In one sense, the country commemorates like no other. Ever since I first moved to Parma, in 1999, I’ve been struck by the number of plaques, on streets and bridges, in parks and churches, marking events and occasions. It’s as if there’s a history lesson on every corner. Walking up one of the towers in Bologna, you see signs every few metres marking the names of the builders who fell to their deaths. “Memory, incessant memory,” as Giuseppe Ungaretti, the 20th century poet, once wrote.

Much of this commemoration is localised and deeply-felt, but nationally there seems to be no such emotional connection. The country’s most sacred monument, the gargantuan “Altar of the Fatherland” in Rome, is the most ridiculed building in Italy. With its creamy tiers and steps, it’s been nicknamed “the wedding cake” or “the typewriter”.

That’s echoed by the country’s broader refusal to settle on an established historical narrative. “Every time public attention is drawn back to the past,” the politician and academic Pietro Scoppola once wrote, “polemics arise that almost result in a wish to dissolve the consciousness of national identity”. Those polemics are evident in the many books about the country’s discordant commemorations, from John Foot’s Italy’s Divided Memory to Giovanni Contini’s La Memoria Divisa.

Much of this stems from the First World War and its immediate aftermath. In Britain, the mud and the trenches, the poppies and the poetry, are hewn into our collective consciousness. But in Italy there was a ferocious debate about whether to enter the war at all (it eventually did in 1915). Afterwards, there was an often bloody battle about the meaning of all that sacrifice. During the so-called “Biennio Rosso”  — two years of acute political polarisation when strikers and workers were met with brutal repression, often courtesy of proto-fascist gangs — a “war of memorials” began.

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Is Meloni enabling Italy's new blackshirts?

By Andrea Valentino

Many anarchist and socialist councils erected plaques and monuments that blamed Italy’s 650,000 dead on fat cats and warmongers. The town council of Albano Vercellese, between Milan and Turin, erected a monument that said bluntly: “To the dead who unsuspectingly gave their youth to the cause of capitalism.” Throughout 1919 and 1920, fascists began bombing, shooting or otherwise removing monuments that seemed too anti-militarist. As a result, many plaques were given armed guards. When Aldo Milano, a fascist footballer, tried removing that anti-capitalist commemoration in Albano Vercellese, he was shot dead.

After Mussolini’s March on Rome, in 1922, warfare and its victims were again glorified. The result was Redipuglia, not far from the battlefields where so many Italians lost their lives fighting against Austria-Hungary in the country’s far northeast. It’s a vast monument, housing the remains of 40,000 named combatants, as well as the bones of 60,000 unknown soldiers. When you go there today, you feel like an ant, dwarfed by cypresses and vast steps disappearing into the sky. You can still see the fascist insignia of the “fasces” — wooden rods and an axe wrapped together. On the distant horizon, there are three crucifixes like Golgotha.

Redipuglia became a symbol of the brief union between fascism and Christendom and — with a central tomb containing the remains of the Duke of Aosta, the king’s cousin — the union between an extremist insurgency and the established aristocracy. Just as important, it’s a union of the living and the dead: every step is covered, in that familiar Thirties font, with one word: presente. It’s the standard reply to a military roll call.

Yet Redipuglia, only completed in 1938, soon became an embarrassment. After Mussolini was ousted by the ​​Grand Council of Fascism and the King, in 1943, that immense royal tomb was awkward. After the Allied victory in 1945, the fascist insignia was even more uncomfortable.

Commemorating the fallen of the Second World War was equally fraught. Italians had fought on both sides, both for Mussolini and against him. In the post-war consensus, partisans once labelled “terrorists” and “criminals” became “liberators”. The country became covered with tributes to Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist politician murdered by Mussolini’s henchmen in 1924. Countless streets were named after other martyrs: near my home in Parma is Via Sette Fratelli Cervi, named after seven brothers killed in nearby Reggio Emilia.

Not far from Redipuglia, the Risiera di San Sabba became one of the country’s central exhibits of remembrance: this red-brick rice warehouse was a concentration camp, where political and Jewish prisoners were either murdered or transported to Nazi extermination camps. The Risiera, it’s thought, was responsible for the deaths of up to 5,000 people, and became a national monument in 1965.

Yet here, again, Italy was ambivalent. Although the post-war republic was officially keen to distance itself from Mussolini, criminalising the reconstitution of the Fascist Party, Italian monuments and buildings never faced anything like German denazification. Today, you can still see a 55-foot marble needle outside the Stadio Olimpico in Rome: “Mussolini Dux” is written on the side. There are fascist slogans in the mosaics nearby and a forest, the size of 15 football pitches, that spells out “DUX”. Iconography here doesn’t really get eradicated or cancelled, merely over-written.

It’s in the country’s northeast that the lack of a national narrative is felt most keenly. The vast majority of Italian casualties during the First World War were along the Isonzo, north of Trieste, as troops attempted to reclaim “unredeemed” Italy from both the Habsburgs and local Slavs. And it was here, at the tail end of the Second World War, that Italians suffered retribution: some, controversially, call it “ethnic cleansing”. As Tito’s communists advanced, around 5,000 people were killed, with many thrown into the deep foibe, the narrow gullies that sink into the mountains around Trieste.

For years, the foibe killings were forgotten. The exodus of 300,000 Italians from Istria and Dalmatia — including my grandfather-in-law’s family — was also largely ignored. It was only after the collapse of Italy’s post-war consensus, in the early 1990s, that the issue of foibe became another conundrum for Italian commemoration. With communism discredited, and the Christian Democratic party swept away by corruption scandals, Silvio Berlusconi forged a new coalition with the country’s post-fascist rump. Slowly, the story of the foibe was transformed into a narrative that fascists were actually martyrs.

The settled consensus around what happened during the Second World War quickly shifted. Berlusconi and his coalition partners often avoided or derided the traditional celebrations on 25 April, a national holiday marking Italy’s liberation from Nazi-Fascism. Partisans were once again scorned as “criminals” while Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace near Bologna, became a Disneyfied fascist theme park. The town is now a Mecca for Italian toughs, where you can visit Mussolini’s tomb, guarded by true believers, and buy endless paraphernalia: busts of Benito; Il Duce wine; replica uniforms. Ignazio Benito La Russa, currently president of the Italian Senate and proud of his middle name, is one of the country’s most assiduous collectors.

Commemorating the dead from Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI), when fascism became indistinguishable from German Nazism, has become one of the most controversial aspects of November remembrance. Each year, modern blackshirts descend on a section of Milan’s Cimitero Maggiore, where fighters from the RSI are buried. That recently removed plaque in Parma had been erected in 2011, lauding “the fallen and missing military and civilian members of the Italian Social Republic (1943-45). Italy before everything! Italy above all!”

The clearest example of this shifting narrative is Berlusconi’s government’s passing of a law, in 2004, to institute a “Day of Memory” commemorating both the foibe and the Istrian and Dalmatian exodus. It is now marked on 10 February every year, and Giorgia Meloni’s government recently approved legislation to build a foibe museum in Rome. In these initiatives there is, one hopes, a noble desire simply to commemorate the dead. But there’s clearly also political calculation: the foibe allows the far-Right to paint its ideological ancestors not as perpetrators, but as victims; and Italians not as sinning but sinned against.

So commemoration has become a provocation, a way not to honour the dead but to needle the living, and indeed Italy’s neighbours. In 2019, in Trieste, a new statue of Gabriele D’Annunzio was unveiled. A proto-fascist and the illegal occupier of Fiume (today Rijeka in Croatia), he’s unsurprisingly a disliked figure in both Zagreb and Ljubljana — let alone among the thousands of Slovenes who still live in this corner of Italy. In 2017, meanwhile, officials in Rome named a park after Rodolfo Graziani, a fascist and war criminal who used poison gas in Ethiopia.

At least the facts about people like Graziani are essentially known. But sometimes even the basics become blurred. In July 1944, 55 people died while sheltering in the local church in the Tuscan town of San Miniato. A fierce debate ensued as to whether the Germans had planted explosives, or the Allies had accidentally bombed the building instead. As a result, locals put up no less than four plaques, each with different wordings. A later atrocity, the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, has seen six separate plaques.

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Italy's bridge to nowhere

By Tobias Jones

Sometimes, uncertainty can become sheer fantasy. In Rome, for instance, there’s a street named after a mayor, Leopoldo Ruspoli, who never actually existed. Many of the most cherished heroes of Italian history — the revolutionary Giovan Battista Perasso; the mariner Flavio Gioja; the medieval warrior Alberto da Giussano — are immortalised in statues even though their identities or achievements are very uncertain. Everyone knows that truth is the first victim of war, but in Italy even peacetime seems shorn of simple facts.

Quite who is remembered or forgotten clearly reflects contemporary political choices, and there’s a large section of Italian society that has, traditionally, been entirely absent from all remembrance: its women. But here, too, “memorialisation is changing,” says Patrizia Sambuco, author of Transmissions of Memory. In Abruzzo, in 2018, local women partisans were officially commemorated for the first time, with several streets renamed in their honour.

In some ways, there’s nothing new to all this. Italy is a notoriously schismatic country, constantly fracturing into ever-smaller tribes and borghi: Guelph against Ghibelline, then Black Guelph against White Guelph; Catholics against anti-clericals; fascists against communists. Siena’s Palio is just the most obvious example of a small city splintering into tiny neighbourhoods, providing pageantry and polemics aplenty.

Perhaps the difficulty in creating a national memory is more a state of mind. In sharp contrast to Britons’ love of pomp and circumstance, Italians scorn the state, its laws and its servants. It’s hardly surprising that a national narrative, or a truly inclusive war memorial, prove hard to find in a country with such startling, cynical proverbs. My favourite says simply: “Never trust a person whose nose has two nostrils”.

When “Return” seems to be the future, it’s easy to forget that in the 20th century, modernism was popular. The Victorian city centres whose demolition we now mourn were dismissed as relics of the past. Many celebrated their replacement with modern, progressive steel-and-concrete boxes.

But less often asked than “Why is it all so ugly?” is: how did we get here?

This might seem an odd way to start an article about Remembrance Day, and the centenary of the Poppy Appeal. But writing about how we commemorate the Great War, over a century after it ended, is to ask: what, exactly, are we remembering? And why?

Of course, when we memorialise that war, we honour its 10 million dead and 23 million mutilated. But, less obviously, we also mark the start of an ongoing, monumental collective effort of forgetting.

The most visible traces of that forgetting are everywhere around us, in the modernist art, architecture and anti-culture that seemed, to contemporaries, not just necessary but essential in the wake of the Great War: a wholesale reboot of human culture.

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The American Right's civil war

By Mary Harrington

At root, the modernists hoped that somehow, if they could only make everything, clean, rational and anti-traditionalist enough, we’d never have to go to war again.

Why, then, did Europe go to war? Popular sentiment today holds that the Great War was fought for democracy. This is also the story America has always told about its own involvement in the conflict. But it’s far from clear that the modern-day abstraction of “democracy” was uppermost in the minds of British people in 1914, when the war began.

The Europe of 1914 was a place of competing empires, where the word of hereditary monarchs still had meaningful sway. The heads of state of three of the main belligerents were first cousins: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas of Russia. As historian Miranda Carter shows, the glittering, solipsistic worlds of these three royal cousins became ever more out of kilter with the industrialising empires they ruled.

Ever more intricate webs of alliances, woven by statesmen in the name of realpolitik and balancing competing interests, drove Europe’s imperial powers inexorably toward disaster. After the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, Britain declared war on Germany partly out of treaty obligations to Belgium, but more broadly to maintain that balance.

It wasn’t until America’s 1917 entry into the fray, under Woodrow Wilson, that anyone talked about “democracy” as a motivating force in the conflict. Wilson’s liberal internationalism blamed an inherently unstable dynamic of “power politics” for the bloodbath, and sought a new way of ensuring peace through “collective security”.

Though it’s widely understood today that Wilson’s efforts helped to create the conditions for a reprise of world war in 1939, recent writers see in Wilson’s project the first germs of the “liberal international order”. The settlement imposed on Germany after 1918 was, after all, America’s first go at imposing democracy at gunpoint.

So from the perspective of grand historical narratives, the poppy marks the end of the 19th-century world of great-power politics, and the long, slow ascent of the supposedly universal Pax Americana.

From the perspective of the ordinary citizen, of course, the poppy simply marks an unimaginable loss. You’ll find a memorial in every parish up and down the country, some huge and some simple plaques. They’re markers of a collective grief, all the more unspeakable because so universal.

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The death of Britain's dignity

By Mary Harrington

In some British families, World War I killed every adult man. The memorials where their names are carved remind us that the schemes of statesmen impose a terrible cost, in empty seats at dinner tables in ordinary homes.

But today even those who remember the fallen are almost all gone themselves. So what, in fact, is the loss we’re left to remember? It’s perhaps most clearly visible in the things we no longer feel able to celebrate, except in subcultures such as Reactionary Architecture Twitter.

For the Great War saw the beginning of the end for faith in the foundations of European culture. By the end of 1918, Tsar Nicholas was beheaded by revolutionaries, Kaiser Wilhelm was deposed and exiled, and George V presided over a broken, debt-ridden empire. The war precipitated a crisis in institutional Christendom. It spawned the first Communist state. And it shattered confidence in Western civilisation.

Patriotism took a hammering; and, perhaps more profoundly, so did institutional Christianity. Most Christian denominations on both sides of the war supported the conflict: according to historian Philip Jenkins many at the time viewed it as “a holy war”. Notoriously, in 1915 the Bishop of London declared it the duty of “everyone that puts principle above ease” to “kill Germans […] not for the sake of killing, but to save the world”.

The aftermath saw an elite backlash not just against nationalism, but also traditional religious faith and cultural forms. As historian Anna Neima shows, after the Great War all energy among the world’s avant-garde focused on how human society might be re-imagined, such that nothing as horrifying could ever happen again — by transcending borders of faith or nation.

Humanity, such visionaries hoped, might be induced to forge links across mere national identity in favour of something higher. In the early Twenties, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, founder of the utopian Santiniketan-Sriniketan community, expressed this vision in a letter to fellow utopian Leonard Elmhirst as “a great meeting of world humanity”.

The elites who corresponded, shared inspiration and travelled between these and other utopian communities, reads like a Who’s Who of high modernism. Figures as diverse as Amartya Sen, Anton Chekhov and Aldous Huxley were shaped by contact with these attempts to forge humanity anew atop the smoking rubble of the imperial 19^th century.

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The humiliation of the British Army

By Aris Roussinos

Some went on to found their own visionary communities: in due course, Elmhirst founded his own at Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon. In time, Dartington served as a petri dish for further influential modernist innovations, including progressive education and battery farming.

At Dartington and other communities like it, all traditional practice was to be thrown on the scrap-heap. Classical music; realist painting; traditional architecture. Everything should be new, stripped of the atavistic loyalties that had powered the slaughter of millions and left Europe in ruins.

Very little survives now of the original reasons to mourn, and none of the original mourners. But we go on remembering every year. Because even if there’s no longer anyone alive who feels the real-world loss of those ten million who lost their lives, we still feel the shock of the catastrophe that ended Europe as the heart of world civilisation, in the name of realpolitik.

Today, with a century of hindsight, it’s clear that Wilson’s enthusiasm for “national self-determination” itself contained a measure of realpolitik. For in practice, the high American ideal of nations shaping their own destinies meant unravelling the dominions of America’s Old World imperial rivals.

And the liberal internationalism Wilson inaugurated has itself, ironically, come adrift in another set of poppy fields: those of Afghanistan. Now, the American civilisation that took the torch from Europe is itself embattled, under economic and cultural siege in a once-again multipolar world. And as the ghosts of 19^th-century style realpolitik stir and begin to mutter, so too the poppy has become a site of culture war.

For some, the poppy is about patriotism, jingoism, an unreconstructed Kipperanschauung. So we get the annual row over wearing a poppy on telly, or a tabloid scandal about some zealot setting fire to poppies to signify their contempt for those who hew to a sense of national identity.

And as we drift ever further through the digital looking glass, so too the byproducts of Remembrance Sunday get steadily more unreal. This year, you can commemorate the end of institutional Christendom, the collapse of four empires, and 100 years of the poppy, with a limited edition NFT inscribed with the names of 118,000 fallen Canadians. Or if you say “Dulce et decorum est” three times into the mirror, the Poppyman will appear (maybe).

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How to survive our tragedy

By Terry Eagleton

But perhaps we go on remembering, ritually, every year, as a means of acknowledging that the West did in fact once have an astonishing, vivid, remarkable culture — and that we blew it all, along with millions of lives, in two immense bonfires between 1918 and 1945.

This week, I’ve watched my small town putting up the wrought-iron soldier silhouettes that mark Remembrance Sunday here every year. Metal outlines round empty air, they’re perfect emblems for how we reacted to that disaster.

They stand as markers for the ghostly persistence of that old Europe, whose spirit burned out in the Great War. And they’re perfect metaphors for the collective decision we made in its aftermath, to evacuate our civilisation of everything suspected of having caused that cataclysm.

It turned out that this meant evacuating our civilisation of, well, everything. And having more or less completed that emptying-out, no one is quite sure what to believe any more. But if history suggests anything, it’s that now the end of history has ended, something will eventually come along capable of mobilising people at scale, for another round of grand historical events.

As ever, when that happens, it’ll be statesmen who shape the bigger story. And no doubt this will be formed of countless little ones. We can only hope these don’t end up told in empty seats, around dining tables in ordinary homes.

Dear Bobby,

I wanted to warn you that only one of my three kids will show at the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan this year. Roman finally exploded that the reading of all those names every frigging September (though he didn’t say “frigging”) has got “kill-yourself boring”, even if one name is his uncle’s.

For Ettie, who was only two at the time and can’t remember you, 9/11 belongs in the same dusty bag as Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. Just out of college, she dismisses the memorial as an exercise in archaic patriotism — itself a celebration of “white supremacy”. I know, I know. That expression used to refer to a few kooks in peaked white hats. It now functions as an indictment of the entire country. And that’s just the beginning of what you’ve missed out on.

I’m hoping that bringing you up to date about the past two decades will partially restore the breath-taking sense of perspective that descended on me that monstrous morning. Although the weight on my chest was almost unbearable, I do miss the accompanying clarity.

To my chagrin, I’d suddenly been elevated to American royalty: I’d lost an immediate relative to the attacks. I soon grew weary of the deference. I didn’t want to feel special. After all, part of that clarity was realising the country itself wasn’t as special as we’d thought. People have been attacking other countries since forever, especially rich countries full of people who think they’re special.

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Why wait to die?

By Lionel Shriver

Not that I believe we deserved it, mind. Just that shit happens, even to the United States, which we might have learned from Pearl Harbor. And sisters have been losing their brothers forever, too.

Everyone was nice and kind and open in the immediate aftermath, as if the shock had shattered the shells we hadn’t even realised we were cocooned in. The force of collective mourning was so overpowering that nothing else seemed to matter, which frankly made the conduct of prosaic daily life rather difficult.

Having still to remember that we couldn’t have tacos again tonight after having had tacos just three days earlier was embarrassing. Funny, I got into a huge fight with Roy, when I pointed out about ten days in that now no one was going to give a flying fig for a documentary about how “attachment parenting” turns your kids into little shits; all that mattered about kids now was that they had parents at all.

Roy exploded. He couldn’t believe his wife could concern herself with anything as petty as her career at a time like this. I said, well, at least it took me a whole ten days to even remember that, oh, crap, a year’s work just swirled down the sewer. In our family mythology, I was the selfish one, and Roy found the typecasting useful. By the way, and you won’t be crushed, because you never cared for his high-horsery: we’re divorced.

Epiphanies are lies. They seem to offer a radical realignment of how you look at things for the rest of your life, but actually they’re just tiny wrapped-up presents that you can peek at but don’t get to keep, and then you snap right back to seeing everything the same way again. It took New Yorkers only a day or two to get competitive about who’d lost someone or knew someone who’d lost someone, who was closer to downtown at the time, whose neighbourhood stank worse, and whose sidewalks were more covered with that awful grey silt. 9/11 brought in a whole new hierarchy, but it was still all about status, so New Yorkers were simply reverting to the same rivalrous assholes they’d always been.

It’s been especially brutal for me that when you died, we still weren’t speaking. And we fell out over what? Bush v Gore! I can’t even dredge up the details we got so exercised about—something about chads and military ballots and “cherry-picking”. Okay, our whole family couldn’t get over my having voted for “that idiot”. You accused me of merely trying to distinguish myself from my liberal family out of desperation for a separate “identity”, but at the expense of throwing the country under a bus. Honestly, in retrospect, I think I just didn’t care for Al, whose dreary sanctimony reminded me of Roy. FYI, our pal Al, always fleshy, is now fat.

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America's failed Machiavelli

By Edward Luttwak

Obviously, that 2000 election ripped the country in half and put us all at each other’s throats. At first, 9/11 seemed to mend that rift. But only with a basting stitch, whose straggled threads broke years ago. No one cares about terrorists anymore. Americans save their animosity for each other. As for contested elections, the last one takes the cake. Two-thirds of Republicans think the 2020 presidential election was stolen, without a shred of evidence. Like, practically half the electorate thinks voting is rigged and fake. That’s way worse than some too-close-to-call in Florida, and even Al had the grace to concede. So that sensation of us all being in this together, that warm feeling of communal suffering while walking down Broadway? Long gone.

The other revelation 20 years ago was, wow, there really is such a thing as an enemy. There really are people out there who hate this country and want to destroy it, and it was pretty disturbing that I’d never noticed before. Well, kiss that insight goodbye, too. These days, no one seems to pay the slightest attention to enemies outside the country. They’re all in the country. Our very President — Joe Biden, believe it or not, and no, he’s not dead, or not quite — claims the biggest threat to the US is “domestic terrorism”. He’s not talking about Islamic nutjobs with visas for going to flying school, either, but about white people — and not even the white people burning down black-owned businesses in the interest of “social justice”.

So never mind China (massively more dangerous than in your day), or Russia, or Iran, or the tons of terrorists in Africa and the Middle East still plotting more mayhem; all that matters is “systemic racism” right here. You’d think this country had never elected a black president (surprise!) — twice (double surprise!). You’d think 9/11 had never happened — that we’d never been shaken up, never looked around wide-eyed at the big scary world out there. We’re back to squabbling with the other children in our grubby private sandbox.

When the South tower collapsed with you in it, I also thought: my God, there is such a thing as evil. Such a thing as truly horrible, despicable people who do horrible, despicable things. And now our compatriots think “evil” means asking someone where they’re from or complimenting a foreigner’s English or using the wrong pronoun. If Ettie and her friends ever came face-to-face with proper evil, smoke would come out their ears and their brains would short out.

After the attacks, we blathered endlessly about defending “freedom”, but no one gives a tinker’s damn about freedom anymore. For 18 months they’ve “locked down” swathes of the country, telling everyone to close their businesses and stay home. That’s what now passes for “liberty and justice for all”, and practically nobody complained.

Maybe that’s because no one feels safe saying anything more controversial than their shoe size. If you announce what might have seemed self-evident 10 years ago, like “women don’t have penises”, you can lose your job, and the only place I’d dare to type such heresy is in an unposted letter to my dead brother.

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This is Britain's 9/11 moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

You’ll be glad to hear we attacked Afghanistan in your memory, but less happy to learn that we only left that slagheap, tail between our legs, ten days ago. The Taliban are back in power, and aside from leaving them as one of the best equipped fighting forces in the world — with $86 billion’s worth of our gear — everything is the same. Oh, we finally shot the Jesus-y creep who ploughed a plane into your office, but two trillion dollars is a stiff price for one hit job. Eight years of occupation of Iraq cost nearly the same money and accomplished the same nothing.

I need to get ready for that memorial, so this will be rushed. In 2008, the financial world went blooie. Though we’ve technically recovered, we’re still tippling on the edge of a sheer drop; my finance guy’s advice is: “Don’t look down.” In 2016, we elected an inarticulate, narcissistic blowhard as president, who made us an international laughingstock. Now we’ve elected an elderly puppet with encroaching dementia who draws not contempt but pity; he’s spending money as if medically incapable of remembering that he already spent all of it last week. The government is in hock $23 trillion and counting (your eyes are bulging), and if the dollar is ever replaced as the world’s reserve currency — this is your bailiwick, Wee Willy Wall Street — we’ll all be huddled around campfires with meat on sticks. Or soy protein on sticks. Yum.

Back in 2001, it was medieval fanatics who denigrated our country as decadent, degenerate, corrupt and irredeemably amoral. Now the leadership of all our institutions — universities, arts foundations, corporations, even the Army and CIA — has taken on the smear job for them, happily trashing the country as wicked and unsalvageable. It’s a form of the entrepreneurship we’re so famous for: Americans have learned to terrorise themselves.

By the way — although well into production, my new documentary on “cancel culture” has just been cancelled. Imagine the hilarious late-night debrief you and I might have enjoyed as I drip-fed you the ironic details. One more of our jousting, wine-soaked sibling powwows would have more than compensated for my wasted work.

L.

1. Promote integration

Nobody wants to live in a society in which we fear fellow citizens simply because we do not know them. In polarised times, we risk a retreat from community if we separate ourselves into our different identity bubbles.

Yet we have never had proper national integration strategies. We have seen nothing like the level of political will, resources or civic engagement that Germany has mobilised in response to polarisation. Government should lead, setting the vision and foundations – but closing the contact gap needs to be everybody’s business.

Nobody should go to school in Britain where there is no meaningful contact across class, ethnic and faith lines. Every school governing body should be required to consider twinning and linking arrangements with other schools to ensure we are educating children to be citizens of a shared Britain.

Employers, sporting and cultural institutions should make practical contributions too.

2. Use the race disparity audit to form policy

Theresa May created the race disparity audit to deal with ‘burning injustices’ of inequality. This pioneering initiative has rendered every policy area transparent. It shows where we are making progress, where the gaps are, and who risks being left behind. It is unmatched anywhere else in the world. It would actually be illegal in France, where collecting data about racial inequalities is prohibited.

We must not waste the opportunity it gives us. This audit must now underpin a practical policy agenda that advances fair chances and no unfair barriers – regardless of one’s class, race, gender and hometown. Theresa May’s potential successors – and the opposition parties – should commit to acting on it, by offering competing ideas to narrow these opportunity gaps to unlock the potential and talent of Britain today.

3. Listen to the public on immigration

After Brexit, Britain will need to rethink its immigration policy. The public has lost confidence in governments who failed to anticipate or respond to the rise in immigration – and which then corroded trust further by making promises that couldn’t be kept. To reassert this, the public need a voice in shaping the choices we make.

The Chancellor has the Budget: a day on which his or her work is scrutinised by parliament and the public alike. So, the Home Secretary should have an annual Immigration Day, on which the Commons agrees policies and targets. This event should be preceded by extensive local and regional public engagement on the pressures and gains of immigration.

Attitudes towards immigration have softened since 2016, but the Government remains nervous about engaging the public in any decision making. The failed net migration target was a one-size-fits all approach. We could better reflect how the public think about migration by taking different policy approaches for different types of migrants: international students; low, semi and high-skilled workers; families and refugees.

4. Make it easier to become a British citizen

It is good for our society when the people who join it want to become British. We should encourage the take-up of citizenship. Three million European nationals are being invited to become permanent residents under the ‘settled status’ scheme; the next Prime Minister should directly invite those who want to take up citizenship to do so, at cost price.

The Government is planning to review the content of the citizenship test; it should also conduct a broader review of the purpose of citizenship policy – and review the current policy, process and cost barriers to becoming British.

We should also celebrate our new citizens – by breathing new life into citizenship ceremonies, holding them in iconic locations, and using them as a practical opportunity to promote full engagement, from voter registration to opportunities for volunteering and contact.

5. Initiate a shared history project

Comprehensively understanding our history is an important step on the road to a more united Britain. Our traditions of Remembrance have become increasingly inclusive, with a growing awareness of the enormous contribution of Commonwealth soldiers in the two world wars; there has been greater recognition across all faith and ethnic backgrounds that Remembrance can, does and should belong to us all.

The 75th anniversary of D-Day this year will see our country reflect on the contribution of the tens of thousands of Second World War veterans now in their eighties and nineties. Across the 2020s, direct experience of this conflict should be captured before it passes from living memory into the history books. That’s why the next Prime Minister should announce the biggest ever oral history project in this country.

Teenagers and young people would meet those who served and record their personal stories. Doing so would create more contact across the growing generational divide than ever before – and help us all to understand how shared history underpins our national identity today.