How Britpoppers killed patriotism The kids won't fight for Starmer

Are the Britpoppers okay? Britain’s distinctive post-boomer bulge generation, they of Jamie Oliver, the 00s London property boom, Posh Twee and “proper chips”, Bloasis and floral shirts and gentrifying Hackney, have gone bananas en masse.

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”.

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 harbouring 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 globalisation 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.

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 realisation 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 productisation 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, pasteurised “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 defence 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 signalling 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 defence 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 defence 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 favour 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 defence 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 realised 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 realised 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.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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