proust shows too how smart folk will cast off once-universal prejudices like last season’s hats once they become socially embarrassing. At the work’s close, we learn that “Dreyfusism was now integrated in a scheme of respectable and familiar things. As for asking oneself whether intrinsically it was good or bad, the idea no more entered anybody’s head, now when it was accepted, than in the past when it was condemned. It was no longer shocking and that was all that mattered.”

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By John Lichfield

Zemmour and his confrères have dipped into the nativist soup that long ago nourished the anti-Dreyfusards. They have carefully extracted its now-unpalatable ingredients (anti-Semitism above all) and brought it back to a rolling boil. Since the age of Voltaire, French life has cultivated such licensed agents provocateurs on the edges of political respectability. They have duly let off fireworks from both ends of the spectrum. Blood-and-soil mavericks of the Renaud Camus or Zemmour stripe have counterparts on the left in the diehard Trotskyists and Maoists — such as veteran thinker-activist Alain Badiou — who still cast a spell. These opposites can attract, or even merge. In the 2017 election Alain de Benoist, a pillar of “New Right” philosophy since the Sixties, supported the unsinkable old-Left survivor Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the French Tony Benn, still running hard in 2022. Zemmour himself has spoken with affection of the old PCF (Communist Party) and its stalwart defence of – native-born – workers’ rights.

The theological politics of rupture and upheaval, and a contempt for liberalism, especially in its “Anglo-Saxon” guise, may solder the far ends of French thought into a sort of fraternal enmity. Their battle of ideas has, since the Revolution, often played out like an intimate civil war. Foreigners may miss this antagonistic kinship. By some weird twist of cultural and institutional history, the so-called “French theory” that came to dominate Anglo-American humanities faculties from the Seventies was imported as a unified body of progressive doctrine. Yet it had roots on the Right as well as Left. Richard Wolin’s analysis The Seduction of Unreason brilliantly lays bare the “subterranean affinities” that knotted both ends. Mainstays of the US-UK “theory” curriculum such as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille had close links with what Wolin calls the “Left fascism” of the Thirties, and the cultural arms of the Vichy regime.

The defeat of 1940, and the four ensuing years of humiliation and compromise, transformed a long-standing elite game of poses and provocations into a blood-sport with actual corpses on the ground. Brasillach, the ultimate paper tiger, joined them. The war in Algeria, and its fall-out in France, did for a while prolong the real-world lethality of these ideological disputes. Then De Gaulle, and the modernised prosperity he fostered, made sure that the extremist entertainers of French culture could once again fire freely – and fire only blanks.

Zemmour, the latest heir to this tradition of high-minded outrageousness, may well fade from view after the first round of voting on 1o April. Sooner or later, another firebrand of the cerebral, nativist Right will fill his shoes. However, the genius of the De Gaulle’s republican monarchy is that the system will eventually install another effective Macron-style president: one more “technocratic” ruler whom apocalyptic right and left will agree to detest.

According to travel writer Sylvain Tesson, France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they live in hell. It can sometimes feel that way. In a country of high-quality public services and world-class social infrastructure where productivity now runs (according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics) 18% higher than in the UK, crybaby ideologues will again lament that la France profonde remains the prisoner of multi-cultural traitors and Anglo-Saxon capitalists. Back in London, meanwhile, I can pay my bus fares to the RATP (Régie autonome des transports parisiens, owner of London United and London Sovereign) and my fuel bills to Eléctricité de France. As Robert Brasillach might say, Vive la France quand même!

The song in question, “Three Score and Ten”, tells the story of a single stormy night in 1884, and the horrific death toll that came with it:

And there were three score and ten, boys and men
Were lost from Grimsby Town
From Yarmouth down to Scarborough
Many hundreds more were drowned

Their herring craft, their trawlers
Their fishing smacks as well
They long did fight the bitter night
And battle with the swell.

But it’s not just the sentimental pleasure of singing a sad song with a catchy chorus that keeps this song alive. Fishing is woven deep into the culture of the British Isles: so deep, that despite today being only a tiny contributor to our economy, and with little political leverage, it may yet scupper Boris’s Brexit deal.

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Why, then, does fishing stir people up? It’s not jobs or money. According to Commons Library research, the UK fishing industry employs about 24,000 people and earns around £1.4bn per annum. As a proportion of Britain’s £2.1 trillion 2019 GDP, that’s small change. And with 27,000 employees in the UK alone, Amazon provides more jobs today than the entire British fishing sector.

The BBC recently had a go, suggesting that ‘supporters of Brexit’ see fishing as ‘a symbol of sovereignty that will now be regained’. But it goes deeper than abstract ideas of control. The environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth argues that if we’re to find national identity anywhere, it’s in the relationship we have with our landscape we inhabit. And for the inhabitants of the British Isles, no matter which wave of migration brought us here since this landmass was settled in about 900,000BC, that identity has been bound up with the sea.

Wherever you live in the British Isles, it’s not possible to be more than 70 miles from the sea. We have around 19,500 miles of coastline: more than Brazil. The sea has sustained and shaped Britain for thousands of years.

The usual angle on this story is about commerce and colonisation. In its pomp, the might of the British Empire was inseparable from its maritime culture. This fact, and Britain’s decline from imperial grandeur, underpinned the recent controversy over singing “Rule Britannia” at the Proms . But so far the culture war has largely ignored those working-class men who plied the same waves not to conquer or trade, but to catch fish.

Fishing has been part of British culture since time immemorial, but especially on the North Sea coast. The monks of Wyke Hull were granted a special licence to fish in the Humber by King Henry II in the 12^th century. Then in the 19^th century, when the arrival of railways opened up new inland markets for fresh fish, a wave of migration to the area made Hull a fishing boom town. Often-illiterate fishermen set sail in ‘fishing smacks’, light sail-powered vessels of around 50 feet with a crew of around four men, to trawl for deep-sea fish as far afield as the Faroes and Iceland.

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Working on a North Sea fishing smack was brutally dangerous: between 1863 and 1871 around 1,000 such boats were operating from ports along the northeast, and every year around 120 of them were lost to accidents. In Grimsby alone, 1,024 men were lost between 1880 and 1893, all from fishing smacks.

Nor was joining a fishing crew always a choice. The historian Peter Anson noted that of the boys and men who made up the Grimsby fishing fleet, “Most of the apprentices had been brought up in orphanages and reformatory schools.” It’s likely that of the “three score and ten” who died on that stormy October night in 1884, some had been forced into the trade.

This hard and dangerous work bred a unique working culture. In his 1934 travelogue English Journey, JB Priestley described fishing as employing perhaps the last of the wild men in this tamed Island of ours; fellows capable of working day and night without food or sleep […] and then also capable of going on the booze with equal energy and enthusiasm.

This culture was transmitted (as is often the case for working-class history) through myth and music. If they survived long enough to be drawn into the culture of working fishermen, apprentice smacksmen would soon learn the songs that beat the rhythms of working life at sea. Shanties and ‘capstan songs’, surviving today only in sheet music and the folk music scene, were tools of the trade: rhythmic tunes sung onboard to give the beat for hauling ropes to work the ship, or turning the capstan to winch in heavy nets.

Indeed, ”The Smacksman”  is itself a capstan song, which contrasts the idyllic appearance of life at sea with its grim reality. Nothing could be more quintessentially British than this cheerful sing-it-on-the-job ditty about having a horrible job:

Once I was a schoolboy, on the shores I used to roam
And watch the boats go out to sea, at the setting of the sun.
I thought I’d like the seafaring life but very soon I found
It wasn’t common sailing when we reached the fishing ground.

It was, “Heave on the trawl my boys, never mind the storm!”
When we get the fish aboard we’ll have another haul.
“Heave away the capstan, merrily heave away!”
It’s the same old cry in the middle of the night as it is in the early day.

The rhythms of fishing life occupied not just those at sea, but everyone onshore too. The whole community turned on the rhythm of the ‘long-tripper’ boats that by the onset of the First World War employed some 17,000 full-time fishermen. ‘Fishwives’ would mend nets, bait lines and process the catch, selling fish from the docks or carrying it to market in woven baskets. Even lullabies had a tang of the sea: the Northumbrian lullaby “Dance to your daddy” promises the baby “You shall have a fishy/When the boat comes in”.

As North Sea white fish grew in popularity, inland fishing declined. Britain lost the taste for herring (today, we export 93% of the British herring catch) and embraced cod-and-chips. Meanwhile, advances in fishing technology began to transform the industry from the dangerous sail-powered work of the 19^th-century smacksman to something more industrial, increasingly carried out by huge trawlers with refrigerated holds and even on-board canneries, that could put to sea for weeks at a time.

Then, in the mid-20th century, a sector focused not on inland fishing but North Sea trawling collided with the ‘rules-based international order’ — and sank.

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Tories have to choose between beef and liberty

By Danny Kruger

The 1970 Common Fisheries Policy was an attempt to address the growing problem of overfishing resulting from the ever more efficient design of 20^th-century trawlers. It wasn’t the first such attempt to allocate fishing rights; the nations signing the 1964 London Convention on Fisheries are all now EU members.

But when Britain joined the EEC in 1973, it was allocated quotas set based not on the total catch by British vessels, but only on fish caught in EEC waters. And these didn’t include the more distant North Sea fishing-grounds where the bulk of the British trawlers worked.

Thus it’s both true and not true that ‘Ted Heath sold British fishermen down the river’, as the popular perception has it today. Yes, CFP quotas were skewed against Britain — but this wouldn’t have mattered had Britain been able to go on fishing further afield. And Britain’s ‘long-tripper’ fishermen were defeated not by Brussels, but by geopolitics.

In the 1970s, in another effort to manage the excesses of overfishing, the UN established Exclusive Economic Zones around coastal states, giving each state the sole right to economic exploitation of these waters. This triggered the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland, over the right to fish off the Icelandic coast. At the height of the Cod Wars, British trawlers were shot at by Icelandic fishermen, and one large vessel was even shelled by Icelandic artillery after it was spotted fishing inside the limit.

Britain’s military clout seemed sure to guarantee victory in the Cod Wars. But Iceland had a trump card up its sleeve: geography. The Cod Wars took place at the height of the Cold War, and the US naval base on the Reykjanes peninsula in western Iceland was critical to America’s efforts to track Soviet movements via the key chokepoint between Greenland, Iceland and the UK.

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So Iceland threatened to withdraw from Nato if the British did not stop fishing in Icelandic waters. Fearful of losing its naval base, the United States put pressure on Britain. Britain folded: the Cod Wars ended in 1976 with Britain agreeing to respect an exclusive 200-mile Icelandic fishing zone around its coast.

But by then there was nowhere else for the British fleet to go. As an EEC member, quotas for British territorial waters had been set meanwhile by the Common Fisheries Policy. It’s no surprise, then, that that the peak year for British fishing was around 1 million tons of fish caught, in 1973 — the year Britain joined the EEC.

Thus British fishing sank under the triple weight of European treaties, marine conservation and Cold War geopolitics. Neither the Right nor the Left saw fit to fight for it: too working-class for the 20^th-century Tories, and too old-fashioned for the Thatcherites, nor was fishing ever a unionised power-base for the Labour Party. No one noticed as Britain’s once-thriving coastal communities slid into despair, becoming some of the most deprived in the country.

But if Brexit teaches us anything, it’s that ignoring something lots of people care about doesn’t make that thing go away. Today, fishing once again threatens to blow Brexit off course — and Boris may find that even his ‘compromise’ position is not enough to calm the political waters.

The Leave vote was as much about identity as substantive economic matters. And below the surface of Britain’s supposedly modern 21^st-century culture is a powerful undertow of maritime memory, that has nothing to do with imperial grandeur — and everything to do with fish. Boris’ deal may yet founder on our yearning for the unquiet sea.

If he himself had held out a week or so longer, he would have seen his publishers Hachette issue a free weekly online Asterix magazine, promising that the moustachioed warrior in the winged helmet would “passer un savon au virus” — give the virus a soaping.

I was informed of the download by the diminutive woman who runs our local maison de la presse in the Charente, as she handed me my neatly folded Le Monde under her plate-glass anti-coronavirus screen. She announced the news with the proud jut of the jaw of a lover talking about her secret beau.

Think Asterix is a just cartoon character who, with his portly pal in stripy keks Obelix, duffs up Caesar’s legions in a swirl of head-banging stars ad infinitum? Oh là là! In France Asterix is a national icon, sitting somewhere in the pantheon of Our Saviours between Joan of Arc and Johnny Halliday.

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The Asterix tales, to put you in the picture, are the creation myth of the Fifth Republic. Its Iliad. Its Cowboy and Indian. Its Epic of Gilgamesh.

Asterix and I were published into the world in the same year, 1961. Courtesy of my mother, a French teacher, I got my eager little hands on Astérix le Gaulois before the others at my sleepy Herefordshire village school. What was instructive was the division among my classmates. Stuart the Swot, with his pens arranged in his blazer top pocket, was obsessed with the brain-wearing internalities of Tintin; while I (detention for blow football with lunch’s marrowfat peas) held a torch for rambunctious, lad-on-the-lash Asterix. He touched my nascent anarcho-traditionalism.

Which leads us across the Channel, and to exegesis of the Asterix phenomenon. Hectares of sub-Derridean deconstruction have been applied to the critical question: why does Asterix so appeal to the French?

Goscinny and Uderzo repeatedly claimed that the mega-success of the books — 380 million copies sold, thus besting Balzac, vanquishing Voltaire, passing Proust — was  because  Asterix and Obelix do “funny things, and that is all”.

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Of course, the books are a laugh. There are slapstick sight-gags for the kids, parodies of the classics and current affairs for the adults, wrapped in vivid, dynamic, bright technicolour, almost cinematic graphics. (Uderzo’s pics were a big BOUM! behind the elevation of the bande dessinée to High Art in France. I once lived across from the Musée de la Bande Dessinée in Angouleme. The queues! The reverence!)

Actually, the Chaplin-meets-Candide humour of the books explains solely their international appeal,  their translation into one hundred and one tongues. (Say this sotto voce in the Francophonie, but the English language versions by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge are sharper, wittier than the originals, hence the druid Panoramix becoming Getafix, the pooch Idéfix becoming Dogmatix.) Globally, only the Americans have withstood the world-wave of Asterixia; the French, typically, attribute Yankee indifference to lack of taste.

Goscinny and Uderzo were having a blague with their avowals of purely humorous intent, their equally frequent disavowals of ideology. It’s the ideology, stupid, of Asterix that particularly possesses the French. The wisest observation ever on the relationship between the French and Asterix came not from a prof at Sciences Po but a member of the public, who told the visiting New York Times that the comics’ Gauls were “like us, exasperating but endearing”.

Culturally contumacious. Or, what Charles de Gaulle called “our old Gaulish propensity for division and quarrelling”.

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The gilets jaunes were but the 50BC bagarreurs villagers from Asterix in hi-vis jackets.

France is the most authoritarian country in Western Europe, a place where La Poste dictates the size of your letter box. In the Asterix oeuvre the Roman Empire is a perennial stand-in for the dirigiste French state. (And who is Macron, he who compares opponents of his reforms to “unyielding Gauls”, but a latter day Caesar?) Asterix is France’s Ego. Asterix is France’s literary Catharsis.

More: The Roman Empire is metaphor too for the external threats to the l’hexagone; Asterix the product was born in a France consumed by Collaborator Syndrome from the Second World War, the imperial military disaster at Dien Bien Phu, and the war in Algeria. Goscinny and Uderzo stripped back French history to the clean beginning, to “nos ancêtres les Gaulois”, with a hero modelled explicitly on Vercingetorix, the real-life anti-Caesar rebel. With a sweep of a brush and the line of a pen, Goscinny and Uderzo rearranged collective memory of the war to become honour-saving Resistance against Nazi Occupation  (read Gauls vs Romans), while simultaneously creating a French national identity as a people forever proud and pugnacious. Indomitable.

By toutatis! A real magic potion for the tribe!

In case, any reader missed the French connection to the war, Asterix and the Goths (1963) featured Germans with pressure cookers used for torture. Gas chambers, in other words.

Goscinny was Jewish.

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Two thirds of the population of France have read at least one Asterix book, the figure rising to nine tenths of men. And they have supped deep the mythology in its pages. In France life has come to imitate cartoon art; the citizens of the Fifth Republic are not the people of Vichy, but the uppity résistantes of a little village in Lucretia. Dispense with the de Beauvoir, give Houellebecq the hump; it is in the works of Goscinny and Uderzo that you read the mind of the French of the Fifth Republic.

France is in thrall to Gaullism. Asterix the Gaullism, that is. Thus, one medium-sized European country remains heroically unconquered by the mondialisation of everyday life.

The Gaullist resistance is everywhere, from the exclusive totality of ‘Origine France’ meat at Leclerc hypermarket to the anti-Anglo-Saxon language patrols of  l’Académie Francaise.

Of course, the French are their antimonies, the phrase “c’est compliqué’’ a staple of every conversation. Since The Mansions of the Gods in 1973 Asterix has repeatedly biffed consumerism (in the above volume patrician Roman wives scramble to buy authentic antiques from perfect little chichi shops — in reality the humble shops of the Gaulish village selling their everyday items). Oh, the irony.

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Despite  Goscinny dying prematurely in 1977 — “like the Eiffel Tower falling” in the words of one obituarist — and then Uderzo retiring to leave relative unknowns Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad continuing the series, the Asterix commercial empire has burgeoned bigger than one of Obelix’s wild boar dinners. Aside from Parc Astérix, there are Asterix video games, movies (with Gerard Depardieu as Obelix, a role you feel he was born to play), product endorsements, et cetera, et cetera.

Even as a staunch Gaullist, I  admit that the book-output of the Ferri-Conrad tandem has been variable. They deserve laurels, though, for 2017’s Asterix and the Chariot Race, which contains a  prophecy Getafix would have been proud of. Ferri-Conrad conjured up  a character called… Coronavirus. He is Caesar’s pet charioteer and, naturellement, the evil Emperor leans on race organisers to let him win for the honour of Rome.

Does Astérix le Gaulois beat Coronavirus the Roman?

Are baguettes long? Is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time unreadable?

It is said by many observers and participants in the Government’s lockdown policy that the most remarkable thing about a remarkable policy is how successful it has been. Arguably too successful.

Some people in and around government have been surprised, and not always happily, at how widely people have accepted and even embraced lockdown. Many more people than anyone really expected have chosen to heed the government’s messaging and shut themselves away for the duration.

That has deepened the economic impact of lockdown, and led to some unexpected misallocations of resources. Officials expected that around 20% of children would continue to go to school, either because their parents were key workers or because they qualified under the provision made for those eligible for free school meals by virtue of low incomes. In fact, the figure is barely 2%.

One reason the NHS has avoided catastrophic overload is the sharp drop in people presenting for non-Covid reasons. Some industries, such as construction, have all but shut down even though they were not told to do so and might have continued to operate in some form.

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Elsewhere, lockdown is causing social tension and even protest. Only very small numbers of people in some American states are demonstrating against the curtailment of liberty, but they are demonstrating. The English, by contrast, have accepted lockdown with a wistful shrug and maybe a bit of passive-aggressive grumbling, eschewing riots in favour of settling down with a nice cup of tea to wait things out.

Curious, because I’m not sure how this sort of behaviour fits into ideas of the English, or at least, into English cultural history. Running through that history is the notion of the English as a people with a deep and even unique love of liberty, a desire to be left alone, especially by people in power.

After all, we had Magna Carta, did we not? That extraordinary document echoed down the centuries, with consequences far beyond my scope here. One was probably the Civil War, which in England at least had its roots in the legal reasoning of men such as Sir Edward Coke, that even the monarch was subject to Parliament’s laws. Coke paved the way for William Blackstone, the 18th century judge who defined “the absolute rights of every Englishman” including freedom from unwarranted interference by the state.

These “rights of Englishmen” were a cornerstone of the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States. At least some of the founders believed that their new nation was brought into being to preserve the liberties that supposedly defined England yet which a tyrannical king and his ministers had defiled.

Here is George Mason, one of the Founding Fathers, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787:

“We claim Nothing but the Liberty & Privileges of Englishmen, in the same Degree, as if we had still continued among our Brethren in Great Britain: these Rights have not been forfeited by any Act of ours, we can not be deprived of them without our Consent, but by Violence & Injustice…”

When our American cousins cry “Live Free or Die” and take to the streets to protest overweening state authority during lockdown, whether they know it or not, they are honouring the tradition of English liberty.

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That tradition has not entirely died out in England itself, even if many of the English prefer to hallow St George and the nation’s history by ignoring the issue altogether. Or perhaps by grumbling at the lack of a Bank Holiday, a propensity for long weekends apparently being an essential part of our Protestant national character — so unlike the idle French and other workshy southern papists.

But some people still remember, upholding the idea of “freeborn Englishmen” as a band especially committed to personal freedom. One of them is our Prime Minister, whose writings for the Telegraph (I used to help edit them) are shot through with a silvery vein of liberty in the face of an intrusive state.

For Boris Johnson, it is an essential part of the English character that, when faced with pettifogging officialdom giving us orders, we tell the offending bureaucrat to bugger off.

Here is Boris in 2004 when Tony Blair was keen on a national ID card:

“If I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am, when I have done nothing wrong and when I am simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman, then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it.”

If Boris Johson has a personal philosophy, it is probably contained in those words. At least until the coronavirus, he saw himself, fame and Cabinet rank notwithstanding, as “simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman”.

That view of the English character was visible in Johnson’s early, stumbling Covid-19 press conferences, when he resisted initial calls for lockdowns and the rest. “We live in a land of liberty,” he insisted on March 18th:

"We live in a land of liberty… we don't intend to pose… restrictions on people… but we will rule nothing out"

UK PM Boris Johnson says "we will consider bringing further… measures where that is necessary to suppress the peak of the epidemic"https://t.co/1Rs1TN7gTf pic.twitter.com/CDb6epjvKE

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 18, 2020

 Not all of his now-famous resistance to lockdown was about personal politics. A big part of the expert calculations put to ministers was about how many people would reject restrictions on personal freedom, rendering lockdown ineffective. Some government advisers counselled that people would simply get bored and resentful about being told to stay at home, so ministers should be wary.

I doubt the behavioural scientists making that calculation explicitly considered Magna Carta, Coke, Blackstone and the “rights of Englishmen”, but the people whose behaviour they were attempting to predict are the inheritors of that tradition, knowingly or otherwise.

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So what to make of the way we have largely accepted and obeyed a polite instruction to put ourselves under house arrest? Why is England, land of liberty, so happy to spend St George’s Day — and maybe many more days beyond — in lockdown?

The search for a definition of the English character is endless and largely fruitless. I used to write about England a lot (for a Scottish newspaper, the Scots often being more interested in Englishness than the English) and have sometimes wondered if the refusal to agree on a common idea of Englishness is, in fact, the defining characteristic of the nation.

Fortunately, there are much better thinkers than me who have looked at this question, doing work that might shed some light on the failure of freeborn Englishmen to resist orders to leave the pub and go home.

One of them is Paula Surridge of Bristol University, who studies the values that underpin voting behaviour and much else besides.

Last month, she spoke to the English Labour Network, which wants Labour to pay more attention to English identity and those voters who think it’s important. More on that in a minute.

Dr Surridge — whose work really should be followed by everyone interested in UK politics — has looked at voters and how they identify themselves. She finds that around 35% of the electorate in England consider themselves to be “very strongly English”.

Within that group, you will probably find the 20-odd % who, in other surveys, are identified as “English not British” or “more English than British”.

However you measure them, these people are very important, politically and otherwise. According to John Denham, a former Labour Cabinet minister who now studies Englishness and the English, almost all of the Labour voters who switched to the Tories last year are from that “very English” group. Until Labour reconnects with England and the English, he argues, it will never regain power. I think he’s probably right about that.

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But how to do that? And what’s this got to do with lockdown?  Back to Dr Surridge.

A lot of her research looks beyond traditional Left-Right divisions on economic questions and incorporates another scale of measuring attitudes: liberal-authoritarian.

Your position on that axis depends on your view of the following five statements:

• Young people don’t have enough respect for traditional values
• Censorship is necessary to uphold moral values
• We should be tolerant of those who lead unconventional lifestyles
• For some crimes the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence
• People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences”

The more strongly you agree with those, the further towards the “authoritarian” end of the scale you fall.

And guess what Dr Surridge found about the “very strongly English”, the group most likely to be celebrating St George’s Day today and to generally embrace Englishness in preference to other identities? The more English you feel, the more likely you are to say that the state and society should tell people what to do, to make them conform and, when they disobey, to punish them harshly.

This correlation between Englishness and authoritarian attitudes strikes me as fascinating, important and underexplored in a lot of political conversation — possibly, in part, because the Prime Minister who seems to appeal so much to authoritarian English voters is so keen to tell a story of them as freeborn lovers of liberty.

Johnson is not unaware of the importance of authoritarian inclinations, of course. Priti Patel isn’t Home Secretary because she likes Brexit. It’s because she used to like the death penalty.

On the other side of the Commons, I wonder what would happen if Sir Keir Starmer managed to reinvent himself as a hardline prosecutor of yobs and petty criminals and shifted Labour’s home affairs posture back to “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”?  That might go some way to solving Labour’s very grave English problem.

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As for lockdown, this is, of course, just my speculation, but it seems likely that people who think that the majority and its official representatives should be able to tell us all what to do would be willing to heed instructions to stay at home — even on their patron saint’s day. And to make sure others do too, hence all those calls to the police from people informing on others for such transgressions as walking the dog not once but twice a day. So numerous are those calls that the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) has had to urge the public to “exercise common sense and only report well-meaning concerns”.

In other words, the police in England, this land of liberty, have had to beg people to stop grassing up their neighbours to the authorities for “simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman”.

Happy St George’s Day.

Instead, a succession of Conservative governments has failed decisively to tackle vital issues – including the housing crisis, for example – while a heavy emphasis on ideology rather than policy now comes from the other side.

As a result, Britain has become a factional country of steadily rising inequality and of high but precarious employment, in which a proportion of our working poor needs recourse to food banks.

The United Kingdom is presently in a state of flux and near-constant dispute within its political and media classes. On many fronts – whether political, structural, cultural or economic – there is a degree of acrimonious fluidity that is highly unusual for a country that (with the exception of my birthplace of Northern Ireland) was once seen internationally as a bulwark of calm.

Yet all political situations solidify eventually – and by the time this one finally does, some serious thought should have been given to what kind of Britain we want in the future. The concept of ‘national interest’ will need be reconsidered.

The recent publication of the historian David Edgerton’s book, the Rise and Fall of the British Nation, is, therefore, a timely one. It argues that Britain was only convincingly a nation for a period between 1945 and the 1970s, which took in the end of Empire and the start of our membership of the EU, and was finished off decisively by the miners’ strike. Of 1950, Edgerton writes: “the new British nation increasingly knew only itself…politics was now national interest, based on the politics of class, of production and of national social services.”

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Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

Edgerton seems intent upon dismantling the myth of post-war British decline. In the course of that era, “the working class, the vast majority of the population in both 1950 and 1975, went from austerity to relative plenty”. The transformation was radical, and in the direction of self-sufficiency:

“In 1950 the United Kingdom was still the same coal-fired, food-importing area it was in 1900. By the mid-70s it had been changed into an electrified, motorized nation which could easily feed itself.”

This growth did not take place by happy accident, he argues, but because:

“Projects were planned, programmed, imagined in advance and put into effect by agencies granted great powers of investment, coordination and decision.”

The book outlines the distinct form of national coherence that was generated after the war – helped, no doubt, by the unifying effect of shared trauma and victory, but also by policies consciously designed to boost British industry, agriculture and social cohesion. In 1951, the Festival of Britain was advertised as ‘A Tonic For The Nation’ (a billing quite unlike that of previous events such as the 1938 Empire Exhibition).

At Churchill’s urging after the 1951 election – during which the Tories had campaigned to give housing “a priority second only to national defence” and committed to a target of 300,000 new homes per year – the then housing minister, Harold Macmillan, undertook an enormous and ambitious building programme, including a high proportion of council housing.

While the 70s, for example, may have been beset by strikes, cultural argument and unemployment, it was also a time when “British social democracy and the welfare state were to be at their peak”. Yet, economically, “by the 1970s British was no longer best…the products of British genius went unsold”. Even so, the benefits of greater integration with Europe were not universally perceived, particularly by those on the Left. When Heath took Britain into the EEC, “the majority of Labour MPs voted against joining”. They were, perhaps, mindful of Hugh Gaitskell’s earlier 1962 speech warning that with EEC entry would come “the end of Britain as an independent nation state”.

With what came next – in the 1980s and thereafter – Edgerton charts significant shifts in the nature of our industries, our national autonomy, and the relationship between the government and the governed. There followed the rise of the service economy and of the City (with its corresponding effect on the prosperity of London: “the City rebuilt the city” and enriched its players, “Trading in money brought huge profits for a few.”) There came, too, the “great internationalization of British life”, which the author describes through various lenses, including the changing composition of our “elite football” teams, a greater variety of food and a sharp rise in foreign travel.

For many British people it must be said that this growing cosmopolitanism came as a psychological relief: stuffy, grey Britain was finally throwing open her curtains and letting the light in. The romance of Europe still had a strong hold on the public imagination.

Yet what came after, in Edgerton’s eyes, was a decline of the concept of British nationhood, and a greater fragmentation within society. He is scathing about the neo-liberal project – “there was little original or new or liberal about it. It was a culture that was increasingly global in its sameness and its lack of political contestation.” He casts aspersions on Gordon Brown’s somewhat cosmetic talk of a ‘global Britain’ and proposal for a ‘British National Day’.

If you are an advocate for – and the beneficiary of – a more global, internationalised vision of Britain in which financial and service industries are the font of national prosperity, you may take issue with Edgerton’s analysis. (There are also aspects of the immediate post-war era that one would be glad to discard, such as its casual racism.)

But those who have indeed been left behind by the UK’s increasing ‘internationalization’ may feel nostalgia for many other aspects of a period in which ‘Britain’ existed as a stronger concept in the minds of our politicians: from the 1980s onwards, in generalised terms, the south of England benefited over the north, the middle-class over the working-class and service and financial industries over those of manufacturing.

Who gained and who lost was broadly reflected in the 2016 Remain/Leave vote. Yet had the government taken steps earlier to address such internal fractures within Britain itself, such a vote might never have come about at all.

The theme of national interest today has many strands, all knotted up in the question of what kind of country Britain should want to be, and how affordable that might be. Should Britain invest inwardly, and further buoy up the NHS? Or should it be looking outwards? General Lord Nick Houghton recently pointed out that the UK has “a defence programme which is currently wholly unaffordable within the available funding”. To maintain influence within NATO, he argued – and be useful to the US as an ally – the budget needs to be increased. [1. The House of Commons defence committee recently recommended that we raise spending from 2%, the NATO minimum, to 3%. Until the 70s defence spending was roughly 5% of GDP. For a wider historical perspective on ‘the warfare state’, courtesy of Edgerton, “the Royal Navy alone consumed one fifth of all central government expenditure before 1914, more than all expenditure by local and central government on education, and even more than was spent on poor relief”.]

Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, called the demand for enhanced defence spending “project fear as surrealism” – yet what if America insists, as the US Defence Secretary James Mattis recently suggested, that the UK needs to bump up its NATO contributions or risk losing the ‘special relationship’ with the US to France?

Further reading

The dangers of historical misperception

By The History Jury

Do we even want the ‘special relationship’, particularly with such a combustible and mercurial figure as President Trump? Some might argue that a desperation to cement the ‘special relationship’ was what led to Tony Blair accompanying George Bush on ill-advised military adventures, in the course of which our Prime Minister was widely thought to have misled the British public over the reasons for war with Iraq. Others will say that it will be difficult to navigate Britain’s way in the world, post-Brexit, without it.

Another question is whether Britain – with the weight of its historical role – can bear to step back from seeking greater influence, and consciously become a smaller player on the world stage. Post-Brexit there will be no going back to the past, but there must surely be a conscious effort to reshape a future British identity: not one that plays out to nostalgic strains of Land of Hope and Glory, but a benign, inclusive form of Britishness that fits a modern, multi-racial society, one that operates with humility in the national interest rather than swaggers in the interests of nationalism.

In working out what that should be, and how it might be delivered, the reading of a book such as Edgerton’s – and Peter Hennessy’s excellent histories from the post-war period – would be well-advised for the public, politicians and civil servants alike. Themes return in British history and the British psyche, and they play out slightly differently each time.

It is natural for politicians to wish to dwell on what their post-war predecessors did wrong: things are more comfortable that way. But, increasingly, we can no longer afford to ignore the lost lessons of what they did right.

But in the end, I didn’t watch the game with Emilliano. And given the result, I am glad. Instead, I went to The Beehive, a proper British boozer, and watched it with some of the local Labour Party, including our MP, Neil Coyle. I shouted at the screen. Jumped up and down. Stood on my chair, bursting my lungs with song. Drank way too much. And, after the penalties, ended up hugging a rather large, heavily tattooed stranger and kissing another on the head.

In that moment of pure patriotic ecstasy, the pub seemed united in an unusually intimate form of togetherness. After all that, Neil and I had a rather messy argument about Brexit. “If we win the World Cup, Theresa May will call an early election,” someone else suggested. Then we all drank up and staggered home.

What we think about patriotism positions us squarely on possibly the moral question of our day. From Brexit to Trump, from Hungary to Israel, the question of putting our country first has a divisive feel that enrages liberals and internationalists. Because when it comes to patriotism, what liberals understand to be a defining feature of proper moral reasoning, communitarians think of as a vice. And what communitarians think of as an essential aspect of a flourishing moral community, liberals think of as bigotry.

In other words, not only do these two groups both disagree, they disagree in the most extreme way, with both sides thinking that the reason the other uses to adduce their case is precisely the reason they would use to dismiss it. Let me explain.

Further reading

The truth about 'liberal' London

By Paul Embery

In his brilliantly organised essay, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” – published in 1984 but still fresh as a daisy – the towering figure of philosophy Alasdair MacIntyre reflects that according to what he calls liberal morality, “to judge from a moral standpoint is to judge impersonally … independently of his or her interests, affections or social position”. To think morally involves “the moral agent in abstracting him or herself from all social particularity and partiality”.

MacIntyre accepts there is a soft version of patriotism which is “regarded as nothing more than a perfectly proper devotion to one’s own nation which must never be allowed to violate the constraints set by the impersonal moral standpoint. This is indeed the kind of patriotism professed by certain liberal moralists who are often indignant when it is suggested by their critics that they are not patriotic.”

We have all probably watched the football with people like this. Maybe they want to be enthusiastic, if only to join in. But when there is too much hugging and shouting and cursing the referee, too much partisan solidarity, they feel a little too much the approaching shadow of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and sit on their hands, smiling nervously. Macintyre says the patriotism of such people is little more than an “empty slogan” and even describes such people as “citizens of nowhere” – this is not a new complaint.

But it is not only the propensity of patriotism towards violence and war that leads the liberal internationalist to be suspicious of it: it is also the sheer lack of reason. Why should the chance act of being born in a particular location so decisively shape one’s identity and moral formation?

A truly rational person would base their moral values on universal principles – justice, fairness, equality – in which each individual’s value counts the same, as with human rights. Thus, to mature as a moral subject, one has to grow out of the limitations of one’s geographical and cultural rootedness and free oneself from the narrowness of its view of the world. Only in this way is universal and rational moral reasoning possible. For the liberal, patriotism inhibits this growth and thus is both dangerous and infantilising.

Further reading

Liberalism has broken us – we need a new party to call Home

By Giles Fraser

MacIntyre’s sympathies, however, are not with this position. For, he argues, we never learn morality as such, but always a morality that is embedded within a particular community, with a particular history and social order. And it is only in reference to the goods as described by this social order that my moral values make any sense. The liberal may agree, and say that this is just a starting point one has to grow out of. But as MacIntyre rightly replies, this misunderstands the relationship between morality and the specifics of a particular way of life.

For central to those goods is the enjoyment of one particular kind of social life, lived out through a particular set of social relationships. Thus what I enjoy is the good of this particular social life inhabited by me and I enjoy it as what it is.

It may well be that it follows that I would enjoy and benefit equally from similar forms of social life in other communities, but this hypothetical truth in no way diminishes the importance of the contention that my goods are, as a matter of fact, found here, among these particular people, in these particular relationships. Goods are never encountered except as thus particularised.

This last point is crucial. If the goods we aspire to are particular, then morality cannot be abstract without tearing us away from the source of moral value. Moreover, as Macintyre goes on to add, being moral is hard work, and the temptation to give in to our own narrow interests is always strong, which is why we constantly need the support and encouragement (and potential challenge) from the community to keep us on the straight and narrow.

All of this may make a crucial aspect of morality non-rational, or pre-rational. There is no good reason for me to prize my own culture and social groupings above those of others. Just as, when I tell my mother than she is the best mother in the world, I have not done any empirical research to establish the fact.

But there would be something crazy about conducting this research, because the claim that my mother is the best mother in the world is a declaration of commitment, love and gratitude, not a factual claim about objective reality. So too patriotism. Yet it is on this that our care for each other is grounded; it’s not a general care about humanity as such, but a care about Gill and Steve and Sarah and Sylvester. So to pull away from the specifics of particular lives and social arrangements, to rise above the local towards a rational and universal value, is to pull away from people as they really are.

The long list of the dangers of irrational commitment to one’s patria must not be understated. And on this the liberals are correct. Historically and presently, patriotism has blood on its hands. So too is the very important point that many of our identities are hybrids of various overlapping commitments – my son, for instance, is entitled to British, Polish and Israeli citizenships. What will become of his patriotism?

But it may also be true that there is no other way of establishing and sustaining a rich moral formation other than by an “irrational” commitment to the people one lives among. For communitarians, my hugging the fat English stranger, my “Come on En-ger-land” at top volume, are crucial to our morality solidarity. And it’s just the same with my mate Emilliano shouting for Colombia over in the Elephant shopping centre.

The problem, of course, is that what MacIntyre and I consider moral solidarity, liberals think of as prejudice, even proto-fascism. And what liberals call morality, communitarians view as a dangerous dilution of moral solidarity. And there, in a nutshell, are the culture wars that presently divide us.

So what’s not to like about Zoe?

A lot, it turns out. At least in Iceland, whose Naming Commission determines the propriety of baby Icelander appellations. A new baby arrived to a Reykjavik couple (congratulations), and they wanted to call her Zoe.

“Nei!” said the Reykjavik District Court in late October, upholding a Naming Commission ruling: “Zoe” can’t be integrated with Icelandic grammar. Since, according to Iceland Magazine, no native Icelander has ever been christened Zoe, the court declared it “should not be considered an Icelandic name.”

You can tell where I’m going with this, right? The whole “Naming Commission” thing, straight out of Orwell via 1970s Soviet Neighbourhood Commissars: what right does a government have to tell parents how to name their offspring? That Zoe “should not be considered an Icelandic name” is a mixture of chilling, and laughable.

Can you imagine a British court declaring, for example, that “Idris should not be considered an English name?” Idris Elba grew up in Canning Town (say “Tahn”, American readers). You don’t get much more British than Idris, ergo “Idris” is a British name.

Well, OK (and I hope Zoe’s parents call her whatever they damn well please.) But there’s still something here for our overtly non-judgemental culture to consider.

Like more than a million of you, next year I’m visiting Iceland (permanent population around 330,000). I’m excited at the thought of the hot springs, the bathing, the whales, the Aurora Borealis, the impenetrable, beautiful language. In short, I want to visit Iceland for all the reasons that Iceland is famous, for Iceland qua Iceland; not as diluted-Iceland, an Iceland that’s homogenised itself to look and sound like any other miserable, failing western nation.

Wish-fulfillment for tourists isn’t a reason for a country to hang on to its traditions, else Londoners would still be choking to death on Holmesian pea-soupers for the merriment of overseas visitors. But it’s a reasonable question: how much of a break can a nation make with its past, and remain, recognisably, the same place?

Fear of the scale and rate of change has political consequences, after all. It is certainly a viable theory for Brexit: no matter how shrilly our cultural intelligentsia screamed at working-class Britain that immigration isn’t a problem – Some sort of bigoted woman,” said Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown on meeting a Labour voter with the temerity to mention immigration to him at all. In the real world, millions of British voters watched Angela Merkel open the EU up to hundreds of thousands of incomers from non-European cultures and thought “No. No, sorry. Whatever Britain ‘is’, it’s not that.” They voted accordingly.

Such voters are “somewheres”, in David Goodhart’s phrase. The people who prefer the way things look now, even if they look a bit manky, a bit un-Shoreditchy (or rather, like the Shoreditch they grew up in, and not a hipster’s wet dream.) Like their Trump-ish American confrères, Brexiteers voted against the “anywheres”, with their theories of prosperity (for some) on the back of global capital and the free movement of labour.

Free movement of labour (let us call things as they are: a world without borders) means, among other things, that the names of your neighbours’ children will become unfamiliar – no big deal. Except that the language(s) you hear on the street will also change, until you reach 2016, when the Prime Minister is attacked for suggesting that your fellow citizens should share your native tongue.

The “somewhere” experience of globalism has been discombobulating. Before the referendum, liberal “anywhere” voters affected concern for their working-class compatriots, calling them the “dispossessed”. With good reason, it turns out, as “anywhere” behaviour post-referendum has made clear: ‘Who do these people think they are? It’s not ‘their’ land; it’s anyone’s who’d move here, but most of all it’s ours. Now shut up and get back in your call centre.’

However you feel about that “somewhere” territorial ownership instinct, built on an implicit relationship between land, history and behaviour (I vibrate with it, as a function of my upbringing, but I understand the limits of its political utility), it’s foolhardy to think that you can insult people out of it (hello Mrs Clinton).

As with Iceland and her Naming Commission, “somewheres” define themselves from the land to which they cling; that endless storm whipping at their backs doesn’t feel like an “anywhere” opportunity. The gap between breathing and drowning is dangerously narrow, and too easily crossed.

And in this context, where a political class casts about for answers to Brexit and Trump and Corbyn — casts about nervously, because it’s frightened of the answers — it’s no longer completely ridiculous for an institution of the state, like a Naming Commission, to insist, gently, that this, ancient and constant can sometimes be allowed to win out over the that, modern and new.

The old myths retain their power — I’m no longer referring only to Iceland, of course — and it’s not “populism” to observe people holding on in desperation, and to offer the reassurance of cultural continuity. No British Islander can regard subaerial Iceland, her volcanic-born people only just breaking the waves, and not feel a shudder of fear.

What if one day, the somewhere-voice asks, the waters start rising above your head? Where will you be, then?