A great deal of Brexit sentiment, and more broadly nationalistic and populist sentiment, comes from people’s nostalgia for a Britain that no longer exists and cannot exist in the modern world. Britain always seems to be looking back, through coke bottle rose-tinted spectacles to Victorian imperialism or to ‘Fortress Britain’ standing defiant against the evil Hun. How ironic then, that many who express this sentiment are far closer to fascists in their outlook than those who fought them.
There’s another kind of nostalgia and another kind of Britain though, the one built by the people who returned from that war and in a time of inescapable austerity built the institutions we used to be so proud of.
As Empire slipped away, by and large more peacefully and with better grace than the other Imperial powers, and we struggled with rationing that dragged into the 1950s, we instituted the National Health Service. A huge and costly change but one that greatly improved the lot of all our citizens. Having pulled together in wartime we applied that same spirit to civil society and while planned economies would end up discredited this period did give us nationalised industries that worked for the people and a blunting of poverty and homelessness previously unparalleled in our history.
Those soldiers who returned home had fought alongside people from all around the world, and had seen the horrors (my grandfather liberated Belsen) that indulging nativism, populism and nationalism could cause. While the euphoria of peace wouldn’t last, alliances, talks and internationalism became obvious in their utility. The United Nations, NATO and yes, even the European Union were born out of those realisations.
Where the wartime generation gave us our social fabric and our institutions, the postwar generation brought us social liberalism. A great flowering of free speech, free expression, acceptance, LGBT tolerance and equality and a huge interest in foreign culture, food, art and more.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that we, for some perverse reason, set about dismantling all we had accomplished – or at least the ruling classes did. Now, weirdly, that same destructive attitude is being displayed by your average Jane or John in the street. A lashing out at the few remaining institutions we have, and the hard-won victories for personal liberty we won.
It’s not just coming from one side however. For every EU-hating Daily Mail reader, there’s a Guardianista demanding censorship. For every skinhead brawler there’s a mask-clad antifa. The nationalists and populists undermine everything that made the nation something to be proud of, the ‘Social Justice’ left threatens our individual and collective freedoms, and makes the right stronger with every illiberal act.
I want my country back too, but my nostalgia is for a country with social housing, a well-funded and publicly run NHS, infrastructure that works for the people, university grants, polytechnics, apprenticeships – and yes, free milk for schoolkids. I want my country back, where my business is none of your business, where ideas of ‘obscenity’ or ‘problematic material’ are attacked with the same robust energy we have devoted to Lawrence, Wilde or Kubrick.
Most of all though, and my bias shines through here, I want the British Left to be left-wing again. Concerned with society, its function and ensuring we lessen people’s suffering and have a country that works for all of us. I don’t want it to be monomaniacally fixated on whatever middle-class first world problem du jour is exciting the chattering classes.
Hey, my nostalgia may not be any more accurate than yours, but isn’t that vision a better one than a domineering, insular, jingoistic, ‘I’m alright Jack’ bully of a country?
I think so.
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