The comparison is well-chosen. Like Gloriana, Mahmood is unmarried; she gives the impression of being singularly devoted to her country. In her manner and speech, she is plus anglais que les anglais. What should they know of England who only England know? Mahmood, the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan, spent some of her formative years in Taif, in Saudi Arabia, where her father was a civil engineer. Prior to 2013, women in Saudi Arabia were prohibited from practicing law. Had she remained there, she would not have been able to fulfill her ambitions. But while Mahmood was in Taif, the United Kingdom, her native country, was governed by a woman — and a woman barrister, to boot. That may explain why Mahmood, unlike her new boss and most of her comrades on the government benches, venerates Margaret Thatcher as a personal heroine.

After returning from Saudi Arabia to Birmingham, Mahmood went up to Oxford to read law. At Lincoln College she was the year below noted PPE-ist Rishi Sunak, who apparently voted for her in a JCR election. Then she went to the Bar, which performed its traditional function of inculcating her with a certain identity and worldview. Her Englishness, like that of many English lawyers, is shaped by an appreciation of the common law. “My parents weren’t steeped in Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and the Bill of Rights”, she said on being sworn in as Lord Chancellor in 2024; but “they did have a strong sense, arriving here in the UK from rural Kashmir, that this country was different: that there are rules, some written and some not, that we abide by”. Her national identity is made of stronger stuff than Sir Keir Starmer’s “cutting the half-time orange”. Nor is it the watery “values” kind propounded by the Labour Home Secretaries of yore, which strung together a sequence of abstract nouns. Those “British values” of “fairness” and the “rule of law”, Mahmood was saying, are products of a particular culture and history, things that make the country “different”.

Mahmood’s robust civic nationalism means that she passes the “Tebbit test”: in the cricket, she supports England over Pakistan “all the way”. At the last Labour conference she spoke of a “patriotism that speaks, but does not feel the need to shout”, one that “embraces those who trace their roots back in this country over a thousand years, and also those who look like me”. She drew a distinction between her own sense of Englishness and Britishness and a “smaller, more divisive ethnonationalism”. When Zarah Sultana compared her views with those of another Midlands politician with a strong feeling for English history, Enoch Powell, Mahmood reacted with fury. Sultana’s remarks, the Home Secretary thundered, were “beneath contempt”.

More from this author

Why Andy Burnham won’t Rejoin

By Samuel Rubinstein

Mahmood characterizes her position as “the patriotism of Orwell”, and she shares Orwell’s disdain for those English elites and intellectuals who “would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than stealing from a poor box”. She therefore takes her patriotic fight to the real enemy, as her friends in Blue Labour see it: metropolitan liberals. Here it helps that she is from an ethnic and religious minority, and that she represents a constituency where problems involving immigration and demographics cannot be brushed aside. Her finest hour as Justice Secretary was her showdown with the Sentencing Council, where she prevented explicit discrimination in favor of ethnic minorities. Her finest hour as Starmer’s Home Secretary was, similarly, a sparring match with Max Wilkinson, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham. Wilkinson made a conventional hand-wringing rebuke of her “cruel” approach to immigration. Mahmood sarcastically expressed envy at his “privilege” for “walking around this country” — his posh, leafy neck of the woods — and “not seeing the division that the issue of migration and the asylum system is creating”.

Then she went in for the kill: “Unlike the Honourable Gentleman, I am the one who is regularly called a ‘fucking Paki’ and told to ‘Go back home’”. She was chided by the Deputy Speaker for her unparliamentary language; that, of course, only added to its effect. It was a fine piece of theater, consummating a long-standing Blue Labour fantasy: a tough-talking, small-c conservative Muslim woman, a “Somewhere” rather than an “Anywhere”, putting the clueless liberal elites in their place. For too long, in the view of Lord Glasman and his ilk, the Labour Party had been in tow to those who dismiss the entire subject of immigration as befitting only bigots. By repudiating Max Wilkinson, Shabana Mahmood was returning the party to its roots. She was Gillian Duffy’s revenge.

All this has, of course, come at some cost on the Left. Mahmood is the least popular cabinet minister among Labour members — a fact which ought to keep in check any leadership ambitions. Her activities as Home Secretary have caused anguish among Labour’s third-sector clientele. The anti-slavery commissioner expressed “deep concern” over Mahmood’s suggestion that modern slavery legislation can give cover to vexatious asylum claims. The Bishop of Edmonton claimed to be “shaken to the core” by some of her proposals. Zack Polanski, who hopes to make inroads among these voters, is licking his lips at the prospect of making her his principal target. Aside from her immigration reforms and rhetoric, the Greens can tap into anger over her perceived betrayal on Palestine — the same anger that slashed her majority at the last election. On the other side of the aisle, though, she has become something of a cult figure. Sir Edward Leigh, the Tory Father of the House, joked that she is “one of the best Conservative Home Secretaries we have ever had”. Danny Kruger invited her to defect to Reform. Michael Gove even confessed to harboring a small crush. Like Elizabeth I, she finds herself swarmed by suitors.

Suggested reading

Burnham faces an insurgent Britain

By Aris Roussinos

And like Elizabeth I, Mahmood is a political survivor. Reeves is out and Yvette Cooper demoted; of the three women who woke up on the morning of 20 July 2026 occupying a Great Office of State, by the evening only Mahmood was left standing. Despite Burnham’s decision to keep her on, Labour backbenchers will continue to conspire against her immigration reforms. They no doubt hope that Burnham, the mushy people-pleaser, can be easily manipulated. Angela Rayner has described Mahmood’s reforms to indefinite leave to remain as “un-British” — an audacious attempt to beat the Blue Labourites at their own game. Mahmood’s commitment to her immigration plans is undoubtedly sincere, and she wants to see them come to fruition; presumably Burnham has made some assurances to this effect. But it seems quite likely that, sooner or later, she and Burnham will be at loggerheads — if, that is, the parliamentary party doesn’t erupt in outright revolt against one of them first.

Mahmood might therefore be a political liability for Burnham. Why, then, has he decided to retain her? It was reported that he intended to promote her to Number 11, perhaps even as a means of getting her out of the Home Office. If that was his plan, it didn’t work. Mahmood might not have given him the choice: she was adamant throughout that she would prefer to remain in post. It could be that Burnham recognizes — or his new constituents in Makerfield have forced him to recognize — that the immigration issue can’t be ignored. If that is the case, then it helps him to have someone else do the dirty work — and someone who got the ball rolling under a previous administration. If Mahmood’s reforms ultimately prove to be too much for Labour MPs and members to swallow, he has the option of pinning the blame squarely on her, and even on his own predecessor.

In any case, it makes good sense for there to be a “Blue Labour” presence in Burnham’s Number 10 — whether the one in Westminster, or the one Up North. “Manchesterism”, Burnham grandly declared in the Makerfield campaign, “is the end of neoliberalism”. Nobody is quite sure what this means, if it means anything at all; but “neoliberalism” is a long-standing Blue Labour bugbear, and Burnham’s idea of somehow defeating it with localism, community, and civic pride could just as well have sprung from the mind of Lord Glasman.

Mahmood hails from Birmingham, and represents the Birmingham seat once held by Neville Chamberlain. It is tempting, therefore, to summon the ghost of Neville’s father Joseph. The comparison has been drawn before: Mahmood, like the elder Chamberlain, seems to transcend the usual political divides. The 19th-century Mayor of Birmingham was the great opponent of free trade, the determined champion of protection. Chamberlain-style, community-oriented, interventionist “Birminghamism” seems to suit Burnham’s vision better than “Manchesterism”, which of course referred originally to laissez-faire. In Burnham’s crusade against London and the South-East, it seems only fair for England’s other second city to get its place in the sun.

Mahmood is probably the only Labour politician with a serious chance of carrying out the public will on immigration. Burnham seems, for now, to recognize as much. Mahmood’s task is simple enough: to act unsentimentally while the Prime Minister does his grinning footie lad act, and to absorb all the resultant anger from the Labour Left. He can speak, in his anodyne way, about values, respect, and even half-time oranges. And she can present a more satisfying answer to the question, in law and in culture, of what it means to be British.

But there’s another item in his wardrobe that is more revealing of the man, and more revealing of contemporary politics in general. It has gone remarkably unremarked-upon that Starmer is, as far as we can tell, the first British prime minister to wear a Stone Island polo shirt — formerly a calling card for football hooligans — off duty. It’s not unauthentic. He’s a middle-aged Arsenal fan. Of course he owns a bit of Stoney.

This is a leading aesthetic indicator of what we could call blokeism: a progressive, 21st-century incarnation of the middle-aged white working-class men who came of age under Tony Blair. They are not quite like centrist dads, whose equivocal politics are primarily shaped by comfortable middle-class upbringings. These progressive blokes owe their outlook to Britain’s blissful run of years in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when economic growth and cultural confidence gave Blair’s liberal refashioning of the country a weighty cosign, even to those with more hardscrabble origins.

They are earnest; mostly Left-leaning but not radical; patriotic but not nationalistic; worried about the future of the country, but not as much as they ought to be. They might be buying Gareth Southgate’s book, Dear England: Lessons in Leadership — the former England manager, a conservative tactician who mused on modern patriotism in a 2021 open letter, is blokeism incarnate.

Sources of authority recognize blokeism’s power and use its language to instruct the public: the British Transport Police’s “See it. Say it. Sorted” slogan; the Mayor of London’s “say maaate to a mate” anti-misogyny campaign. Blokeism’s working-class nature anchors its authority with a power rootless, middle-class centrist dads can only envy.

Blokeism holds sway at the top of the Labour party and in Left-leaning culture and media. As well as Starmer and Southgate we could pick out Andy Burnham; Gary Lineker, podcast empresario and Gaza advocate; Gary Neville, an on-off Labour outrider who recently said he tore down a Union flag put up at one of his construction projects for its nationalist implications; and John Fisher, the influencer better known as Big John, who found fame consuming hefty Chinese takeaways and saying “bosh” but has been drafted in as an icon of progressivism for his media appearances defending migrants.

Remember Burnham’s navy worker’s jacket, which went viral in 2020 when he wore it in a speech criticizing the then Tory government’s Covid rules? Mix with his black North Face cagoule, and his black Clarks Wallabees, and you have a strain of dadcore with distinct class implications — no burgundy chinos here. The month before the 2024 election, Labour released a promo video of Neville lobbing softball interview questions at Starmer with a bucolic Lake District backdrop. Both were in black straight-legged jeans and technical black jackets. They talked about going on humble family holidays in the British countryside as kids; about the importance of government delivery. The purist of blokeism.

All these men were born within 14 years of each other, the youngest being Neville, 50, and the oldest Lineker, 64. They all have working-class backgrounds, or at least working-class affects. Lineker’s dad was a greengrocer; Burnham’s was a telephone engineer; Starmer’s was, as you certainly know by now, a toolmaker. Fisher used to run a small cheese business. Neville is a semi-exception: his dad, the emphatically named Neville Neville, was a cricketer and football administrator. Besides Big John’s outer-London home of Romford, none of them are from the capital, though Starmer and Lineker now have nice houses there.

In May 1997, when New Labour came to power, these men were between the ages of 22 and 37. What phase is that in a man’s life? Maturing. Marriages, mortgages, kids. If a political gear-change syncs with a personal gear-change, of course it’s going to seep deep into your understanding of the world. The Blairite liberal revolution came early enough in their lives that they were open to it, but late enough that they had a full sense of what it was replacing. John Major’s sleazy Tories to Blair’s shiny teeth and shiny government — the improvement was obvious. It’s no wonder they cling to “grown-up politics”, as the comfort-blanket phrase has it. This is the politics that came in when they were themselves growing up.

And so we have this reflexive rhetorical allergy to “division”, as if division wasn’t a fundamental part of politics itself. “Anyone else feel politically homeless?” Lineker tweeted in 2017, after the lose-lose election between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. “Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?” “You’ve got extremists on the left, and extremists on the right, and neither of them are any good for society,” Fisher told GQ in September. “We are reasonable people,” Starmer said of Britain in a New Statesman interview this June. When asked about the recent flag-raising campaign on his book tour, Southgate affirmed that “there’s more that bonds us all than separates us”.

What looks like complacency from a lower generational rung makes more sense when you consider that the Blair settlement is associated, in these men’s minds, with long, sustained prosperity. By the time of the 2008 crash, since which UK real wages have stagnated, our blokes were between the ages of 33 and 48 — more than old enough to have established a career and bought at least one house. Hence their tenuously founded optimism about Britain’s prospects. “I don’t agree when Farage and others say we’re a broken country, I don’t subscribe to that, and I actually think it’s unpatriotic. True patriots don’t say their country is broken,” Starmer has said. “There is no place like Britain,” thinks Big John. “When we’re down on the floor, we can joke about it, do you know what I mean?”

Blokeism has always been pretty relaxed about moneymaking. Lineker first advertised Walkers crisps in 1995; was the BBC’s highest-paid employee for seven straight years; and co-founded Goalhanger, the media company behind the podcast phenomena The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics. Neville has a Manchester-centered property empire that includes co-ownership of two hotels and Salford City football club; his company, Relentless Developments, is in the middle of a private-equity-backed £400 million redevelopment in central Manchester.

It’d be easy, then to cast the Garys’ social progressivism as hypocrisy. Easy but wrong. The young online Right’s mockery of middle-aged men reverent of “diversity” ignores how prominent xenophobia was in everyday life until quite recently. Lineker says he was subjected to “racist abuse” at school and by fellow footballers, for having “darkish skin” despite being white; monkey chants and banana skins were still being directed at black players in the early years of his sporting career. In 2004, monkey chants were also being directed at Neville’s black England teammates during a friendly against Spain in Madrid.

For football players, and for football fans like Starmer and Burnham and many other blokes, the Premier League’s modern pre-eminence is a lesson in the virtues of cosmopolitanism. Look what happens if we let in talented people from around the world! What works for Arsenal and Everton must surely work for the rest of the economy! The uptick of migration in the Blair years, and the adoption of diversity as a hegemonic establishment value, was twinned with, again, economic prosperity. If life is good when X thing is happening, surely X thing is itself good?

Blokeism emphasizes that, contrary to what the new Right think, social liberalism is not just an elite practice. From 1983 to 2022, the British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion of people who thought same-sex relationships were “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9%. In the World Values Survey conducted in two dozen countries from 2017 to 2022, Britain presented itself as impeccably tolerant, with citizens the least (or among the least) bothered about having neighbors who are gay, immigrants, or of a different race or religion.

More from this author

The taming of the finance bro

By Josiah Gogarty

As for the hyper-online derision for a purely civil conception of nationhood in the form of “British values” — 2024 BSA data shows that, of all ethnic, religious and civic markers, “to respect British political institutions and laws” is the most widely supported test of being “truly British”, with 86% agreeing. These numbers are more than capacious enough to swallow up a good chunk of middle-aged, white working-class men, and perhaps explain why the Blairite liberal settlement has lasted so long after Britain’s post-2008 slump. Cultural predilections that have successfully filtered down through society are hard to attack and hard to shift.

Britain has changed a lot over the lifetimes of our blokes. Maybe to the point where they can’t believe things can change much more. But we are where we are, with insurgent populist parties, Reform and the Greens, now often outpolling the traditional, sensible duopoly of Conservative and Labour. Blokeism is not oblivious to this — it is, by virtue of its demographic basis, more tapped into Britain’s discontent than blissfully ignorant middle-class centrism. “I’m a bit disillusioned by politics as a whole”, Fisher told The Sunday Times, and said he understood why people felt they had to “take it on themselves” and raise the St George and Union flags on lampposts across the country. He even tweeted that he planned to vote for Reform himself, “as a protest against the big 2”, until Zia Yusuf accused him of being an establishment “counter signal” to Thomas Skinner.

Skinner is another “bosh”-loving influencer, but one who’s distinctly Right-leaning – and, at 34, of a notably younger age than Fisher. Skinner was six when Blair entered government. That’s the only political settlement he knows, and as such, he has no particular love or sentimentality for it. Younger blokes do not subscribe to blokeism. That’s one of the things their older peers are worried about. Burnham, for his part, has spoken of an “existential” threat to the current order from Reform, and how politics has to “change quite radically” to face it. But in general, the rest are too old, and too entrenched in their worldviews, to understand this. Blokeism’s power came from it being a generational phenomenon, the very same thing which will make it helpless in the political world to come.

You’d think the fact that all this is happening at the same time as anti-immigration protesters are threatening to burn down hotels housing migrants really ought to give the cultural nationalists pause for thought. But then again, such an engorgement of self-regard never goes well for us. Just as we think it’s all going to work out, that we’re going to finally become the Big Men we’ve always known we are, there’s a storm off the coast that means the Spanish fleet don’t reach us, the arms can’t be landed. Or there’s a miscommunication amongst the rebels, or we start killing our own, or there’s a devastating financial crash. No doubt the next time the money dries up our new heroes, the Americans, will leap off the island as promptly as the French once did. We as a nation have always looked elsewhere for saviors destined to disappoint us in the end. And where will we be then? On the boat to England, probably.

Suggested Reading

Is Guinness really Irish?

By Alexander Poots

Because I can’t help but suspect that, as usual, this puffing out of the national chest relates, somehow, to dem over dere, on dat udder, longer island. One way or another, it’s always to do with the English. They are the race we see ourselves in relation to, the ones we want to impress or defy. England is the omniscient Big Daddy, whose approval we Irish crave, all while telling him how much we fucking hate him and don’t care what he thinks. We are defined oppositionally: we are Irish against the English. 

The issue at hand, then, isn’t Irish people loving ourselves. That’s nothing new. It’s the smugness with which we’re doing it, as well as the ongoing issue of whom we’re really loving ourselves for. Ireland is a whole nation of in-jokes and knowing nods, which only works if there’s someone there who hasn’t heard the joke or doesn’t know what the nodding’s about — and that someone for us is, invariably, the English. 

Recently, Kneecap, Sally Rooney and Graham Linehan have all, for various reasons, acted the part of the uppity Irish rebel in the UK headlines, positing themselves as courageous truth-speakers from that more honest, more decent place across the water. Meanwhile, on every British red carpet, Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott seem to be falling over each other while laughing handsomely, suggesting with every white-toothed grin that they’re off to a party to which their English colleagues aren’t invited (probably somewhere in Stoke Newington). Musicians such as Kojaque or the aforementioned Fontaines are sending home exquisite, poignant and rageful albums from London about how much they miss Ireland, albums that contain bona fide love songs to their home nation. These are accompanied by interviews given to Irish news outlets in which they bemoan the casual racism of the English, who mock their accents and call them Paddy. But surely, with all their success, if they wanted to, they could just move back to Ireland? 

The problem is, it’s so deliciously satisfying to be stupidly offended, to feel oneself victimized. That’s one of the reasons Irish people love going over to England. We relish the romantic, stormy misery of sitting in damp flats , missing the green hills and soft, dulcet tones of our native land. We wet ourselves with glee when we find opportunities to insist that the Guinness isn’t the same over there because sea air sours it and all that painfully clichéd bollocks. We know we’re doing it, being “the Paddy”. We despise ourselves for it. Yet we can’t seem to help ourselves. We love to feel hard done by, or at least to pretend to. 

Recently, in Dublin, I attended the launch of a book about rediscovering the Irish language. I sat beside a squirming English friend as the author announced that Irish people have never been able to “authentically” express themselves in English. She talked about undoing the trauma of colonization through the rediscovery of the Irish language — specifically, through the purchasing of her book. An Irishman in short shorts, much like those sported by Paul Mescal, told us how his amazingly “authentic” girlfriend’s success grew exponentially the moment she started teaching her yoga practice in Irish instead of English. Now, at her live events, he said, she often gets over three-hundred people, all desperate to perform downward dog (madra síos, I’m guessing?) while fulfilling their primordial need to hear it said in Irish. I’m not sure I understand the appeal but then, inauthentic Mick that I am, I don’t speak fluent Irish.

To discuss the blind stupidity of these claims — to mount a defense of the “authenticity” of the English of James Joyce or Sally Rooney or Roddy Doyle or Samuel Beckett or Edna O’Brien, or Fontaines D.C. for that matter — feels vaguely self-defeating. Once you’re engaged in such a conversation, you’ve already lost. When, though, I wondered at this book launch, will we be able to talk about the particular beauty of the Irish language, without feeling the need to dismiss our use of English as inherently inauthentic? 

The stench of post-traumatic self-congratulation that is now permeating the island is, to me, sad evidence that our psyches haven’t developed beyond those of the old, wily peasant, still looking to the master we claim to despise for validation. We persist, even in our grandiose self-love, to experience it only in bitter relation to the English. And the worst part is that this belief in a perpetual and defining relationality is only true of the Irish side. It’s embarrassing to admit, but they’re not even thinking about us.

Sure, when the Irish take the piss out of the English, constantly dismissing them as bastards or pretentious or uptight or not good craic, it’s all “in jest”. Sort of. But even if it is only good-natured joshing, it’s uncomfortably regular, an ongoing undertone, and never repeated quite so freely when they’re actually in the room. 

In truth, hating the English is one of our great, unifying national pastimes. Even now, we continue to associate authority with the English, and are brought up to distrust most politicians and the police. (The only politicians we’ve ever truly loved have been our two most authoritarian Taoiseachs: Éamon DeValera and Charles Haughey, the sole potential equals to defend us against our big English Daddy). Our national identity has been formed as one of rebelliousness, of shneaky defiance. We’re delighted to be a nation of cute hoors (Hiberno-English for crafty son of a bitch). Growing up in Nineties Ireland, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that until I came across English people as an adult, I had never met anyone — anyone — who didn’t believe that getting around the law (be it by speeding or drink driving, a little bit of stealing or even just getting away with not paying a fine), was a satisfying victory against The Man. The Man being, not the Irish state, as, in fact, it was, but the lingering presence of those bastard fucking English. 

Suggested Reading

The rising violence of Irish rebellion

By Aris Roussinos

This could all be said to be fairly benign. Yet is it really a coincidence that Ireland’s moment of swelling national pride is happening at the same time as our first significant anti-immigration protests? The recent violence in Citywest only further proves that time has not stemmed the festering tide of Irish nationalism. Also, can it really be said that Ireland’s immediate alignment with Palestine — and the persistent parallels drawn with our own historical relationship with England — isn’t fomenting bad feeling, not only towards Israelis (and, if we’re being honest, Jews more generally), but also towards our old foes, the English? Our close alignment with Palestine is, after all, based on the idea that they, like ourselves, are the victims of brutal neighbors, attempting to subsume their country and eradicate their race. Again, Catherine Connolly, a woman who may soon become the Irish president, has drawn this comparison directly, and has even gone so far as to state that Hamas should have a part in the future of Palestine’s governance rather than suffering the indignity of international intervention. In other words, fuck off away from our Republic, England. Just leave us, and them, to it, whatever the consequences.

Perhaps it is the ultimate indifference of the English towards Ireland, the Irish, and our shared history, that makes our current sport of flouncing about, utterly delighted with ourselves, appear so worryingly pathetic. I know that the surge of rageful pleasure I feel when we beat the English in rugby (or at anything else for that matter) has to be, at this point in our shared history, suspect. Similarly, to sit in the audience of the book launch of an Irish language textbook on a September night in 2025, and hear the two people on stage discussing the lasting effects of a famine that happened in the 1840s, is indicative of a nation whose pride is still dependent on a sense of having been wronged. This love of Ireland, as we are currently expressing it, is too closely tied in with our ongoing hatred of England, the English, and everything we can’t bear to forget they’ve done to us. All while they’re over there, not thinking about us at all. 

When, I wonder, will we start loving Ireland, not as a hurt, ever-limping post-colonial nation, but as the rich, capable and, for many, almost indecently comfortable country that it now is? One with an enormous capacity for innovative literature, art, film, music, philosophy and political development, uncolored by our history with England, or what the English might be thinking. When, too, will our progress, internally and internationally, no longer be measured against this perpetual overcoming of our past, but rather by our present and future? Even our politicians, those pink-nosed white men in ill-fitting suits, seem to only be playing at running the country. When are the Irish people within the Republic, those of us with no justifiable cause for complaint beyond their laddish ineptitude, going to start looking inwards, at our own very real national problems and our own, very real, responsibilities? We need to learn to take pride in, and accountability for, our island, without first making sure the English are watching, then spitting in their bastard watching eyes, just to make it feel sufficiently “authentic”. 

I approached one of the soldiers, who peered down at me from beneath his helmet. “I’m rooting for you guys,” I said. “Thanks,” he said, and laughed before remembering he was in character. “We will win!” Before the battle a band of Normans marched past the camp on the way to their headquarters across the field. Saxon warriors heckled them: “Go home, Normans, go home!”

Every year English Heritage hosts a re-enactment at Battle Abbey around the anniversary of the 1066 Battle of Hastings. Every year the Normans ride again, knights on horseback charging into battle behind William the Conqueror; every year the Saxons erect their shield wall, standing firm until the fateful arrow finds Harold Godwinson’s eye. The outcome is predestined, but somehow, watching the re-enactment last weekend, there was still an element of suspense, a bloom of hope that this time the invaders could be repelled.

Why was I rooting for the Saxons, I asked myself? We all were. Throughout the crowd there was an unspoken agreement — a bit tongue in cheek, but there nonetheless — that the Saxons were our guys, and the Normans were not. Some spectators waved mini versions of Harold’s Fighting Man banner. William was played with a cartoonish French accent. The crowd booed him and the Normans throughout the display, as though the battle had happened yesterday and not nearly 1,000 years ago. I thought of George Orwell’s comment, in his essay “England Your England”: “What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots.” Did this instantly recognizable truth about the class system actually reflect a deep hatred of the Norman overlord 1,000 years on? It certainly felt like it.

The announcer narrating the clash was firmly on the side of the Saxons. “Cheer now to put strength into their sword arms,” he shouted during a fierce bout of man-to-man combat. “Cheer now to make sure they throw the invader back into the sea.” When the battle was over, Harold dead and the Saxons decimated, the crowd grumbled at the announcer’s order to cheer for the new king. “There he is, your new lord and master,” the announcer said. “Your taxes are due.”

This was an especially amusing event to watch as an American, and also an educational one. We love to talk about how old things in Britain are. The churches, the pubs — we’re astounded at anything that’s been standing here for longer than America even existed. But it’s not just places: events seem to last forever here too. Living in England, I’ve often thought that it’s this long memory that gives the country its essential stability. The Brits have had enough excitement over the course of history and they’d very much like to avoid having any more. But it also means there are deep cultural nerves running through the nation, and one of these is the memory of foreign invasion from over the sea and the fear of it happening again.

We see this today in the rising anger over small boats, in the flags that line the streets. Resentment over immigration policies has emerged this year as a powerful enough force to potentially reshape British politics, with polls showing Reform UK continuing to gain momentum. This sentiment has also translated into a visible manifestation of national pride: in the past several months, people around the country have raised Union flags and St George’s flags as part of “Operation Raise the Colors”, a social media movement that started in Birmingham.

Patriotism remains a bit of a taboo among British liberals, something a bit embarrassing that has taken on Right-wing political connotations. But glimpses of it can be seen during moments like the Hastings re-enactment, or in other socially-permitted contexts like the World Cup or Royal weddings. It is otherwise kept to a bare minimum by a still Norman-minded elite who prefer to stifle this instinct.

To an outsider, this aversion to patriotism remains a striking feature of British culture. Though this same tendency exists in America in intellectual and Left-leaning circles, it isn’t nearly as mainstream. While American conservatives are more likely to display the flag and revel in patriotic iconography, they don’t have a monopoly on it the way the Right seems to here. To win a US presidential election, you have to love America harder than the other guy. Flag pins are a standard political accessory in both parties. And it remains commonplace for schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the flag every day in state schools, though they have a constitutional right to refuse. A town displaying a lot of flags wouldn’t be worth remarking upon. On the drive back to London from Sussex, someone in the car remarked on the number of Union flags on show in a suburb we drove through. I hadn’t even noticed.

Suggested reading

Humanism is a heresy

By Tom Holland

British liberals have reacted to people raising Union flags and St George’s flags the same way many Americans would to the sight of a Confederate flag. “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,” Orwell wrote in that same essay. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.” Much the same is true today: instead of seeking to understand the deep anger over immigration that is making people want to fly these flags, the focus of British liberals has been on suppressing them, citing the involvement of far-Right activists in organizing the campaign. Social media is full of often quite classist comments about “flag shaggers”. Councilors and MPs call for the flags’ removal to tamp down on “division”. In my neighborhood in South London, I noticed this week that someone had put up a St George’s flag emblazoned with pro-immigration slogans. “There is no such thing as true British culture,” read the all-caps letters printed on the red cross. “This flag was originally made by Saint George — a Turkish/Palestinian immigrant.” (Saint George died hundreds of years before the cross associated with him came into use.)

Whether intentionally or not, the flag campaigners have forced British elites into the unappealing position of disavowing their own national flag for political reasons. If they think it has been successfully co-opted by the far-Right, they only give it more power by fearing it. The cleverer play would be to display the flag as a symbol of opposition to the Right; to accept that people have a desire to feel patriotic and appeal to that, instead of pathologizing it. Lately, there does seem to have been some recognition of the need to reclaim the flag among the country’s liberal power players. Both the Labour and Lib Dem party conferences were festooned with flags, and the Prime Minister has spoken about his pride in all the flags of the UK. But they are playing catch-up against a movement that has much more successfully linked itself to the Union Jack; one that has been more proactive in channeling the down-to-earth Saxon instead of the lofty Norman.

Writers here have always had a better read on England’s Saxon yearnings than politicians. There’s a rich tradition of Anglo-Saxon nostalgia among English writers over the past century or so. In 1911, near the end of the imperial century, Rudyard Kipling imagined a Norman baron’s take on the rugged Saxon: “The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite. / But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right. / When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own, / And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.” Here, Kipling depicts the Saxon as the forefather of cherished British values like fair play.

Kipling was writing during a time when Britain still projected itself out onto the world, at the tail end of a period that echoed the terrible greatness of the adventuring Normans. Yet he, like other 20th-century writers who mythologized the Saxon past such as J.R.R. Tolkien, saw something more authentic and fundamental to the culture in the Saxons, who stayed put here and defended their island against all comers. Perhaps this old Anglo-Saxon ache persists today and explains some of what’s happening now — a repressed tribalism with ancient roots that is playing out in modern politics.

At the battle last weekend, I thought about how, a millennium later, the Saxon fans in the crowd are just as Norman as they are anything else. It was an audience no doubt full of Williams, Richards and Henrys cheering for a lost army of Oswalds, Godfrics and Cuthberts. But this didn’t seem to matter. There’s always next year. Maybe the Saxons will finally win.

Over the weekend, Trump and Vance ordered Ukraine’s President Zelensky to “make a deal with Russia or we’re out”. In the ensuing international pandemonium, Keir Starmer stood up and promised that Britain would step into the breach, along with a “coalition of the willing” and perhaps even with all 25 of our tanks. Now, Britain’s well-fed Gen X commentariat is working itself into a bipartisan militaristic frenzy, all Churchill, Union Jacks, and “standing up to bullies”.

From the Right, Julia Hartley-Brewer encouraged everyone to watch the Second World War movie Darkest Hour to “learn something about how you should deal with the threat from dictators like Putin”. From the Left, Dan Hodges suggested that anyone who supported Trump’s ceasefire plan over Zelensky’s desire to continue fighting was no better than the Nazi propagandist “Lord Haw-Haw”. And LBC’s Matthew Wright lectured John, a 70-year-old Cockney, on the lessons of Munich in 1938.

This generation came of age in the End of History era, in which the kind of hard-edged patriotism that inspires young men to enlist in armies seemed obsolete, hopefully for good. In its place emerged something softer: a vision of nationhood as without enemies, only friends we hadn’t met yet. Now, though, the world is changing. Can this kind of inclusive patriotism still awaken the fighting spirit, in an emergency? The Britpoppers have, until now, presided over a world sufficiently peaceful that this question never really came up. But as the world has grown more dangerous, the shrillness of their bellicosity suggests they’re worried the answer might be “no”.

More from this author

Donald Trump is the end of Hilarity

By Mary Harrington

Starmer himself is arguably himself a post-national Britpopper par excellence. He declares himself “proud of being patriotic”, though the Tories demur; for example Robert Jenrick recently called him a “quisling” for seeking to hand control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. More generally, conservatives of both small and large C varieties accuse his regime of harboring deep animus toward Britain, as expressed in Labour policy toward anything even tenuously English-coded, from independent schools to small farmers, provincial churches, and even history itself.

How does this add up? The explanation is simple: Starmer is all for Britpopper patriotism, of the Spice Girls Union Jack and globalization variety: the kind where national identity is lightly worn, inclusive, and adequately expressed by “British Values”, like a Three Lions football shirt, for sale to anyone who wants to wear one. By contrast, the older, harder style of patriotism saw nations as having both friends and enemies. But since the war, and especially since the End of History, this version has become indelibly associated with racism, jingoism, and hostile, exclusionary sentiments. Starmer’s not for that.

The gap between this End of History Britpopper patriotism, and the harder-edged one that preceded it, was captured in vivid microcosm in the LBC exchange between Matthew Wright and John the Cockney. John tried to explain to Wright that Britain going to war today would be a non-starter, simply because patriotic solidarity has ebbed along with ethnic homogeneity. He was circumspect in his phrasing, saying only that Britain can’t fight because “we haven’t got the people any more”. He continued with the example of how the East End Cockneys left London and “ran for refuge”. And though he doesn’t say what they were running from, the clear implication is that he’s referring to that area’s well-documented postwar demographic change. In John’s view, those who replaced the Cockneys are unlikely to be as willing as they were, to fight for Britain: “If you went by these schools in the morning…you know…it’s unbelievable. Them kids wouldn’t be fighting.”

He doesn’t say so explicitly, but the clear implication is that John believes the children of immigrants would be less willing than Cockneys to fight for their adopted country. Wright catches the hint and rejects it forcefully: “How do you know? Have you spoken to any?”. John hasn’t, of course, and is dismissed; another smack-down victory for tolerant Britpopperism. For from the perspective of soft patriotism, there’s no obvious reason why the people who live in London now should experience this sentiment any less than those who lived there a century ago.

Suggested reading

Trump's angry imperialism

By Tom McTague

Who is right? Just last month, a Times report suggested only 11% of Gen Z would be willing to fight for Britain, which they aren’t proud of and think is “racist”. The published report didn’t break these views down by interviewees’ ethnicity, so there’s no way of knowing if there’s anything to the imputation made by John the Cockney. But when Rishi Sunak floated mandatory conscription for 18-year-olds just before the last election, vox-pop interviews suggested that many young people rejected the idea of British military service out of hand, and in some cases, cited immigrant heritage as grounds for refusal.

In any case, something has clearly gone very wrong with the sense of solidarity upon which military conscription is founded, within the generation upon whom conscription would fall in extremis. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is at least potentially an existential threat to national security. And if there’s a desperate edge to the Britpoppers’ recent spate of Churchill-posting, it surely lies in their dawning, horrified realization of their generation’s contribution to this predicament.

I’m just about old enough to remember Britpopperism coalescing in the late 1990s. As I exited my teens, all was ironic Union Jack iconography and the reclamation and productization of British culture. It wasn’t just London that was to be re-gentrified; it was everything, just this time a bit more inclusive, tolerant, welcoming and non-jingoistic. It was, on its own terms, a sincere utopian vision. It produced a Britain at once shinier, cooler and more optimistic than the dreary Major-era one, but also a Britain indefinably more twee: a culture playing itself in caricature, for an audience of investors and tourists, paradigmatically in the oeuvre of Richard Curtis but also in any BBC costume drama you care to name, and lately, notably, the Paddington Bear movie franchise.

With this twee-ification, too, came a transformation of history and culture proper to the neutered, pasteurized “British Values”: again, a genuinely utopian effort to preserve the solidaristic effect of national fellow-feeling while discarding its more exclusionary aspects. Concurrently, too, something equivalent was afoot on the Continent, in the European Union project: the dream of a permanent end to European conflict, delivered by ever-closer political and economic union of European peoples.

But this continent-wide retreat into soft patriotism always tacitly relied on the stability and enduring existence of the US-led international order: an order that, ultimately, had to be backed up by hard power and paid for by someone. In Europe especially, the identity of this someone remained, for the most part, delicately unstated: after all, how could leadership be safely entrusted to any one European state? That prospect bore too great a risk of reviving unhappy and all too recent intra-European rivalries.

The solution had been, literally, to defang Europe: that is, to subordinate all European defense to hegemonic American power. American foreign policy leaders were always ambivalent about this arrangement, but seem historically to have accepted it as the price of ensuring a relatively internally unified European ally for American geopolitical priorities. Lately, though, Trumpist foreign policy thinkers have been signaling their wish to adjust this arrangement.

So what does this imply for the style of post-national peace and plenty enjoyed by the Britpoppers? We can perhaps understand their dismay: American withdrawal, if it happened, would mean losing the fundamental enabling condition for the entire Britpopperanschauung; perhaps even the return of intra-European conflict. It is a genuinely frightening prospect. So all the current international brouhaha over Ukraine can be understood as a negotiation over whether, or how far, this is actually going to happen. And Starmer’s recent spate of flag-waving, militaristic public pronouncements makes perfect sense, understood as an effort to provide European leaders a face-saving means of acceding to defense spending increases Trump has requested, without looking too slavishly obedient to a POTUS whose style they dislike. Perhaps Starmer hopes that such gestures will forestall an overall American withdrawal, from its longstanding role underwriting European stability.

But assuming this is right, can Britain and Europe follow through on such noises to American satisfaction? The difficulty here is at least twofold. Firstly, as Wolfgang Munchau has pointed out, after some decades of comfortable post-nationalism European defense capability is woefully etiolated. To this we can also add the question of whether the current British regime commands enough public affection to expect patriotic service when a growing subset of the electorate regards their government as fundamentally illegitimate – not least thanks to a perceived cross-party refusal to respond to popular demand and reduce immigration.

But whether or not Cockney John is right about migrants’ likely attitude to conscription, mass migration is arguably an effect of soft Britpopper patriotism rather than its cause. That is: it was the Britpopper vision of national identity as fuzzy, open, and opt-in that enabled the political consensus in favor of mass migration to form. And if it’s really true that only 11% of British youth would be willing to fight for Britain, that means 89% wouldn’t. Recent figures suggest about 25% of young British people are from minority ethnic backgrounds. This suggests that at least some – maybe a lot – of the young people swearing off patriotism must be white British. Even if Cockney John does have a point, migration is clearly not the only thing killing British patriotism.

And this points to the most profound way that Britpoppers have created our defense predicament: it’s their kids who were raised with the soft-patriotic, End-of-History version of national identity. And as it turns out, an ingroup without an outgroup doesn’t seem potent enough to inspire any kind of warlike spirit. So maybe Britpoppers are frenziedly banging the drums of war now, because they’ve realized it was them.

In their certainty that the American security-blanket would last forever, many raised their own kids to believe in a version of patriotism with only friends, no enemies. Now, belatedly, they’ve realized that actually there are plenty of enemies still out there. But their kids don’t believe them. So the yelling is perhaps an attempt, all too late, to be heard over their offspring’s AirPods. Should it fail, we will need to ask, with some urgency: who will don the “boots” Starmer has promised “on the ground”? I doubt somehow it’ll be the Cool Britannia generation.

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.

More from this author

Bop House will make you a porn star

By Poppy Sowerby

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?

Suggested reading

How to build an eco-zealot

By Nicholas Harris

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.

It wasn’t one of Morrissey’s more successful gigs. He was the support act at a much-anticipated reunion of Madness, a band who drew a very different crowd to him, and he wasn’t entirely appreciated. He looked increasingly displeased, truncated his set, and then withdrew from the second of the two nights, complaining about “the abysmal behaviour of a small group of loathsome yobbos”. (He later refined this to “a small selection of rather dull North Londoners”.) Meanwhile in America, tickets for his forthcoming show at the Hollywood Bowl sold out in 23 minutes, beating the record set by the Beatles. Now he knew how Jesus felt: a prophet being without honour in his own country and among his own kin.

It was ironic, then, that “Glamorous Glue” should have been, in part, a lament for a lost British culture, swamped by a wave of Americanisation. “London is dead,” he sang — to fans of the most London act this side of Ian Dury (also on the bill).

It wasn’t the Union Jack that irked the hostile sections of the crowd. Their reaction was more to do with long hours of drinking, an impatience to relive their younger days with the Nutty Boys, and a suspicion of a bloke from Manchester wearing a gold-lamé shirt, split to the waist, prancing about in front of images of androgynous-looking skinhead girls. The previous year Morrissey had said his perfect audience would be “skinheads in nail polish”, but there weren’t many of them in Finsbury Park 30 years ago.

On the other hand, it very definitely was the Union Jack that provoked the NME to devote its front cover and five inside pages — some 6,000 words — to that question of whether he’d gone too far this time. Because the flag had been seen as deeply suspect in Leftish culture for some time. It conjured up images of the Empire, now regarded as a Bad Thing in progressive circles, and it had become associated with extreme-Right groups. There was a fine line between patriotism and racism, and the national flag was seen to sprawl all over it. There was, proclaimed the NME, no room for irony when it came to “the Union Jack, with all its ambiguities”. The paper’s charge sheet against Morrissey cited song lyrics and quotes from interviews, to show that he had long been “toying with far-Right/fascist imagery, and even of racism itself”, with the flag as the last straw. Stopping short of calling him a racist, the paper concluded that “he has continued to pick away at the scab of race relations”.

Revisited three decades on, the striking feature of the NME’s denunciation is how dated it all seems for the time. The reference points are those of the Seventies: skinheads, football hooligans, the National Front. And there’s mention of previous transgressors Eric Clapton and David Bowie, whose comments in 1976 had prompted the creation of Rock Against Racism. (Clapton had spoken in support of Enoch Powell; Bowie nominated himself as a fascist dictator for Britain.) It feels like a rear-view mirror, looking back to the dawn of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, when post-punk pop could be both oppositional and successful, and when the circulation of the NME was twice what it now was. It’s like the last shout of a passing era.

More from this author

The rise of Cruel Britannia

By Alwyn W. Turner

Ten months later, a new Manchester band, Oasis, began circulating a demo tape, the cover of which had an image of the Union Jack swirling towards the centre as though disappearing down a plughole. “It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter,” explained Liam Gallagher. “We’re here to do something about it.” It wasn’t long before the Union Jack was all over popular music, from Noel Gallagher’s guitar and Geri Halliwell’s mini-dress to David Bowie’s distressed frock-coat designed by Alexander McQueen. A new day had dawned, had it not?

In this era of cultural branding — Britpop, Cool Britannia, the YBAs — the Union Jack was flown proudly as the national trademark. The associations now were with the Swinging Sixties, when Britain was losing an empire and finding a new role as purveyor of music, movies and style to the world, when the flag had been ubiquitous, celebrated as a classic design by commerce and culture alike. In the Nineties resurgence of popular culture, the Union Jack spoke of Peter Blake and The Who rather than Enoch Powell or the Raj.

And where culture went, politics was sure to follow. Tony Blair’s speech to the 1996 Labour conference ended with a projection of the flag, much to the horror of the old Left. “It was the National Front,” shuddered Tony Benn, in his diary, “and it made me absolutely sick.” But Benn was stuck in the past as well, and couldn’t appreciate that things were different now. The title of Blair’s recently published book spelt it out: New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. The Union Jack was the symbol of this reborn nation. “We have reclaimed the flag,” declared Peter Mandelson. “It is restored as an emblem of national pride and diversity. Restored from years as a symbol of division and intolerance.”

More from this author

How James O'Brien destroyed the phone-in

By Alwyn W. Turner

It was fun, it was colourful, it had no baggage, none of those “ambiguities” that once troubled the NME, because New Labour memories were too short to include the imperial past. Admittedly, there was a moment when one of Blair’s speeches in the 1997 election campaign was initially written to address a longer history, but only in celebratory terms: “I am proud of the British Empire.” And even that didn’t happen, because Robin Cook, the shadow Foreign Secretary, had the sentence deleted from the draft.

Meanwhile, the fear of neo-Nazis had receded so far that the Euro 96 football tournament even saw the Cross of St George adopted by England fans. This wasn’t a reclaiming, since it had never been much-used except by the far-Right. It became sufficiently popular to attract politicians, and, come Euro 2004, Downing Street itself was flying the St George Cross — believed to be for the first time ever — to celebrate England’s triumphant progress to a quarter-final defeat on penalties. It annoyed some Scots, but it was typical of Blair’s gesture populism.

Just as characteristic was that Gordon Brown should decide to fly the same flag over Downing Street on St George’s Day 2008. Brown worried a good deal that the English might take against him for being so Scottish, but his fears were just an acute form of New Labour’s wider obsession with being seen as patriotic. Seeking to spike Tory guns, Blair’s party laid claim to the entire nation. “New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole,” declared the manifesto in 1997. “Our values are the same: the equal worth of all, with no one cast aside; fairness and justice within strong communities.”

More from this author

The Tory conference that caused Brexit

By Alwyn W. Turner

If that seemed a little vague, there was no greater precision forthcoming. Blair later talked about “standing up for British values — for example, rights coupled with responsibilities, duty, fair play and open-mindedness”, which got us precisely nowhere. His spokesperson blurred the picture even more: “Britishness to us is about issues as varied as how you manage the economy, the approach you take to issues like unemployment, your vision of society.” And Brown merely reheated the same thin gruel, speaking of “common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is.” If none of it quite made sense, you could always clutch at the flag to cover a multitude of meanderings. For a while, bolstered by the imagery of Cool Britannia, it did help deflect criticism of a government that sought greater integration into the European Union, that encouraged immigration on an unprecedented level, that allowed the US to set its foreign policy.

But the tide was turning, both culturally and politically. There was a slow Tory resurgence: from their low-point in 1997, they increased their share of the vote in the next six elections. And by the time of the 2009 European Parliament elections — when Labour was beaten into third place by Ukip and the BNP picked up close to a million votes — the talk was of recession, illegal war, MPs’ expenses and grooming gangs.

If the NME’s attack on Morrissey provided a full stop to a period of politically engaged, alternative culture, then Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics did the same for Cool Britannia and New Labour. Which is why it’s so fondly remembered by so many, a last hurrah for a happier time. The Industrial Revolution, the NHS, post-1960 popular culture — it was enough to make you feel proud of a creative, communal, cool nation.

Suggested reading

Morrissey will never be cancelled

By Douglas Coupland

Things are different now. Flags are different.

On the day of the Rochester & Stroud by-election in November 2014, Emily Thornberry tweeted a photo of a white van parked outside a nondescript yellow-brick house, on the side of which hung three St George flags. The picture was captioned “Image from #Rochester”, and it was widely seen as being a patronising, Islingtonian sneer. Even as Ukip was winning the by-election, Thornberry resigned from her post as shadow attorney general, and historian turned Labour MP Tristram Hunt spelt out the official position: “We are hugely in favour in the Labour Party of people expressing pride in their national identity and national symbols.”

No one was convinced. No one believed for a second that Hunt, let alone Thornberry, would ever dream of draping a flag from their own houses. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was done in polite society, and anyway the flags — both the Union Jack and the St George Cross — were again being treated with suspicion: they were, to put it bluntly, a bit Ukip-y.

This is all the more so since the 2016 referendum, of course. The Union Jack is now seen by some — on both sides — as anti-European. A photo of it on Twitter will prompt a wave of denunciations of “flag-shaggers” (often from those with an EU flag in their profile). And since the creative industries — to use Blairite terminology — were and still are predominantly pro-Remain, popular culture takes a less celebratory line. The modern equivalent of Geri Halliwell’s frock at the 1997 Brit Awards was Stormzy’s Union Jack stab vest, designed by Banksy, at Glastonbury in 2019, a much darker vision of the nation. The artists and musicians have moved on.

Suggested reading

New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

All of which gives Sir Keir Starmer a problem. Post-Brexit, post-Corbyn, like Blair he’s anxious to assert his patriotic credentials. But popular culture isn’t with him, and the brazen flag-waving of the Nineties isn’t appropriate now. Instead, he treats the Union Jack with reverence, a furled flag on either side of the quasi-presidential podium for a speech, or next to him behind a statesman’s desk as he talks frankly and seriously to the nation. It’s meant to be prime ministerial, but that also means that he’s using the same imagery as the actual prime minister, both the current incumbent and his likely successor. In his glory years, Blair went further than that, arguing that it was the Tories who were unpatriotic: “It is no good waving the fabric of the flag when you have spent 16 years tearing apart the fabric of our nation.”

On the other hand, the Union Jack has made a notable comeback in retail circles. Culture and commerce have parted company. As the post-Brexit advertising for Vauxhall cars — “a British brand since 1903” — suggests, the market is convinced that there’s mileage in the old flag yet. The meat aisle in Aldi is adorned with the Union Jack, and it appears on products from milk and chicken thighs to Shreddies and strawberries — even on sugar that has been grown and refined abroad but packaged in Britain. It’s also to be found on Scotch beef, to the irritation of those Scottish nationalists who would rather see the use of the Saltire. And, presumably, to the fury of the militantly vegan Morrissey.

On 28 May, 1979, the occasion of Greece’s accession to the European Economic Community, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then president of France delivered a speech in Athens and declared: “Europe without Greece would not be Europe… We are all, in our language and thought processes, children of Greek civilisation…” Today, he concluded, “Europe is rediscovering Europe.”

A century or so earlier, the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. Not to be outdone in philhellenism, commenting in 1941 on the Greek resistance to the Italian and German invaders, Winston Churchill famously added: “Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.”

Surely any people showered with such lavish praise by influential foreigners would be forgiven for taking a certain pride in their culture. For Greeks used to hearing folks like Giscard d’Estaing insist that Greece is Europe, and vice versa, telling a pollster that they do not believe their culture to be superior would be tantamount to questioning the superiority of European civilisation. In fact, from a Greek’s perspective, it is the equivalent of asking the French, German, Spanish or Dutch to respond, with a yes or no answer, to the silly question: “Is European civilisation better or worse than other civilisations?” In this sense, modern Greeks are neither more nor less culturally chauvinist than Europeans who celebrate European civilisation as if the horrors of European colonialism had never happened.

But ask us Greeks about modern Greek culture and you will get a very different response. Sure enough, we have our fair share of looney ultra-nationalists, some of whom believe that Darwinism applies to every human except the Greeks, who stem from some divine extra-terrestrial gene. Yet the vast majority of my countrymen and women think very little of our contemporary culture, ways and behaviours. The past decade, especially since our wholesale bankruptcy, has left us reeling, insecure and verging on self-loathing.

More from this author

Ukraine cannot win this war

By Yanis Varoufakis

Yes, we still appreciate the glowing successes of Greeks who left Greece in search of a better life elsewhere. Yes, we celebrate the odd athletic victory and we appreciate the beauty of Greece’s land, sea and environment. Yes, we maintain some pride in uniquely Greek concepts like philotimia — a penchant for acting in a dignified way simply for the hell of it. But at the same time, we fear that these qualities, natural and spiritual, have been diluted terribly in recent decades; partly because we neglected and cannibalised them (our monstrous investment in tourism, for example), and partly because of a European Union that helped us lose our way.

When Giscard d’Estaing made his 1979 speech, a year before northern Europe formally admitted us to the EU, most Greeks rejoiced. Alas, we soon realised that a general loss of dignity was the hefty price we would end up paying for the privilege. I am often asked why Europe first let us Greeks into the Common Market and later into the euro. The correct answer sounds improbable today: because, back in 1979 when Giscard was waxing lyrical about Greek civilisation, the Greek state had one of the lowest levels of public debt in Europe and its citizens had next to none. Yes, we were a poor people but we managed within our modest means, living and breathing paradigms of parsimony. That’s what we brought into the EU: low debt and high levels of home ownership — a combination that was the Western banker’s wet dream.

Even in 1999, just before we were admitted to the euro, barely any Greeks had a mortgage, let alone a credit card. However, to enter Europe we had to lower our trade barriers and, later, to dismantle all capital controls. Immediately, a tsunami of imports, money and loans left northern Europe for Greece. Not that we resisted it, hungry as we were for the material trappings of modernity. Before we knew it, our factories were shut (and converted into warehouses for the imported washing machines and fridges that were once manufactured here); our bank accounts went from thin black to deep red; our dignity and philotimia were torn asunder.

Suggested reading

Who set Greece on fire?

By Aris Roussinos

It was only a matter of time before the global debt and banking bubble burst, before the same Europeans and Americans who once praised us as the pillars of Western civilisation turned on us. Conveniently ignoring that they had insisted we borrow mountains of their money — so we could buy their cars, washing machines and haute couture — they did not hesitate to call us all sorts of names unfit to print here.

Worse still, under our breath, we call ourselves similar names. When talking to each other, we have no qualms of being highly self-critical, often bordering on self-hatred. No Greek I know would, for instance, disagree with David Holden, the Times journalist who in 1972 depicted Greece as “rich in talent and poor in resources, developed in its tastes and underdeveloped in its capacities”. And so partly out of a false dedication to not disappointing those who talk up Greek civilisation, and partly due to our anger with ourselves and with a Europe that led us astray before treating us like cattle that lost their market price, we respond to idiotic survey questions with fake pride. Of course, we know it is fake — but, then again, fake pride is the last resort for those who have forfeited the real thing.

Indeed, the world has been turned upside down: liberal pundits bedeck their Twitter profiles with blue and yellow bunting, declaring the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders, while self-styled American nationalists make sympathetic excuses for the revanchist ambitions of Russia’s sprawling, multiethnic empire. So is nationalism acceptable again in polite society?

The belief that there is such a thing as a Ukrainian people, who speak a Ukrainian language and are the shared heirs to a common Ukrainian culture, and who therefore have the right to self-governance in an independent Ukrainian nation state is by definition a nationalist statement. That is what nationalism is: in the anthropologist and theorist of nationalism Ernest Gellner’s pithy definition, “nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent”.

Furthermore, for Gellner, “if the rulers of the political unit belong to a nation other than that of the majority of the ruled”, for example, “through the incorporation of the national territory in a larger empire” (as would be the case if Ukrainian-populated territories were absorbed by conquest into the Russian Federation), “this, for nationalists, constitutes a quite outstandingly intolerable breach of political propriety”. By this definition, most people reading this would be nationalists — or Ukrainian nationalists by proxy — and rightly so: it offends our basic moral sense of how things should be that Putin could decide otherwise.

Yet nationalism has become, in recent decades, an unfashionable doctrine. A product of 18th and 19th-century liberalism, which aimed to liberate the small peoples of Europe from the grip of sclerotic empires either unresponsive to their needs or directly oppressive, nationalism became taboo after the Second World War, following the destruction wrought by Nazi German and Italian imperialism on the European continent.

A meaningless folk distinction between “nationalism” and “patriotism” has become current among many non-academic pundits, in which “nationalism” is simply “patriotism, but bad” and “patriotism” merely the safely-neutered version of nationalism. This seemingly derives from Orwell’s essay Notes On Nationalism, in which the requirement of a jobbing journalist to churn out copy on time has been granted an afterlife far longer than it deserves. The fact that Orwell’s primary examples of “nationalism” in the essay are Communism and political Catholicism indicates the analytical uselessness of his definitions: then as now, “nationalism”, like “fascism”, is just a catch-all descriptor for things the writer happens to dislike.

More from this author

The battle for Moldova

By Aris Roussinos

At a slightly higher level, much of the debate on nationalism — and the certainty that it is both a bad thing and a superseded relic of a destructive past — derives from the “Modernist thesis” of its origins. This was most notably put forward in the Seventies and Eighties by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, the last of whose book, Imagined Communities, is probably only matched by Edward Said’s Orientalism for its deleterious effects on political discourse through skim-reading by lazy undergraduates.

There is not the space in this essay to adequately deconstruct the Modernist thesis on the origins of nationalism (interested readers should turn to Anthony D. Smith’s Nationalism and Modernism for that), but to summarise: rather than nationalism being a product of the political aspirations of pre-existing nations, nationalism creates nations, as social elites elevate aspects of peasant folk cultures into a never-before-existing high culture with political secession from a multiethnic imperium as their goal.

As the historian Richard Drayton notes in a recent essay historicising the Modernist turn: “Since around 1980 social constructionist views of nationalism have been predominant, seeing it as principally artificial, as invented tradition, a fictive relationship of ethnicity to culture to territory to political destiny propagated by manipulative elites who are the beneficiaries of imagined communities and the nation state.” This is the hegemonic understanding of nationalism among the educated classes of the West, through dissemination of the Modernist thesis through university education.

Yet as Smith notes sadly of Anderson’s reception, “the postmodernist reading, and its accompanying cultural analysis, can always be detached from its modernist moorings”. Anderson’s focused emphasis on print capitalism has been sidelined, and instead it is “the role of imagination, and the idea of the nation as a discourse to be interrogated and deconstructed, that have proved most influential… developed by the many theorists in the postmodernist traditions who have drawn their inspiration from a partial reading of Anderson’s work.”

The “imagined community” is thus misread as an imaginary one, an entirely fictional construct of political elites with little basis in reality. As Smith notes, both Gellner and Hobsbawm agreed, to differing degrees, that nationalism required some pre-existing sense of social or ethnic cohesion to work, and “with the exception of Hobsbawm, most modernists have in fact been reticent about the fate of the national state and the prospects of nationalism. It has been left to so-called ‘postmodernists’ to proclaim the demise of the ‘nation state’ through an overwhelming combination of political dependence, economic globalisation, mass communications and cultural hybridisation.”

This position reaches its most debased and vulgar downstream form in the iconoclastic glee with which, say, British Twitter liberals race to inform us each April 23 that actually St George was a Palestinian refugee or Turkish immigrant or whatever they deem most shocking to their notional English nationalist readers. Surely now, newly-armed with this brave puncturing of national-mythmaking, the backward old certainties must fall away, with the harrumphing major or knuckle-tattooed yob finally accepting, chastened, the borderless utopia of global liberalism? This is, sadly, the intellectual terminus of the Modernist thesis.

More from this author

What Harry Flashman teaches us about empire

By Aris Roussinos

Yet the Twitter liberals share a most unlikely ally in what they view as their iconoclastic deconstructing of the nation state, and its petty myths: Putin himself. In his rambling 2021 essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin adopted the tropes of the Modernist thesis to prove his contention that the Ukrainian nation has no rightful existence outside Russia’s embrace.

Putin begins by emphasising the diverse origins of the “Slavic and other tribes” across the ancient Rus state, united by shared dynastic rule and latterly a common language and faith. He emphasises the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Ukrainian lands, noting that: “the south-western lands of the Russian Empire, Malorussia and Novorossiya, and the Crimea developed as ethnically and religiously diverse entities. Crimean Tatars, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Karaites, Krymchaks, Bulgarians, Poles, Serbs, Germans, and other peoples lived here.”

Yet over time, as in Gellner and Hobsbawm’s narrative of nationalist development, “the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions,” including elevating folk dialects into a standardised Ukrainian language. In Putin’s Modernist theory of Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian elites, through the logic of seeking their own advancement, created a Ukrainian nation where none had existed before, just as Gellner characterises the ideal nationalism of his fictional Ruritania.

Just like Hobsbawm, Putin blames Lenin’s Nationality Policy for invigorating nationalist sentiment among Russia’s subject peoples, claiming that the 1924 Constitution “planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb”, while warning that Ukrainian nationalism is forcing “the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state” in “a country, as I have already noted, that is very complex in terms of its territorial, national and linguistic composition, and its history of formation”.

The Modernist thesis on nationalism, and on the fraudulent novelty of the nation state, is thus put to effective use for Russian imperialist purposes. We can argue further that the Modernist thesis is tacitly imperialist, in that it views nationalism as a destructive innovation with broadly deleterious effects, compared with the benign patchwork of faiths and languages in the empires that preceded it. Both Hobsbawm and Gellner were born in the wreckage of the multiethnic Habsburg Empire, and both preferred it to what followed, in their cases quite rationally: both fled the rise of the Nazis for England and academia (Anderson, from an aristocratic Anglo-Irish background like his brother Perry, also had a complicated family relationship with nationalism).

In Hobsbawm’s case — he would write to a friend that “I remain in the curious position of disliking, distrusting, disapproving and fearing nationalism wherever it exists” — the latent imperialism of the Modernist thesis in general (which by highlighting the novel, unnatural nature of nationalism makes its predecessor “natural” by default) was made explicit. He regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union, remained one of its last supporters in British intellectual life, and would inform an audience of Budapest students in 1993 that “although many of you will not welcome my saying so, that up to a point [the USSR] worked better than anything since the break-up of the monarchies in 1918. For the common citizens of the more backward countries in the region — say Slovakia and much of the Balkan peninsula — it was probably the best period in their history”.

More from this author

Is this Ukraine's last chance for peace?

By Aris Roussinos

It’s worth noting here that Hobsbawm wrote in to the Daily Worker on the topic of the USSR’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising to say that “While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this is possible.” Perhaps we can therefore term him a moderate, even conservative imperialist. On the topic of Ukraine, he would note that “Ukraine remained relatively quiet while Baltic and Caucasian republics demanded secession, remained under the control of the local Communist Party leadership, and did not resign itself [my emphasis] to separation until after the failed coup of August 1991 destroyed the USSR”. As does Putin, Hobsbawm emphasises that “Russians, in the nineteenth century, regarded themselves as Russians, and this included many Ukrainians and Belorussians, today zealous defenders of their national identity.”

Observing Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he warned that “the eggs of Versailles and Brest-Litowsk are still hatching”. For Hobsbawm, “the permanent collapse of the Habsburg and Turkish empires and the short-lived collapse of the Tsarist Russian empire produced the same set of national successor-states with the same sort of problems” leading inexorably to “mass murder or forced mass migration… However, unlike the Habsburgs and the Ottoman empire, the multi-national Russian empire survived for another three generations”, while “Victory in the Civil War eliminated the possibility of Ukrainian separatism”.

As with Marx himself, a certain wistful conservatism can be glimpsed in the Modernist worldview, with Gellner observing sadly of capitalist modernity that “the old structures are dissipated and largely replaced by an internally random and fluid totality… There is very little in the way of any effective, binding organisation at any level between the individual and the total community”, paving the way for nationalism to fill the gap.

But then, as Drayton notes of the Modernists: “It is usually forgotten that these kinds of arguments about the fraudulence of nationalism first emerged on the Right of European politics. From Klemens von Metternich’s attempt with the Carlsbad Decrees to force the nationalist genie back into its bottle, to the reactionary Catholic and monarchist regionalist response of figures such as Charles Maurras to the Third Republic in France, the proposition was made that nationalism was artificial, a subversive project of sinister minorities.”

As nostalgic as any throne-and-altar Catholic Integralist for the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, Hobsbawm was as paradoxically conservative as only committed Marxists and genuine reactionaries can be, seeking a return to the polyglot imperium shattered by nationalism, under a new communist guise. A fierce critic of the Wilsonian liberalism that saw Europe’s great multi-ethnic empires divided into squabbling ethnostates, Hobsbawm takes the Modernist thesis to its conclusion. His conscious undermining of the symbolic narratives undergirding shared nationhood, and of the desire for political autonomy deriving from them, finds dark echoes in Putin’s claims today.

Where does all this leave us? As Gellner notes of nationalism, “if we are to understand the fate of these societies, we are sometimes obliged to look carefully at the words, doctrines and arguments of the thinkers who forged the faiths that dominate them”. As Hobsbawm observes, nationalism’s proponents were historically the educated classes: “the lower and middle professional, administrative and intellectual strata”, and “the people who formulate those myths and inventions are educated people: schoolteachers lay and clerical, professors (not many, I hope), journalists, television and radio producers. Today most of them will have gone to some university.”

But today of course, this stratum of society does not adhere to nationalist ideals: it has instead adopted a vulgar Postmodernist anti-nationalist ethos that ultimately derives much of its tropes from a cursory reading of Hobsbawm, Gellner, Anderson and others. How did this come to be the case?

Suggested reading

Why the English don't like flag-waving

By Robert Colls

Smith notes that, through the work of writers such as Stuart Hall, a Postmodernist extrapolation of the modernist thesis creates “alternative discourses of peripheral ethnicity, newly constructed out of popular experiences, and predicated on the celebration of diversity”, a new, diverse Imagined Community for an era of mass immigration which “is the premise, and justification, of the politics of multiculturalism”.

Similarly, Drayton observes that “this rise of historiographical skepticism toward nationalism in the Seventies coincided with the attacks from the Right on the legitimacy of the Keynesian and the socialist developmental state, and on the claims of Third World states to a new international economic and political order… The secret sharers of the analysis of Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Fred Cooper” were the neoliberals “who through the Washington consensus and ‘structural adjustment’ sought to limit the postcolonial state’s power to intervene in its economy and social welfare” and the liberal imperialists “who sought to legitimise the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s intervention in Yugoslavia and the Iraq and ­Libyan wars”.

When the rising American state’s rivals in 1918 were sprawling, multinational empires, the official doctrine of the US was to break them up into self-determining nation states. Now that the US is itself a sprawling, multiethnic empire, whose long-term survival seems as questionable as that of Austria-Hungary at the turn of the last century, the emphasis is — perhaps we can now say was — on the fictitious backwardness of the nation-state ideal, and the progressive necessity of its dissolution, and incorporation into a globalised world. This is, as Smith observes, a globalised culture which “though it presents itself as universal, bears the imprint of its origins and flows from a single source, the United States”.

There is then an imperialist quality, at times latent, at other times overt, in the hostility to nationalism displayed by both the post-Marxist, progressive Left and by the nakedly imperialist reactionary Right. Has nationalism therefore returned to the liberal fold, and will liberals, enraptured by Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination, fall back in love with nationalism? That is perhaps unlikely: yet analysis of the intellectual origins of the discourse shaping our world provides hints as to the future directions of our politics, in all their contradictions and ambiguity.

Writing in 1990 just before the collapse of his beloved Soviet Union, Hobsbawm would claim that “the very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress in the study and analysis of nations and nationalism suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak. The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.” The willingness of younger historians to place the Modernist thesis itself in historical context as an ideological construct of intellectual elites at a very specific, vanished political moment suggests the same could more accurately be said of the post-national era.

As Smith warns, “Nationalism will not be easily tamed and categorised to fit the prescriptions of moral and political philosophers”. Without returning to an idealistic faith in the progressive certainties of Communism or capitalist globalisation, or subsuming ourselves in a revived imperial polity, it is doubtful there is any alternative to the nation state, for the love of which ordinary Ukrainians, of all political persuasions, are fighting and dying right now.

It is 40 years now since the outbreak of the Falklands War, one of the strangest, most colourful and most popular conflicts in British military history. Today this ten-week campaign to free the South Atlantic islands from Argentine occupation seems like a moment from a vanished age. But that was how it felt at the time, too: a scene from history, a colossal costume drama, a self-conscious re-enactment of triumphs past.

On the day the Invincible sailed, Margaret Thatcher quoted Queen Victoria: “Failure? The possibilities do not exist.” In the Sun, executives put up Winston Churchill’s portrait. And as the travel writer Jonathan Raban watched the departure of the Task Force on television, he thought it was like a historical pageant, complete with “pipe bands, bunting, flags, kisses, tears, waved handkerchiefs”. He regarded the whole exercise with deep derision, until the picture blurred and he realised that, despite himself, he was crying.

For many people the Falklands War was only too real. There were serious issues and genuine lives at stake, not just for the 1,813 islanders who had woken to find military vehicles roaring down their little streets, but for the tens of thousands of Argentine conscripts and British servicemen who were soon to be plunged into the nightmare of combat. And although polls suggest that about eight out of ten Britons strongly supported it, there were always those who considered it a mistake, a tragedy, even a crime. A certain Jeremy Corbyn thought it a “Tory plot to keep their money-making friends in business”. The novelist Margaret Drabble considered it a “frenzied outburst of dying power”. A far better writer, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, famously called it “two bald men arguing over a comb”. That seems an odd analogy, though, for almost 2,000 blameless sheep farmers, who had no desire to be ruled by a junta that threw dissenters out of helicopters.

One common view of the Falklands campaign is that it was Britain’s last colonial war. But this strikes me as very unpersuasive. When we think of colonial wars, we think of wars of conquest by white men in pith helmets against brown-skinned underdogs. We think of embattled imperialists struggling to stave off a nationalist uprising, or fighting in defence of white settlers against a native majority. But the Falklands War was none of those things. There was no oppressed indigenous majority — except perhaps for the islanders themselves, some of whom had been there since the 1830s. As for the Argentines, their Spanish and Italian surnames were a dead giveaway. Indeed, few countries in the Americas had done a more thorough job of eliminating their original inhabitants.

More from this author

Putin can't win a Cold War

By Dominic Sandbrook

What of the British? For all the “Empire Strikes Back” headlines, they had actually spent the last decade trying to give the islands away. Less than 18 months before the invasion, Mrs Thatcher had sent the chain-smoking Nicholas Ridley to urge the islanders to accept a sovereignty deal with Buenos Aires. His words have a blackly ironic ring today. “Do you want the Argentinians invading you and us kicking them out in a state of perpetual war?… I mean, it’s all very well sitting here saying someone else must come and kick the Argentinians out. Of course we will, but is that good for sheep farming, for fishing, for looking for oil, for all your futures, for your children, and your grand­children and your great­-grand­children?”

On paper, much of what he said was perfectly true. Not unsurprisingly, however, it went down like a lead balloon. When Ridley flew home, the islanders saw him off with a loudspeaker playing Land of Hope and Glory, This Land Is Our Land and We Shall Not Be Moved. He didn’t come back.

Not a war of decolonisation, then. And still less a Victorian war of conquest. Yet there’s no denying that this was a war with a sense of history. On the morning the Task Force sailed, the Daily Mail interviewed a veteran of the First World War, Tommy Mallen, for whom it had been a day of catharsis. “I thought England was done for, spineless, a doormat for the world,” he said. “I’d pass the war memorials or see Nelson’s Victory and wonder what it had all been for. But I was wrong, thank God. We are still a proud country, and we’ll still protect our own.”

The fleet’s commander, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, said much the same. Two months later, bursting with pride after the successful landing at San Carlos, he too looked back to the age of Nelson. “What difference,” he wondered, “between Ardent, crippled and burning, still fighting and Sir Richard Grenville’s Revenge all those centuries ago? Or between this and that October day off Cape Trafalgar as Nelson and Hardy walked the quarter deck of the Victory shortly after noon?”

The references to Nelson, the most romantic of all British patriotic heroes, were no accident. From start to finish there was something oddly 18th-century about the Falklands campaign, not least the fact that so much of it involved the high seas. One of its many ironies was that until the Argentines invaded, the Thatcher government had been planning to slash the Royal Navy to the bone. But the spectacle of the Task Force ploughing through the Atlantic was perfectly calculated to stir the hearts of a seafaring people who had grown up with tales of Drake and Nelson. And from the moment the fleet left, press and public alike relished the connections with Britain’s maritime history. In that respect, the news editor of the Sun, who took to wearing a naval cap and demanded that his subordinates address him as Commander, spoke for millions.

More from this author

Kyiv will rise again

By Dominic Sandbrook

Today much of the Sun’s coverage would have sensitive readers running for the hills. The “GOTCHA” headline, glorying in the sinking of the General Belgrano, was merely the most infamous example in a long series: the repeated admonitions to “STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA”, the paper’s “Argy-­Bargie” joke column, even its operation to airlift 50 gigantic posters of Page Three girls to the RAF base at Ascension Island.

Yet none of this would have seemed shocking to newspaper readers in 18th-century London. Britain fought at least seven major campaigns against the Spanish Empire in the course of the 18th century, from the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins’s Ear to the Seven Years’ War and the struggle against Napoleon, and the press coverage back then was much the same. On one side, the jolly, earthy, open-hearted Jack Tars, the defenders of individual liberty and plain-speaking Protestantism. On the other, the inheritors of Spain’s Black Legend: flamboyant, superstitious and unspeakably cruel. “A jumped-­up junta of barbarous men,” roared one Tory backbencher. “The very thought that our people, 1,800 people of British blood and bone, could be left in the hands of such criminals is enough to make any normal Englishman’s blood boil,” thundered another.

He was speaking in the spring of 1982, but he could so easily have been talking two centuries earlier. Indeed, it’s striking how often MPs reached for parallels, not just with the Second World War, but with the campaigns against the Spanish, the French and other similarly sallow and superstitious foreigners. “Let us hear no more about logistics — how difficult it is to travel long distances,” declared the Tory backbencher Edward du Cann. “I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras. We have nothing to lose now except our honour!”

History never repeats itself, of course. But when you start noticing the Georgian resonances, it’s hard to stop. A few months after the Task Force returned in triumph, the social commentator Peter York claimed that the single most powerful “piece of everyday symbolism” in the country was the mock-Georgian front door, “strong and safe and solid… a revisionist burst of bourgeois individualism”. The members of Visage, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, with their whitened faces, billowing pantaloons and over-elaborate eye make-up, would have made superb extras in a stage revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. So too would the greatest sporting icon of the age, whom you can easily imagine roaring out “Hearts of Oak” on the deck of the Victory.

As the cricket writer Derek Hodgson put it: “Regency England would have recognised him instantly as the man who could ride to hounds from dawn, fight 25 rounds bare-knuckle of an afternoon, dine on a mountain of boiled mutton, roast beef, plum duff and cheddar cheese, washed down by ale and claret, and top it off with a bottle of brandy: a man who proclaimed one Englishman worth 10 scurvy foreigners. For Ian Botham read John Bull.”

More from this author

How to lose a leadership election

By Dominic Sandbrook

Even Margaret Thatcher, so often seen as a Victorian Gradgrind, had her Georgian side. When she moved into 10 Downing Street, she specifically requested paintings of Nelson, Wellington and George II. At a reception in the autumn of 1982, she gave the journalist Hugo Young a tour of the new paintings, proudly pointing out George I, Sir Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Younger and “other admirals and soldiers”. And when, in her memoirs, she discusses the moment she became Prime Minister, whom does she quote? Not Churchill, but Pitt the Elder: “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.”

Perhaps it was no wonder, then, that the Falklands War felt like an eighteenth-century throwback. In a country shorn of its imperial pretensions, struggling to find a new place in the world, it revived the image of a buccaneering, free-trading, maritime people, sometimes boorish, often vulgar, but always staunch in the defence of freedom. Here was the Britishness — or perhaps more accurately, the Englishness — of Rule Britannia, of James Wolfe at Quebec and H. Jones at Goose Green, swashbuckling martyrs in the national cause. It was cynical and sentimental, ruthless and romantic, fervently patriotic and often aggressively populist. Some people hated it. But deep down, most felt its emotional pull.

For almost two centuries it had been buried beneath a veneer of Victorianism, but it had never disappeared. “It must have always been there,” wrote the columnist George Gale on the day of victory, “for we have seen it flooding back.” Britain, agreed Margaret Thatcher, “has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.”

But it was an even more controversial politician who put it best. “A change has come about in Britain,” wrote Enoch Powell. “We are ourselves again.”

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the Falklands War in The Rest is History.

Without a moment’s hesitation, I corrected them. I told them that I was intent upon returning to my own country, for good or for ill. My friends were mildly stunned. I like Americans — so much that I married one. But I know where I belong: here in Britain.

Quite why I feel this way is not easy to explain. Lots of people who were born here and who live here don’t feel that way — or at least, they don’t appear to. And yet it has determined the direction of the whole of my life. In the words of W. H. Auden, I accept the fate I am. I accept it as a vocation to be true to my deeply felt attachment — and now to confess it.

I say ‘confess’, because throughout my life I have been acutely aware that in the educated, middle-class social circles of my own generation, patriotism has been regarded — and is still regarded — as embarrassing. I am aware that, if old and dear friends in Oxford and in London, politically centrist with a leaning to the Left, read this, there will be a sharp intake of breath and a sucking of teeth — a mental stepping back, as if they’d just encountered something diseased.

I have been aware of the un-coolness of patriotism among members of my own class and generation for all of my life, which is why I have suppressed it. I have always felt it, but rarely expressed it — because I assumed that ‘everyone else’ must know better. However, older age, I have found, confers two benefits: first, one finally knows what one thinks; and second, one cares less for what other people think. So, I now say what I have always felt. I confess the truth: I am a British patriot.

Suggested reading

What Brexiteers get wrong about empire

By Ferdinand Mount

Accordingly, I have become critical of my self-styled ‘progressive’ friends. Not critical, necessarily, of their attachment to Europe, but critical of their habitual silence over the signal blessings that life in this country has conferred on them — and critical, most of all, of their habitual tendency to denigrate it, unnecessarily and irrationally.

Hilary Mantel, the famous author of Wolf Hall, is not a friend of mine, but she does represent lots of people I know. Last September she told the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, that she’s planning on moving to Ireland, so that she can become European again. Why? Because, she says, Britain is “an artificial and precarious construct” and has shown its “ugly face” in “abusing exhausted refugees even as they scramble to the shore”.

Now, Dame Hilary was born in Derbyshire, blessed with a university education at the LSE and Sheffield, enabled to become a best-selling and prize-winning novelist, and then awarded public recognition in the form, first of a CBE, and then of a DBE. Such a person, I suggest, owes Britain considerable gratitude, and if she is moved to think ill of her country, it should only be under great pressure and with great reluctance. But Dame Hilary’s alienation is partly incoherent, partly untrue. It’s not reluctant; it’s wilful.

She says that Britain is an artificial construct. Of course, it is. Every state is man-made and artificial. No state ever dropped out of heaven. Britain in its current form as the United Kingdom did not exist before 1707. The United States did not exist before 1783, nor Italy before 1871, nor Ireland before 1922. Since states are artificial, not natural, they come and go: Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 and in 1993 it ceased to exist.

Perhaps, however, by calling Britain artificial, Mantel means that it’s an unnatural yoking together of different peoples — English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. But if that’s what she thinks of the UK, what on earth does she think of the EU? The artificiality of a state, or its multinational character, is no reason for leaving it.

What then about the ugly, racist face of contemporary Britain? Well, there’s no denying that racism exists here — as it does in Europe. But according to the 2018 report of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, racial discrimination occurs less in Britain than in any other EU member state, including Ireland. (Just for the record, I voted Remain in 2016, not out of blind faith in the EU, but out of Burkean caution. Now, however, I want Brexit to succeed with my whole heart.)

So something perverse, something dishonest, is going on here. One reason, I take it, why my ‘progressive’ friends would suck their teeth if they heard my patriotic confession, is that they find it very difficult to distinguish patriotism from nationalism, and nationalism from fascism. So let me make quite clear what kind of patriot I am. I am a Christian patriot.

What does that mean? In part, it means that I recognise that my country, like every other, is indeed an artificial construct. It is man-made. It is not divine and eternal. My country is not God. In that respect, my Christian patriotism is quite distinct from the kind of Romantic nationalism that so scarred the twentieth century, most infamously in Germany. In this kind of nationalism, the nation is a substitute for God and it’s by investing oneself wholly in the life of the nation that the individual achieves a kind of immortality.

Suggested reading

In defence of defending empire

By Robert Tombs

Such an idolatrous nationalism conflates the nation with divinity. Christian patriotism cannot do that. Therefore, the Christian patriot recognises that his loyalty to his country cannot be blind and it has to be critical, holding it to account before the law of God.

My Christian ideal of patriotism was incarnated, as it happens, in the life of a German. His name was Helmuth James von Moltke. A lawyer, he was the great-grand-nephew of Bismarck’s famously victorious general. Although an aristocrat, he became a Christian socialist and an opponent of the Nazi Party. In the mid-Thirties, he came to England to qualify for the English bar in case he should decide to flee here with his family. In the end, however, he chose to return to his country, to suffer alongside his people, and to do what he could to mitigate the evils of the Nazi regime and prepare for a better future.

And yet he did not support the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. The reason was that he foresaw that the plot, were it to succeed, would have given Germany a conservative regime that, while not Nazi, was not different enough. He believed that, in order to be redeemed, Germany had to suffer an unequivocal, catastrophic defeat, before being reconstructed from the bottom up. Imagine how painful it must have been for a patriot to want that for his country. Christian patriotism is not Romantic nationalism. The Christian patriot must be willing to play prophet to his country, criticising it because he loves it and wants to save its soul.

So, I am a Christian patriot. But I’m also a British patriot. I have always been a British patriot because I am an Anglo-Scot, born in Scotland to a Scottish father and an English mother, and educated on both sides of the border. I do not answer to ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’, for, being both, I am British.

During the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 I lost several nights’ sleep worrying about the possible break-up of the United Kingdom. As a Christian, I had to admit that it was possible that the UK should break up. It could be that its time had come to and end and that, like Czechoslovakia, it should disintegrate into its constituent parts. At the time, I found it difficult to explain why I was viscerally opposed to this conclusion, and what would be lost if the UK were to disintegrate.

However, in the months following the independence referendum, I discovered at least two things about what the UK is good for. First, the UK is good for multi-national trust and solidarity. Germans identify themselves very closely indeed with the European Union. Yet German taxpayers are adamantly opposed to fiscal transfers, whereby their resources are used to subsidise the French, no matter the Greeks. In contrast, the English, and especially Londoners, hardly bat an eyelid at the redistribution of ’their’ taxes to Scotland or Northern Ireland, or indeed other parts of England and Wales.

During the referendum campaign Alex Salmond was glibly misleading on a number of things. One of them was the supposed ease of the process of dis-uniting. In addition to the Queen, the BBC, and the pound, Salmond genially assured us that the ‘social union’ would persist.

Suggested reading

The age of empire is back

By Aris Roussinos

But since English and Scottish interests would be opposed, it’s a practical certainty that negotiations would be fractious. It’s highly probable that the separating Scots would not get all that they wanted, and that, in turn, the English would recover a resentment of the Scots not seen since the 18^th century.

The truth is that we here in the UK have achieved a level of multi-national trust and solidarity of which the EU can still only dream. It’s a precious achievement, which we should not take for granted nor surrender lightly. That’s one thing the UK is good for.

A second thing is the security and promotion of humane and liberal values. There is a strong strain in contemporary Scottish nationalism, as there is in Corbynite socialism, which believes in the equation, “Britain equals Empire equals Evil”. By ‘Empire’ here is meant, not only the imperial past, but the present aspiration to play a global role in bolstering the liberal international order.

According to some nationalists, therefore, for Scotland to separate from England, and so to disintegrate the United Kingdom, would be an act of national repentance and self-purification. It would redeem the English as well as the Scots.

This view is documented in John Lloyd’s excellent book, Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot, in which he quotes from Robert Musil 1930s novel, A Man without Qualities, which was set during the decline of the Austrian Empire around 1900. Of that empire, Musil wrote “However well founded an order may be, it always rests in part on a voluntary faith in it, a faith that, in fact, always marks the spot where the new growth begins, as in a plant; once this unaccountable and uninsurable faith is used up, the collapse soon follows; epochs and empires crumble no differently from business concerns when they lose their credit”.

I agree with Musil that faith in what we might call a globally responsible Britain is uninsurable: there’s no guarantee that it won’t be lost. But I disagree that it is unaccountable. I think a good account can still be given.

Maybe in the Nineties we thought that History had ended, that the West had won, and that NATO had lost its reason for living. But with an aggressively nationalist Russia rattling its nuclear sabre on the borders of Europe, and with a ruthlessly authoritarian China building military bases in the South China Sea, it seems that humane and liberal values still need defending. So, who will defend them? The United States, we hope. But after that, who? Arguably, the UK, more or less alongside France.

Britain may no longer rule the waves single-handed, but we can still help to rule them. The fact that we’re no longer Number One in the world doesn’t mean that we’re nothing. If the UK were to disintegrate, one of the West’s three serious military powers would be hamstrung.

Suggested reading

How liberals made the British Empire

By Aris Roussinos

So, I think that the United Kingdom is good both for multinational solidarity and for a liberal world order. My British faith still has credit in the bank. That’s why I am a British patriot.

But it is not just Scottish nationalists who disagree. Another major way of corroding faith in global Britain is to denigrate its historical record, the most recent part of which involves empire. This is why the decolonisers focus so relentlessly on slavery, presenting it as Britain’s dirty secret.

There are two main objections to this story. First, as I’ve indicated, there is hard social scientific evidence that contemporary Britain is actually one of the least racist countries in Europe. More recently, this year saw the publication of the so-called ‘Sewell report’ of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which concluded that Britain is not systemically racist. The second problem with the decolonisers’ equation of the British Empire with slavery and the ugly racism behind it is that fact that the Empire was the first major power in the history of the world to abolish the slave-trade and slavery in the name of a Christian conviction of the fundamental equality of all human races under God.

John Wesley, Anglican priest and founder of Methodism, prefaced his Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) with a quotation of the tenth verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis: “And the Lord said—What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground”. The context is Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and the implication is clear: African and Englishman, slave and master, are brothers, common children of the same God. This was the racially egalitarian view that triumphed in 1807 when the British parliament voted to abolish the trade in slaves throughout the Empire, and again in 1833, when it voted to abolish the institution of slavery altogether.

What is more, from 1807 and throughout the second half of its existence until the Sixties, the Empire was committed to suppressing the trade and the institution across the world — from Brazil, across Africa, to India and Malaysia. In the 1820s and 30s, the Slave Trade Department was the largest unit in the Foreign Office.

At one point in mid-century, the Royal Navy was deploying over 13% of its total manpower in suppressing the trade in slaves between west Africa and the Americas. According to the economic historian, David Eltis, the British spent almost as much suppressing the Atlantic trade in the 47 years from 1816-62 as they earned in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807. And according to the American scholars of international relations, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic trade in 1807-67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”.

So, no, there is no causal connection that runs through the British Empire from colonial slavery in the past to systemic racism today. Britain today is not systemically racist. And between the slave trade and slavery of the 18^th century and the present lie 150 years of imperial penance in the form of costly abolitionist endeavour to liberate slaves around the globe. The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire, and whatever residual racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.

Despite the heated nature of these debates, some, on both the Right and the Left, think that the ‘Culture Wars’ are a fuss about nothing. I could not disagree more strongly. What’s at stake in the ‘decolonising’ front of the ‘Culture Wars’ is nothing less than faith in Britain.

Keeping that faith is important for the welfare of human beings, not only on these islands, but all over the world. That is why I’m a British patriot.

A version of this article was delivered at a meeting of the National Club in September 2021.  

But to my surprise we won, and by a considerable majority, in a packed chamber. Not due to my halting efforts, but rather to a brilliant speech by Trevor Phillips, who evidently touched both the hearts and the minds of the large and diverse audience. He was able to draw on his family’s opposition to colonial rule in British Guiana, and yet also on his father’s patriotic service in the Second World War and his own respect for many of our country’s achievements today.

Not all students fit the “woke” stereotype that I was too ready to ascribe to them, then. Many of those present, including several who spoke, were not British; the University is today a highly international institution. And yet they recognised that our nation can and should inspire pride and gratitude.

Trevor urged the audience not to emulate their Oxford predecessors and encourage the enemies of democracy and freedom by publicly rubbishing our common culture; and he politely but firmly rebuked a young woman who proclaimed from the floor that the current Tory government was little better than a populist dictatorship. Though he had never been and would never be a Tory, he said, the present government included more people from ethnic minorities in senior positions than all the governments in our history combined, and more than any government in Europe today.

Suggested reading

Conservatives need multiculturalism

By Blake Smith

This is what our “history wars” are really about. Not analysing and understanding the past, but using historical claims to support negative assertions about the present. Despite the majority of students who voted for us that evening, I was alarmed at some of the opinions that were presented as incontrovertible fact. Two that remain in my mind are that our history had been “a long bloodbath”, and that Churchill was responsible for the Bengal famine if 1943.

I hope these were not History students, who should have known that the Bengal famine is a complex and contested episode, and our domestic history, compared with most countries’, has been relatively peaceful and bloodless. I hope that History students might also have recalled the conclusion of that deeply anti-colonialist former imperial policeman, George Orwell, that the British Empire had been “peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been [with] fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state”.

Where do (some) Cambridge students get the idea of our history as a “bloodbath”? Much recent popular writing on the empire — for example John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried — has emphasised its violence practically to the exclusion of all else. But for that perspective to seem plausible, it is necessary to avoid all comparisons with what existed before colonial rule, and with what, in some countries, came after it. It is necessary to draw a veil over pre-colonial societies, and imagine them uncritically either as “noble savages” living in a peaceful and ecologically sustainable Eden, or as viable modernising states. It is even more important to avert one’s gaze from post-colonial failures and tyrannies.

Instead, one has to accept the accounts of axe-grinding nationalist politicians, such as the Indian polemicist Shashi Tharoor, who in Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, uses the British Raj as a scapegoat for the failings of modern Indian governments. Or one has to play up to the politics of victimhood by making slavery the hallmark of the Empire — even though the Empire was the major force that suppressed global slavery during a century and a half of effort.

Suggested reading

How liberals made the British Empire

By Aris Roussinos

The “woke” fervour that has recently disturbed the cloistered calm of Cambridge is based on bad history, then. The kind one would expect of a doctrinaire first-year undergraduate, perhaps. And yet, as my pleasant and interesting evening at the Cambridge Union suggested, I do not believe that it comes primarily from the majority of students. Some of it may come from PhD students and academics in subjects such as “postcolonial literature”, for whom wokeness is practically a requirement of the job. But although they managed to bully one young academic out of his college fellowship after accusing his research of being “racist”, generally they are too few and intellectually too marginal to have an impact on their own.

The real problem comes from the University and College administrations. It is they who are encouraging, and even requiring, gestures towards “decolonisation” and the sort of anonymous denunciation that masquerades under the once innocent slogan of “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion”. It was a Pro-Vice Chancellor who pushed a now notorious anti-racist strategy that encouraged secret complaints about “microaggressions”, and which had to be withdrawn in the face of strong internal and external criticism. It is certain Colleges, notoriously Downing, that are now attempting to adopt an almost identical policy at the lower level. It was the University’s central authorities who dragged their heels over guaranteeing free speech, until forced to change direction by a vote of the academic rank-and-file in the Regent House. And it was the Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Toope, who in 2019 set up an enquiry into the University’s links with slavery, “amid a wider reflection taking place in the United States and Britain on the links between universities and slavery”.

Herein lies a clue as to what is really going on here. The university is in competition, especially with American universities, and, pretty obviously, wokeness is part of a marketing strategy. University managers are increasingly operating like any other multinational corporation. All have to “curate” their public image, and their gestures carry no more intellectual or moral weight than those of Nike or Ben and Jerry.

More from this author

In defence of defending empire

By Robert Tombs

My own College, St John’s, has been spared the temptation of progressive histrionics: luckily, our connection with slavery is that the two greatest English abolitionists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, were undergraduates, as were Lord Castlereagh (who secured the first international anti-slave-trade commitment in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna) and Lord Palmerston (who in 1850 sent the proverbial gunboats to Brazil to stop the largest remaining trans-Atlantic trade). It seems that the father of an 18th-century student owned slaves, but fortunately the College got none of his money.

Not so fortunate has been Jesus College, whose contortions have epitomised the worst hypocrisies of “woke”. Their embarrassing record of lucrative sycophancy towards the Chinese regime means that discussion of human rights has been regarded as “unhelpful”, and suppressed, in case the College were “perceived as being a campaigning college for freedom for Hong Kong [or] freedom for the Uighurs”. But if they show limited concern for genocide in the 21st century, they are very sensitive indeed to an investment in the slave trade by their great benefactor Tobias Rustat in the 17th. Him they are busy cancelling, to the extent of trying to remove his memorial from the College chapel. Meanwhile, the college’s China Centre, which “aims to deepen mutual understanding between China and the West by ‘using the past to serve the present’”, blithely continues.

Jesus College has also just ostentatiously returned to Nigeria a “Benin Bronze”, seized during a British punitive expedition against the slave-owning Kingdom of Benin in 1897, following the slaughter of a diplomatic mission. Of course, the college is free to donate its property as it wishes, and it could have decided, unobtrusively, that a brass cockerel from Nigeria would be more appreciated in its ancestral homeland than merely by being placed on a dinner table in Cambridge during feasts.

But instead, the college staged a fulsome ceremony, in which the statuette was handed to a descendent of the Obas of Benin, the slavers from whom it was confiscated. The British who freed the Oba’s slaves were described by the Master as having committed “a wrong that is so egregious”. Slaving by Africans, it would seem, is not worth a mention. At Jesus College, the Master added, “we teach, we educate.” It is hardly surprising if Cambridge students thereby acquire strange notions of history.

It has — as usual — taken a football tournament to achieve this momentary tolerance, and there is no guarantee that it will hold. It hasn’t previously. But, while we may, let us enjoy it. Let us, against the background of not only this gruesome past 15 months but the bitter polarisation that has gripped our country over the past few years, appreciate the uplifting sense of solidarity and belonging that have emerged with the successful march of the England football team to the final of Euro 2020. Such sentiments, as most of us have always known, may be harnessed as positive forces if only the liberal establishment and assorted high-minded progressives were to abandon their own longstanding prejudices against them.

That we lost the final in the most cruel manner will not dampen the fervour. Not yet, at any rate. The feelgood factor generated by England’s advance through the tournament, as well as the admiration the players and manager have drawn for the impeccable manner in which they have conducted themselves, have given rise to unabashed displays of English national pride — the kind which, outside of a sporting context, are usually resisted and discouraged by those who know better.

St George’s flags affixed to cars and adorning houses; outpourings of support for “our boys”; the massed ranks of fans belting out “Football’s Coming Home”; the invocation of a history and culture that, by and large, has been a force for good; the spirit of openness that says that, irrespective of whence and when you came, you may be part of all this if you wish to be: these are not the divisive manifestations of a hostile or exclusionary nationalism or sense of superiority, but instead the benign and unifying expressions of national consciousness, born of a recognition that we are part of something greater than ourselves.

Everything we have seen in recent weeks has been the best of what it means to be patriotic: a spirit of reciprocity, common values and identity, the nurturing of associative bonds that give meaning to life and transcend cold economic calculus. When communities which would normally live parallel existences unite in pursuit of the same desire – on this occasion to see a team of eleven young men win some silverware on behalf of the nation – we all have cause for celebration. That’s what football has the capacity to achieve, and no politician dare mock it.

Only the truly cynical would have sneered at the unbridled joy displayed by students at an Islamic school in Blackburn when Harry Kane scored the winner against Denmark in the semi-final, or the Bhangra flash mob dancing through the streets of Wolverhampton to their own version of the Three Lions anthem. Who could have failed to identify with exactly how these groups felt at those moments? What separated them from the residents of the Bermondsey housing estate which was festooned in St George’s flags for the entirety of the tournament? During the past few short weeks, not much at all. For all the incessant and patronising establishment lectures force-feeding us a diet of “diversity” and “tolerance”, it often takes the simplest things to break down barriers.

Suggested reading

England fans can't be beaten

By Will Lloyd

I predict, however, that it won’t be long before we are back to normal. Those members of our political and cultural elites who are instinctively hostile to any overt demonstration of Englishness — seeing it as an inherently reactionary and destructive force — will regroup and seek to ensure that the phenomenon does not take firm root. Not for nothing did George Orwell say that England was perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals were ashamed of their own nationality.

The sense of English national dispossession which has been in evidence since the advent of devolution and has intensified in more recent years, coming to a head over the issue of Brexit, will continue to be ignored — but it won’t go away. Those living in our post-industrial and neglected coastal towns, where a heightened sense of Englishness exists — not by coincidence, but because it is in those types of places that citizens are most likely to feel a disconnect with an ‘unEnglish’ liberal establishment — will continue to see national identity as a tool of resistance. The sentiment will remain inchoate and uncoordinated, but it will not abate. And it will continue to develop outside of normal political structures, not least because none of the major parties has any serious plan for giving the English a dedicated voice in the institutions of our democracy, nor for addressing the democratic imbalances created by devolution.

This patriotic sentiment will continue to be misunderstood by many of our cultural influencers. It is dismissed as the fruits of unenlightened and nativist English mentality which refuses to be persuaded of the merits of a global cosmopolitan liberalism – almost certainly synonymous with white superiority and a longing for the age of Empire. It was this patronising attitude — a refusal to recognise the legitimate grievances of England beyond the cities, or to understand the motivation behind an instinctive affinity for country that is considered normal in most other nations — that has created so many of the faultlines in our recent politics.

It has taken a team of 11 multiracial young men to show these people why they are so wrong. Let us savour the moment.

In fact, of the rare household flags you do see across the country, few are likely to be British. There’s been a Greek national flag flying in Walberswick for as long as I can remember. All last year our local Conservative Association had an Irish tricolour unfurled from the flat above. Ditchling in Sussex proudly flies the Cornish white cross at the moment, for some reason, and Eastbourne Town Hall the Gay Pride stripes, but that’s about it outside of major football tournaments. On the whole, like all other official symbols of our national identity — portraits, parades, anthems, uniforms and the like — we go quietly.

What does this tell us about who we are? First it speaks the truth: that states are all very well and we’d be literally lost without them, but that their official symbols are not what counts. What counts is generally found around the corner and that isn’t a flag up a pole. Our most telling identities are inherent in the people, although there are institutions — the armed forces, for instance — when popular and official expressions powerfully combine, and the battle flag is one of them.

Second, it shows a remarkable, non-political, political maturity. Communities come from the inside out. That is why they are communities. Raising a flag (especially the national one) in the middle of a community does nothing for that community, and is also just a bit naff.

The same goes for lapel pins. It was George W Bush, I think, who started wearing a tiny stars and stripes in his lapel soon after 9/11 and to my utter astonishment he kept it there and then Obama followed. British ministers do it now with Union flags or, in Hancock’s case, with the blue badge of the NHS. Warning to ministers: do you believe in our country or do you not? If you do, you don’t need to wear a pin. If you don’t, we don’t trust you anyway and a pin isn’t going to help.

Third, flags get tacky. They only look good for five minutes in a germ-free environment. After that they fly tattered and torn not by shot and shell, but by general indifference and neglect. Like weeds in the garden, flags that look like dishcloths are a bad sign. Leicester railway station used to have half a bush growing out of its clock-face and I can assure East Midland Trains that this did not inspire confidence.

Now flags are flying high in the Euro football championships, and like summer blossom, they burst out everywhere you are expecting them and in some places you are not. But like Christmas lights, or party balloons, or bare chests, they’re only there for the moment and the minute we’re out, so to speak, so are they. But if we win (did I really say that?) the whole country will come out like the Kirby Estate in Bermondsey and even Emily Thornberry will be forced to get her flag out to celebrate.

The point is, except on high days and holidays, we do not like to be told where we live or who we are, just as we did not need to be told by Gordon Brown back in 2007 what our national values were. Either they are our national values, or they’re not, and if they’re not they’re not, and if they are they are, and we don’t need teaching about them.

Only, they aren’t our “values” at all – more like pieties, and most Western democracies claim to share them. We look at ourselves more by managing, pro tem (it’s always pro tem), to come to terms with our history not by erasing what is shameful but by facing it, with all due humility. The rest can look after itself. For our history is us, not a set of values, or a lecture, or a flag, and of course it is never quite resolved. The trick is to keep it in play as an essential and positive part of who we are.

More from this author

How the nation learned to sport again

By Robert Colls

The Union “Jack” was originally the creation of a Scottish king (James VI, also James I of England) who wanted a Union of Great Britain when he found himself ruler of both kingdoms. Designed for the main masts of the Royal Navy, St Andrew’s silver saltire was laid over St George’s red cross for Scottish ships, and St George’s red cross was laid over St Andrew’s silver saltire for English ships. After the 1707 Act of Union, the Jack joined John Bull and Britannia as the third great icon of the Union state, gradually taking on a darker blue to better weather the wind and rain.

In the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland, St Patrick had no cross to offer and was not around to conjure his own martyrdom, so the flag designers found what they wanted in the red saltire of the Fitzgerald family. Stranger things had happened. In 1776, the Union Jack with stripes was the first flag of American independence, while the Welsh, who were in the Union from the start, were never in the flag, and the Irish, who were last in and first out (mostly), are in it still.

As the Union of Great Britain and Ireland was buckled together at home, and Empire accumulated abroad, the Union Flag became pre-eminent. The four home nations came to stand for the inner, more affective resources of the peoples they came to represent (and vice versa), while the Union Flag came to stand for the outer power and authority of a British state which, one way or another, claimed to represent them all.

Suggested reading

The self-loathing of Britain's elites

By Ed West

Inner and outer nationhood was an asymmetrical mixture of politics and culture that has confounded pollsters ever since, with England, the dominant partner, subsuming its identity the most. When England won the World Cup in 1966 just about every flag at Wembley was a British Jack, even the corner flags.

It might be that the English have moved on from those sunny days and the rise of the plain red cross of St George signifies as much. When a British Government built the opportunity for formal secession into the constitution, at any rate for the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish if not for the English (who were persuaded that they had nothing to devolve from), politics in these islands changed forever. From then on, not liking the government meant, or could mean, not liking the Union, and not liking the Union meant, or could mean, politicising all the affective power of the inner nation. How well that inner power would do after independence is anyone’s guess because it has far more pull inside the United Kingdom than out it. As in the football, Scotland plays best in England. Dealing with a far bigger, more complex, and alien Union in Brussels would test Scottish flag-waving to the limit.

For the English, the rise of the red cross of St George might be a response to devo-nationalism; it saw a renaissance around the time of Scottish devolution being passed in 1997, although it probably had more to do with Euro 96 the year before. It is certainly a class signifier against a liberal meritocratic caste who, although they have found their love of football (and never stop writing about it), appear to have lost their nation. To misquote Orwell, they would rather be caught stealing from Oxfam than flying the English flag in their garden. Which is a pity. The flag of St George saw action on the people’s side in the Peasants’ Revolt and in the English Civil War, and is streaming now in pubs and bedroom windows and yes, from hard-working dirty white vans, across the land.

Suggested reading

Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Back in SW1, it’s a risky game for politicians to stand in front of the flag not because it makes them look zealous but because it makes them look dull. At the Downing Street press conferences, flanked by freshly ironed Union flags, Boris & Co looked like a firm of undertakers who had got a bit above themselves.

For sheer iconic beauty and power, politicians done up in Union Flags are never going to beat gold medal athletes wrapped in red, white and blue. Flags have their moment and then they’re gone — and on their own they are never going to do it for you. If you are going to fly the flag, find the people to fly it for you, and only then spontaneously, and in earnest and together. As it was ‘Ooray for Bobby Moore, and Kelly Holmes, and Jessica Ennis, so it’s ‘Ooray for ‘Arry Kane.

But if you thought that Emmanuel Macron’s floundering over the Covid crisis, and especially his drunken sailor pas de deux with Angela Merkel over the AstraZeneca vaccine, might ring in a measure of rarely-seen humility among the French ruling elite, think again.

No matter that one day Le Président says the Oxford jab is unproven and useless on the over 65s, only to perform the mother of all reverse ferrets three weeks later, and forbid vaccinating the under 55s with it, after a four-blood-clots scare over 15 million shots. No matter that the instant Mutti blinks and decides to suspend AZ vaccinations in Germany, France’s Covid Conseil de Défense, after being interrupted by a telephone call from Our Man In Berlin, rules that France will blindly follow suit.

In the immortal words of a thousand French novelty aprons and fridge magnets, Même quand il a tort, le boss a toujours raison (“even when the boss is wrong, he is still right”). Our President, who last year took most decisions on the handling of the crisis alone, whether following or contradicting the Scientific Council, found early on the ideal piñata: les Anglais, which in French means the British (with apologies to Celtic readers). Because we love to hate the English, too.

He has been helped in this strategy because the groundwork being generously laid for almost five years over Brexit. Emmanuel Macron, toujours lui, was still harping on about it for his New Year wishes last January, assuring Britain that France remained her “friend and ally” despite her choice to leave in a Brexit born of “lies and false promises”, coming across like a man moaning about custody rights and alimony during a family reunion five years after his divorce.

And while we usually protest that French ill-feeling towards the British is nothing, nothing compared to British naked aggression about all things French — yes, that Up Yours, Delors still rankles — the truth is that we love casser du sucre sur le dos des Anglais (to break sugar cubes over the backs of Brits, a popular colloquialism for badmouthing).

You may have invented the wrong sort of leaves to excuse your pathetic excuses for proper trains (for which read: French trains); we can discourse for hours about the wrong way in which Brian Moore won tries, and matches, over a technically better French rugby team. We could have invented the term “beautiful losers”, because even when France loses, it is with so much more élan than when the English win. Oh, and Emmanuel Macron even said for a long time that Britain actually vaccinated the wrong way, and France had performed better in terms of the proportion of people getting the full two-jabs. (No, I don’t understand the maths either; it’s all about “taking dangerous risks”, and he may not have been entirely correct.)

More from this author

How France became the most anti-Semitic country in the West

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

The likelihood that the AZ vaccine would have been similarly targeted by a series of damaging official statements if it had not been invented in Britain seems close to zero. The urge to do down les Rosbifs was too strong, even at the risk of encouraging antivaxxers over the Continent. In fact it’s the one cultural trend France has successfully exported in recent years: while we used to be Europe’s leaders in vaccine scepticism, with 43% of the population unwilling to take the needle, that number is now up to 61%; but similarly, 55% of Germans would now refuse the AZ vaccine (up 15%), as well as 43% of Italians and 52% of Spaniards (up 27% in each). And a good deal of it was born of the age-old French uneasy contempt for the British.

We don’t understand you. We don’t trust you. We don’t trust those among us who suffer from that terrifying disease, l’Anglophilie. There’s a certain kind of bon chic, bon genre French bourgeoisie who dress their daughters in kilts, send their children for a couple of terms in minor public schools in the Home Counties so that they’ll speak English more fluently than almost all our presidents, who mourned the disappearance of Marks & Spencer from Paris, and worship the Royal Family unironically. Just as Remainers pine for Provence and Tuscany after the second glass of Prosecco, France’s social equivalents wax lyrical about Glyndebourne, serve Pimms in the wrong sort of glasses, and think longingly to this day of Tony Blair. This sort of Anglophilia is not a vote-winner with the rest of the country, as politicians from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to Édouard Balladur have found out.

A quick vox pop among friends hit unexpected Yellowstone-sized geysers of animosity. It starts with use of unregulated longbows at Agincourt, encompasses burning Joan of Arc at the stake, finds its stride with Pitt’s flooding fake assignats to devalue French paper money during the Revolution (typical of the perfidiousness of Albion in all things financial, and probably present in the subconscious of Brussels regulators as they deny City financial institutions either passporting or equivalence rights), but truly flourishes when it comes to Napoleon.

Suggested reading

How Macron made France a laughing stock

By John Lewis-Stempel

“Les Anglais conspired to break the Peace of Amiens in 1803, led the entire continent into war, and managed to pin it all on Napoleon!” one friend raged. And on to St. Helena, to Kitchener’s stand-off against Marchand at Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898, and of course to the sinking of a good chunk of the French Navy at Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 by the Royal Navy, rather than risking it fighting on for Vichy. Yes, we do hold grudges.

But a great deal of Anglo-French antagonism is probably due to a discomfort on both sides as to who, really, is coolest — not that anyone will openly admit to failure. From the 1960s onwards Paris has played second fiddle to London, home to the Beatles and Rolling Stones and countless other musicians — even Berlin has at times appeared more cutting-edge — but with fashion Paris remains king. Even London’s couturiers, graduates from St Martin’s School, have not truly made it until France’s warring luxury titans, Bernard Arnault of Dior and Givenchy or François Pinault of Gucci and Chloé, had given them whole Paris ateliers to play with. Frenchwomen may be better dressed than their British opposite number, but Englishmen of a certain class beat too-dapper Frenchmen in narrow suits hollow — although no one would say that of all Englishmen.

We win at food, but you steal our chefs. It’s worth it, in order to escape your legacy of baked beans for breakfast, of frozen peas the colour of hazmat suits with the consistency of grapeshot, boiled meat falling in lank grey strands on the plate into congealing gravy, and at puddings you could play rugby with. We eat your fish (not so much these days, because Brexit spite trumps le brunch du dimanche) but you drink our Bordeaux and our champagne, one clear instance where you win hands down. Mostly, the French do not understand Marmite; but some cultural practices must just remain a mystery.

Suggested reading

Why French teachers are afraid

By Agnes Poirier

Sport is more complicated: a friend cursed you twice, once for stealing Eric Cantona from us, the second for returning him. Business is even worse: thirty years on, one of the negotiators over the Channel Tunnel contracts was still smarting over British “cheats”. “How so?” I asked. “The minute they’ve signed, they endlessly amend, change, revise contracts! It’s like trench warfare! You think you’ve got something to rely on, they want to adapt and adapt all the time!”

As we hashed it over, it became obvious that two entire philosophies were clashing: British pragmatism against French theory; British nimbleness against French top-down hierarchy. “Business in England starts when 20 shopkeepers get together in a café near the docks, and decide to finance a ship to the West Indies,” he said: “They find a captain, networks, information, insurers. In France, you go to the King; he gives you letters of marque against a cut in your profits; all is done in his name. Nothing has really changed: today, most large cross-border deals need the approval of the Direction Générale du Trésor at the Ministry of Finance.”

It was a perceptive point, and explains a lot of the different ways that Britain and France have handled the Covid vaccination effort. For the French, les Anglais appear to have won the war, despite losing so many earlier battles; but we cannot help that feeling there is something perfidious about it.

I suppose what some people mourn is the passing of time and the disappearance of a generation, but Capt Moore was also able — unusually — to cross over two different types of British patriotism, symbolised on one hand by the Spitfire and on the other by the NHS rainbow, and in doing so acquired a sort of symbolic status.

These two types of patriotism, like so much of the British psyche, date to the Second World War, and are the sort of yin and yang of collective identity — warfare against a common enemy, and welfare for the weakest. The Tories feel more comfortable with the former, Labour with the latter, and I wonder if the Capt Tom effect will come to be seen as the holy grail of politics from now on. 

Patriotism is something that Labour has particularly struggled with in recent years. The latest thinking is that the party must make “use of the [union] flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly”, which makes many MPs and activists uncomfortable or angry.

From a strategic viewpoint the leadership is right, since the number of people who don’t feel at all patriotic is pretty small, and concentrated in safe seats where the party can afford to leak a few votes to the Greens or some crankish minor party.

And yet even the most inoffensive and saccharine appeals to patriotism by Labour politicians attract criticism from a section who view all patriotism and nationalism as essentially as morally suspect, and anti-Left-wing.

Jeremy Corbyn personified this worldview, a man for whom patriotism was not just repulsive but almost inexplicable. The Corbyns of this world cannot understand why a person would prize their own country, and its citizens, over another. There’s nothing immoral about it — it’s just that most people don’t feel the same way, and successful politicians can’t really get away with publicly admitting to deeply unpopular opinions.

Labour moderates argue that by not embracing patriotism they risk ceding it to the Right (and extreme Right) — just as once happened to the Union Jack. By this reckoning patriotism is a social good, as opposed to nationalism, its darker cousin; indeed patriotism might almost act as a vaccine against nationalism, inoculating us against its dark magic.

This argument was most strongly articulated by Orwell, who famously distinguished between the two in his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism, in words which are often treated like gospel. Patriotism, he wrote, was “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

More from this author

The phoney War on Woke

By Ed West

Orwell was writing during the dying days of the Second World War, and someone’s views on nationalism in war is probably going to be as jaded as someone’s view of love in the middle of a painful divorce. And the distinctions between the two, of good patriotism and bad nationalism, seem pretty arbitrary. Patriotism has such positive connotations that when Clive Lewis condemned flag-waving he said “it’s not patriotism; it’s Fatherland-ism”, even though that is literally what patriotism means.

Patriotism is a bit of an Alice in Wonderland word that can mean whatever someone wants it to mean, often in a very solipsistic way. What some people say makes them feel “patriotic” about their country are really feelings about a political system or ideology. For certain types of liberals, it was the 2012 Olympic Games and its opening ceremony, representing globalism, liberalism and multiculturalism. For some socialists it is the various radical political movements that flourished from the Civil War to the 19^th century, such as the Diggers and Chartists. (Then, I suppose, if your vision of patriotism is filled with kings and castles, you are also buying into a certain ideological idea of England, too.)

Nationalism, in contrast, is largely viewed as a mindless, Right-wing hostility to all things foreign. Yet this certainly hasn’t always been the case – indeed the opposite was once true.

Modern nationalism begins with the French revolution, with the “patriots” who wished to overthrow the old monarchial and clerical order. Nationalism and liberalism went hand and hand, and although it seems counter-intuitive now, Adam Ryan wrote in On Politics that in central Europe “liberal nationalism was not merely common but during the nineteenth century [was] the most prominent, if not the most passionate, form of nationalism”.

Liberalism and nationalism were condemned together by Pope Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors in 1864, seen as twin evils of the modern world that threatened the reactionary establishment.

The link between liberalism and nationalism began to dissolve partly because the Right were able to offer a more satisfying version of nationalism — satisfying until your leg is blown off in a trench, that is — while in contrast liberalism became more and more internationalist.

The parting of ways began to show 150 years ago when Germany was united in Versailles. As Katya Hoyer writes in her recently published history of the Second Reich, Blood and Iron: the brutal militarism of the ceremony, with the Kaiser leading his princes in military uniform, “was a far cry from the democratic unification of which the liberals had dreamed. At Versailles, there were no reminders of 1848 — no tricolour, no ‘Deutschlandlied’. Just marching bands and formalities in the heart of a humiliated enemy.”

Suggested reading

Europe shows its true colours

By Peter Franklin

While liberals increasingly began to see the ugly side of nationalism, the Right became aware of how much they could use it, and present their opponents as unpatriotic. In 19^thGermany, socialists were called vaterlandslose Gesellen (fellows without fatherland); in our time Norman Tebbit called the BBC the “Stateless Person’s Broadcasting Corporation”, while Theresa May’s “citizens of nowhere” speech upset lots of people who were collectively choking on their [insert vaguely foreign foodstuff].

Socialism, unlike liberalism, is internationalist by definition, so the criticism is often valid, yet the nation-state is the best mechanism for carrying out social democrat policies, especially the welfare state, which in Britain was mostly created during a period of intense patriotism after 1945. It’s also the best environment for liberalism, which thrives where competing identities play a minimal role in politics; there is a reason that liberalism first flourished in Amsterdam and London, not in multicultural Constantinople or Beirut.

And so progressive politics and nationalism are mostly certainly compatible, as long as the latter is micro-dosed. It is often lamented that Scottish nationalists get a pass that other nationalists — especially English ones — don’t, but Scottish nationalism is arguably a more authentic, liberal form of nationalism than most. There is nothing contradictory with liberal-minded people supporting a nationalist movement.

And nationalism has real, practical benefits, the vaccination programme being a very obvious example. Nation-states have clearly proved to be the most effective at enabling the mass production and distribution of vaccines; the supra-national EU in contrast has turned out to be hopelessly incompetent and, when that has proved evident, has behaved in a bullying manner reminiscent of past empires. The most successful vaccinating country of all, Israel, is the one western state that, for tragic historic reasons, takes nationalism very seriously. This sort of vaccine nationalism has been effected — without contradiction — through international cooperation and the work of scientists from dozens of nations working together, with government support. Liberal nationalism at work.

There are no limits to the number of vaccine shots that can be produced, just as there aren’t huge limits to how wealthy a country can become (up to a certain point, of course). One nation-state’s success is not usually another’s loss, yet it is still a competition in which we wish to outdo our rivals.

Suggested reading

Why the EU lost the vaccine war

By Bruno Macaes

Few people wouldn’t prioritise their own country’s vaccine roll-out because most of us are neither pathologically internationalist, as much as the WHO would like us to be, nor are they xenophobic. Of their neighbours most people take the view of Sir Bronn of the Blackwater: they like them, they just like themselves more.

Nationalism is the understanding that political systems are best shared among a group with enough of a commonality that good government can flourish; most importantly of all, that loser’s consent exists. You might argue that patriotism is the active ingredient required, or that patriotism is whatever you are prepared to die for, but it is hardly a separate, distant idea.

Most people, Labour and Conservative, have contrasting ideas of what they like and dislike about their country, but most understand that there is still something worth preserving and celebrating. And I suppose, for many people, Captain Tom Moore personified that.

Recent events have coughed up a particularly prime example of Morrissey hitting a nerve years before anybody else in the pop sphere, getting castigated for it, and being justified in saying he told us so when it became horribly relevant.

Ten years ago he described footage of the treatment of animals in Chinese markets as “absolutely horrific” and that anybody who had seen it “could not possibly argue in favour of China as a caring nation. There are no animal protection laws in China and this results in the worst animal abuse and cruelty on the planet. It is indefensible.”

This statement was Morrissey’s reaction to the hullabaloo after an interview in The Guardian with the poet Simon Armitage in which he said, hotly, after watching animals being skinned alive: “You can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.” In Morrissey’s view cruel treatment of animals makes you less than human, but this wording, robbed of its context and intent, was a gift to his many enemies.

More from this author

The absurd melodrama of modern soaps

By Gareth Roberts

That’s because Morrissey annoys people, and unlike most purportedly outspoken pop stars he often annoys the people pop stars aren’t supposed to annoy. What I’ve found fascinating is how many of the opinions he has expressed in his long career have become hot topics on the table of late. Immigration, animal rights, free speech, the denigration and demoralisation of the working class, the unhealthy news media. And with universal basic income sliding its legs ever further over the sill of the Overton Window, his famous declaration in song from 1983 “England is mine, it owes me a living” feels more apposite by the day.

In his own strange way, for how could it be other than strange, Morrissey was a post-liberal before anybody else really cottoned on, and this from someone regarded commonly as stuck in 1954.

Morrissey’s mind is unschooled. One might even call it deschooled. (Anybody in favour of the return of selective education should have a read of the section of his autobiography dedicated to his gruesome years at a secondary modern and take pause.) He left school at 16 almost completely unqualified, and didn’t get tipped into the academic funnel that increasing percentages of us have been strained through. His intelligence and learning is of the scattergun, autodidactic variety that sometimes lights on obvious things that we have been accustomed to ignore or to look at without seeing.

It’s also interesting, and often very funny, to see the reactions of former disciples of the posher, ‘indie fan’ variety, when he says something outrageous but which they don’t like, to the point they get huffy and disown him. His advocacy of terrorism for animal rights and his repeated death wish for Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s — “the sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Thatcher escaped unscathed” he said very soon after that happened — didn’t ruffle feathers because it coincided with their own bluff talk. But when Morrissey lamented in 2007 that “England is a memory now, the gates are flooded and anybody can join in” they fainted clean away over a stack of Belle & Sebastian CDs.

suggested reading

Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

By Fiona Sturges

The double standard is gobsmacking. Fantasising in song about the public execution of the elected prime minister? Just a bit of harmless fun from a loveable old eccentric. Saying he was ‘excited’ by John Redwood? Burn him at the stake!

Why does Morrissey upset people so? His singing voice drives some instantly to distraction —my father couldn’t stomach more than ten seconds of it before shouting, in a broad Cardiff accent, “Oh, bloody hell, it’s the ghost of Jim Reeves” — but this is equally true of many other pop stars who merely get the occasional grumble for it.

A lot of the time it boils down to envy, and I’m as guilty of that as anybody else. Morrissey got to do things many millions of us dreamt of — mythologise our adolescence, inspire the adoration of perfect strangers in distant lands, say what we actually think — and it happened almost by accident. He can’t be accused of pandering, trend-chasing or compromising. He has the toxic combination of arrogance and self-pity that has fatally holed so many in a similar position, but he also possesses the humour and talent to leaven it. His lyrics are witty and smart, with an eye for life as it’s lived rather than the upbeat escapism and puppyish approval-seeking of most pop music. He keeps doing the same bloody thing and it keeps working, sailing over the heads and the power of critics. He has a ghastly habit of rising from the grave.

All this had to happen to somebody. But it’s a constant, maddening reminder that it didn’t happen to us.

suggested reading

How Birmingham gave birth to heavy metal

By Paul Lay

There are things that drive me potty about him. He can’t do polemics — his most direct, unambiguous material (the songs “Meat Is Murder”, “America Is Not The World”, “World Peace Is None Of Your Business”) is his weakest. Fiction writing is not, let’s get this out of the way quick before the screaming starts, his strong suit. His horror of electronic instruments and any development in dance music after about October 1972 is just silly, like the ladies of Cranford boarding their first train.

But the problem with criticising Morrissey is that his entire schtick is criticising himself. People pointing out his faults seem not to realise that he got there 37 years before. Right from the off he has sung about his personal failings, of pushing people away, of being intense and unbearable. He knows exactly what he’s like and he’s not happy about it.

However, all this openness and honesty can lead to terrible, avoidable blunders if you haven’t thought everything through. The “now, I must be careful how I put this” reflex is not there in him. That lack is the source of his success, but also of his woes. Because if your thing is always saying what you think, people will take what you say seriously. Bashing in with his size nines with open support for Anne-Marie Waters’ For Britain party was serving himself up on a plate.

To Morrissey, it’s obvious that he’s not a racist. But to advocate a political party, and of the fringe right — in considered statements, not off-the-cuff interviews — was breathtakingly naive. What on earth did he think the reaction would be? Did he really think he was helping — himself or anyone else?

suggested reading

The revolution will be commercialised

By DJ Taylor

It was as daft as singing a song called “The National Front Disco”. Seen in the broad flow of his oeuvre the song is obviously about a rather sad loner in the 1970s who drifts into a hopeless cul de sac. The repeated phrase “England for the English” is delivered in weary and mournful quotation marks (by the republican child of Irish immigrants). But people often don’t have time to think beyond the obvious, and ambiguity can be a gift to those who want, for whatever reason, to destroy you.

Morrissey is more often, I think, right than he is wrong, and a sizeable chunk of the things he’s observed, some of it long ago, have reared up to bite us all on the bum. “The left has become right-wing and the right-wing has become left — a complete switch, and this is a very unhappy modern Britain,” he stated recently, which is a fair enough summary of where we find ourselves.

We are constantly being asked to view the most anodyne and conformist pop stars as challenging and controversial. But we’re not having this conversation about Ed Sheeran, and I suspect we probably never will. We should be grateful for, in our increasingly dull and frightened culture, this bizarre, awkward, contradictory, funny fellow.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

There has always been a healthy suspicion of jingoism and flag-waving on the Left. However it wasn’t this that Orwell was referring to. Few wrote more damning screeds about the British empire than the former colonial policeman, who was always willing to give the “blimps” who ran Britain a good kicking. Rather, Orwell was referring to a more generalised contempt many on the Left felt towards Britain and — by extension — their fellow countrymen.

Socialism to Orwell meant bread and butter issues of higher wages and more freedom — freedom itself depending to a large extent on how much money one has. Yet the movement attracted its fair share of cranks. It was this penumbra of crankishness that prevented socialism from developing a mass following. A major hallmark of it was its anti-Britishness.

Jeremy Corbyn has been compared plenty of times over the past five years to the “vegetarian”, “fruit-juice drinker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist” oddballs Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier. In Orwell’s time these types seemed to gravitate towards the socialist movement “like bluebottles to a dead cat”, as he put it. Since Corbyn became leader in 2015 something similar has occurred: the Labour Party has been flooded with conspiracy theorists, antisemites and various other subliterate fools. Uniting almost all of them is a profound contempt for Britain and in particular British foreign policy.

By the same author

The Left's long history of antisemitism

By James Bloodworth

This is arguably a major reason Labour lost the recent election. “Such was the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn,” wrote the Labour MP Liam Byrne, “that hundreds of voters I met thought Labour’s leader was a ­communist terrorist sympathiser who wouldn’t push the nuclear button or sing the national anthem.”

This isn’t so much the “demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn” as an accurate summation of the Labour leader’s views. Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, two of Corbyn’s first appointments as advisers, are communists. Corbyn called members of Hamas and Hezbollah “honoured friends”. He fraternised with the IRA and argued for the abolition of Nato. He has obfuscated shamefully over acts of aggression directed against Britain, such as during the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury. It is not demonising someone to accurately list the things they have said and done.

Many who opposed Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from the outset did so because of the crude ‘anti-imperialism’ he subscribed to. As Professor Alan Johnson wrote in 2015: “Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘strange associations’ — so widely noted, yet so little understood — are not a personal foible. They are a symptom of the ideological corruption of that part of the Left in which he was formed.”

This ‘ideological corruption’, as Johnson put it, is a legacy of Stalinism — or more specifically, Stalinist ‘second-campism’. This refers to the Soviet Union’s policy of supporting reactionary movements in what at the time was called the Third World, on the basis that they contained ‘progressive’ elements. The cultural theorist Judith Butler summarised this world view approvingly in 2006: “Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.” Never mind that such movements sought to murder Jews only for being Jews.

This was the milieu — swamp might be a more appropriate term — from which Jeremy Corbyn emerged in 2015. Crude anti-capitalism meant that America and its allies, notably Britain and Israel, were responsible for all of the world’s ills. This worldview is best encapsulated by the Stop the War Coalition (an organisation that Corbyn chaired for many years), whose guiding mantra might be boiled down to “It’s our fault”.

Suggested reading

How Labour's Left has stitched up selection

By David Kogan

The flipside of this ‘anti-imperialism’ is a lionisation of any movement that points an AK-47 in the direction of the West; distinctions in non-western countries are rarely made between the rulers and the ruled. The Iranian mullahs, Hamas, Hezbollah, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, Colonel Gaddafi are viewed as historically progressive forces. Those who languish under their tyrannical rule are ignored. This also contains a neat reanimation of Bertrand Russell’s point about the “fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed”. Effete bourgeois intellectuals and activists, softened by the relative comfort available in the western democracies in which they live, pursue their vicarious revolutionary fantasies through fatigue-wearing men of action such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

The assumption that Britain’s role in the world is overwhelmingly negative and that Britain’s enemies “have a point” undermines repeated attempts by Labour over recent weeks to forge a “progressive patriotism”. The implication being that the Labour Party is viewed as unpatriotic by the electorate. The Conservative Party doesn’t need to constantly burnish its patriotic credentials. Labour on the other hand must, partly because its hard-Left flank contains many comrades who cannot abide the notion that Britain has any progressive role in the world.

This is not simply a question of foreign policy, though foreign policy plays a significant part. One burnishes one’s credentials in Labour these days by talking up one’s opposition to the 2003 war in Iraq. It’s as if there were no consequences of isolationism and inaction prior to 2003 (Srebrenica anyone?) and everything since is viewed through the lens of ‘blowback’ from the Iraq war. A profound ignorance reigns when it comes to successive humanitarian interventions in Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia, as well as the no-fly zone over Iraq from 1991 to 2003.

If the next Labour leader is to win an election Labour must change significantly. In selecting Jeremy Corbyn to be Labour leader back in 2015, party members didn’t only consign the party to inevitable defeat while he was at the helm. They probably relegated the party to opposition for several parliaments post-Corbyn. This was their biggest miscalculation. It will take this long to detoxify the Labour brand in the eyes of the electorate. As the New Labour strategist Philip Gould wrote after defeat at the 1992 election: “Labour lost because it was still the party of the winter of discontent; union influence; strikes and inflation; disarmament; Benn and Scargill.”

Suggested reading

Why the Labour Left is doomed

By David Kogan

It was a decade-and-a-half between the infiltration of Militant in the early Eighties and Tony Blair’s victory in 1997. Labour’s climb back to electoral credibility could take longer this time.

There is set of first principles that the Labour Party must adhere to if it is to have any hope of winning back power in the foreseeable future. Central to that is the assumption that Britain is a country that is more good than bad, both as a place to live and in its conduct around the world. This is not to ignore ill-thought out and gung-ho foreign policy decisions such as Iraq — nor to whitewash domestic issues such as inequality and xenophobia. Britain is not a bad place to live, and from its generous developmental budget to successful humanitarian interventions in places such as Kosovo and West Africa, there are examples in its recent history of British governments doing the right thing.

There is a lot more to do of course. There always is. Britain’s obsequious relationship with Saudi Arabia is an easy target for the ire of Labour activists but an appropriate one. As is China, whose human rights abuses the British government seems increasingly willing to overlook for the sake of economic expediency.

But whenever such matters are discussed some perspective is required. And this will not be forthcoming for as long as Labour adheres — even tangentially — to the fly-blown notions that animate Corbyn’s worldview. A break with these sclerotic doctrines is required. And a break with them will do more for Labour’s chances with the British people than any convoluted attempt to forge a gimmicky ‘progressive’ patriotism.

Patriotism needn’t be flashy or tub-thumping. But it does begin with the belief that one’s own country is more good than bad, more right than wrong.

Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford argued recently that national solidarity is a cornerstone of public support for a welfare state, and the nation-state a critical defence for ordinary people against the forces of globalisation. It appears the public agrees: Dominic Lawson argues that it was Corbyn’s rejection of common basic gestures of patriotic feeling that caused the British working class to reject him.

But Blue Labour’s call to respond with a return to “patriotic, communitarian, one-nation” Labour politics was countered with accusations that patriotism is just racism in disguise.

Part of what makes this unfair caricature funny is the nagging worry that it might contain a grain of truth. What if patriotism is a bit racist? After all, it is possible to conflate membership of an ethnic group with belonging to a nation-state. And history is not short of examples of national or ethnic antipathies being used to justify violence and hate.

But what if many of our fellow-countrymen have decided they don’t care? That retaining a democratic nation-state and a sense of national pride is worth being accused by members of the identity Left of stupidity or racism? If this is the case, our high-minded betters have two choices.

The first is to try even harder to “educate” the stubborn proles out of their love of Queen and country in favour of (one presumes) intersectional identity politics and socialist internationalism. To which I say: good luck with that.

The second is to make a positive case for patriotism. Racial prejudice is still, sadly, a feature of British life, but there are many more non-racist Britons than there are racist ones. A look at the 2019 General Election results for actual racist parties such as the BNP (total votes: 510) supports the contention that racism does not have mass electoral appeal.

By the same author

Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

What would an inclusive patriotism look like, though? The last serious effort anyone made at articulating such a thing was Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia back in the 1990s. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that he was the last Labour leader to be, however fleetingly, popular with the working class.)

But Cool Britannia was fatally wounded by Blair’s decision to drag the country into a disastrous war in order to shore up our post-imperial “standing” on the “world stage”. And if Cool Britannia’s geopolitical fantasies were punctured by the Iraq debacle, its cultural and economic vision imploded with the Great Crash of 2008.

We seem to have run out of iterations of Great Britain. Colonial empires are frowned upon and the EU’s opt-in reprise of imperialism has been resoundingly rejected by the British public. “Soft power” is an elite preoccupation and ours is waning anyway. Financialisation has hollowed out our economy. So what remains for us to be patriotic about? It is perhaps understandable that many decent people on the centre-Right and centre-Left fear that the answer is “just racism, sorry”.

I think they are wrong. If Great Britannia has run out of road, I would like to wave a (suitably small) Union Jack to celebrate a new, bijou British patriotic vision: Small Britannia.

For starters, our island home is small but nonetheless beautiful and precious. Small Britannia should make stewardship of this small home a patriotic duty — our ancient landscapes are struggling, as they are relentlessly strip-mined of natural health and resources by super-sized agribusiness. Subsidised by that one-size-fits-all policy of anti-smallness, the Common Agricultural Policy, this kind of industrial agriculture rips up hedgerows and decimates wild plant, animal and insect species (especially the smallest) with crop spraying, habitat destruction and topsoil erosion.

By the same author

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Post-Brexit, freed of the strictures and perverse incentives of the CAP, a patriotic vision of Small Britannia might help us also resist pressure to import US-style agribusiness methods. Instead we could go large (or small) on environmental protections and seek to promote a rural economy that celebrates everything small, from small multi-crop farms to small fields with rich hedgerows to fertile topsoil teeming with the small organisms that keep the land healthy. 

Small Britannia could continue, in the same spirit, with policies oriented toward supporting smallness in businesses. Thickets of regulation automatically benefit big business, as they have the resources to meet them, while smaller organisations flounder or are simply put off starting because of regulatory obstacles. As suggested in this 2014 report on EU over-regulation, Small Britannia could encourage a flourishing raft of small businesses by exempting them from a thicket of rules (written risk assessments, GDPR etc) they neither need nor have time to obey.

While we’re at it, let’s celebrate smallness in architecture and urban development. Let Small Britannia encourage human-scale building, self-build projects, small-scale development, and architecture in keeping with local settings. A patriotism of smallness would embrace not enormous bland housing estates, gigantic modernist skyscrapers or even the grand imperial-era architecture of cornices, porticoes and Great Men but small architecture: vernacular styles using local materials and adapted over centuries to work harmoniously with local climates.

Boris Johnson is already embracing Small Britannia in turning his development focus toward towns and smaller places. We must demand more of this, and ensure a post-Brexit Johnson government responds to the despair of “left behind” parts of the country not with handouts or pressure to turn everywhere into an underwhelming simulacrum of London, but a vision of smallness flourishing on its own terms.

Let Small Britannia oversee a wave of investment in towns, in rural transport, in encouraging new, small businesses in small places. And let us have policies that help the young to stay on in small communities or come back there to raise their own families, rather than draining youth and talent away to enormous urban hubs. 

Smallness also supports integration. Letting go of empire and the grandiose visions of the past means embracing the country we are today, not just an imagined “original” (white) population. Here, again, Small Britannia could do worse than start with a celebration of small communities. It is far harder to segregate by religion or ethnicity if you live in a village where everyone knows everyone else by name. (I live in a small town and this is one of the best things about it: though our population is multi-ethnic, civic life is far more tolerant and inclusive than anything I ever saw living in London.)

Stable, friendly small communities need not mean suspicious and exclusionary ones if we all share a love of Small Britannia. Far more than balkanisation by the resentful categories of the identity left, a patriotism of human-scale communities and buildings and landscapes has the potential to offer a genuinely inclusive sense of belonging.

Suggested reading

Why Corbynistas can never admit they're wrong

By Tom Chivers

And as Small Britannia oversees a flourishing of smaller, more stable and more inclusive communities, let us also celebrate a new geopolitical smallness. Small Britannia does not have to either possess or join an empire. Let power-bloc politics grind on; small nations have survived unscathed in other great-power eras. And within Small Britannia, let us see a real devolution of power; as Tom Clougherty argued in CapX earlier this year, fiscal devolution to the regions could hold the key to economic rebalancing away from London.

Small Britannia can close the book on all the dreams of ‘reach’ and ‘influence’ that are really codes for one empire or another. Let us turn our backs on the grandiose vision of the hyper-liberals, with their dreams of technocratic global government. Let us be free of Cool Britannia and its Hyacinth Bucket-like fretting about how Britain appears “on the world stage”. Let us above all spurn the ethno-nationalist frothing of those few racists who believe, mistakenly and perniciously, that Britain’s worth was ever tied to its ethnic makeup.

Let Small Britannia instead be a beacon to a world still in thrall to a narrative that says globalisation is inexorable, that small cannot survive,  that nation-states are doomed and governance must inescapably globalise in order to keep a lid on capital. Let us prove that the hollowing-out of small communities can be reversed and national democracies can return accountability to electorates.

Let us not abandon patriotism to actual racists but reclaim it for the decent majority. Small Britannia can set aside cold, homogenising utopias and empires, and embrace the local, the particular, the emergent and the organic. Let us turn away both from nostalgia but also from abstract victim identities and embrace all the citizens we have, with their multiplicity of origin stories. Out of this we can forge a new national synthesis in which everyone in our great small country can feel proud to wave a (small) Union Jack.

—

Every nation is entitled to its patriotism. When, for a few brief days during the 2018 World Cup, the England football team started firing on more than its habitual single cylinder, I painted my face with the cross of St George and joined a lot of other drunken people trying to stop traffic at the junction outside my local pub. But beyond football I cannot see the point of English nationalism.

In fact, it’s quite hard to be enthusiastic about a nationalism that didn’t exist when you were young. As a child I played Napoleonic war games, but the regiments we were taught to venerate from the battle of Waterloo were the Gordon Highlanders, the Scots Greys and the Inniskillings. The patriotism I was taught was, if anything, British.

Further reading

The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

But it is near certain that Scotland will gain independence in the first half of this century, and a united Ireland is a distinct possibility. So the rise of an English national identity in response to the UK’s breakup would be logical. The problem is, there is very little logic to a purely English nationalism once you get beyond the Tudor era.

From James I onwards, the London-centred elite’s mission for two centuries was to create a single kingdom out of Britain and Ireland, and use it as a springbard to build a colonial empire. Even under Cromwell, the essential mission remained the same. English nationalism, such as it existed, was never about separating off from other countries but conquering them.

As a northern English person, I find it even more complicated. The most resilient identity I’ve carried with me across the airport lounges of the world is “northern”. There’s a strong regional identity which expressed itself, for my Dad’s generation, through antipathy to other parts of England

And then there was mining. Mining culture was one of the strongest components of the British labour movement and created a kind of glue through which people from towns like Easington, Ysdradginlais and Auchinleck could create a shared experience that transcended their national and regional origins.

So it’s not surprising that our current form of English nationalism – centred around southern English culture and traditional institutions such as the Royal Navy, the Monarchy, the BBC and the flat horse racing season – has not proved particularly resilient.

Further reading

More than a beautiful game

By Michael Dalton

On top of all the regional and cultural forces, there is also globalisation, which has created – not just in London but in most of England’s major cities – a cosmopolitan vibe, in which your talent, not your nationality or ethnicity, is the route to success.

Do the polls reveal the emergence of a distinct, new English identity? Not conclusively. Residents of England forced to make a straight choice between “English” and “British” have been dividing roughly equally over the past 30 years.

Pride in English identity is weaker among the young (45%) than among the old (72%) according to a YouGov survey for the BBC. Meanwhile if 61% of white English people express pride in being English, only 32% of those from ethnic minorities do so. By contrast British national identity remains equally strong between all these groups.

The point is, an English nationalism moulded around its current symbols, ideologies and cultures cannot be successful in its own terms. If pushed hard enough, it would divide Britain, alienate the inhabitants of most big cities and find scant support among the creators of culture. It would, at worst, become a form of ethno-nationalism completely unsustainable in a diverse, open economy like ours.

Further reading

How Jane Austen makes fools of her fans

By Tanya Gold

Some on the Left, like the musician Billy Bragg, have argued that the Left should create its own version of English nationalism, out of the radical traditions that inspired the Levellers, Peterloo, the Chartists and the Peasants’ Revolt. But Leveller soldiers were shot by Cromwell for refusing to participate in the founding act of Left English nationalism – the conquest of Ireland. At Peterloo they carried the red cap of the French republic.

Like it or not, our past of continuous trade, conquest and openness to immigration makes the whole English nationalism project difficult to sell.

And yet the centrifugal dynamics of the UK make it inevitable that, at some point, a state comprising just England and Wales will have to find a viable ideology to explain its own existence.

Further reading

Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

My guess is that if such a state ever emerged, the only viable ideology would be one that validated its existence as a confederation of regions. They may not map exactly to the so-called ‘heptarchy’ of the Anglo-Saxon period, but if you separated off South West England from Wessex, made Birmingham the capital of Mercia and created an energetic Leeds-Manchester conurbation as the power centre of a new Northumbria, you would then have something similar to the power balance under King Ecgberht in the year 800.

The ‘nationalism’ that might emerge out of a neo-heptarchy would be centred around a common language, legal institutions and money – and thus be quite weak in terms of breast-beating emotionalism. But it would stand a better chance of being accepted by the 21^st-century population of England than all the current attempts to create a nationalism of exclusion. Having St George as its patron saint – a Greek conscript venerated by Christians from Palestine to Georgia and celebrated as a martyr in Islamic texts – would be pretty cool.

Paul Mason’s Confessions with Giles Fraser is out on Monday

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.