A rose tinted spectacle
There is a persistent, poisonous myth that runs through British political culture like rust through old iron. It tells us we were once a proud, moral, self-reliant nation. That we 'stood alone' in the war, unyielding in our defiance, with decent values, a strong work ethic, and a quiet, un-showy patriotism.
Of course it’s a lie. A comforting, kitsch delusion and one that’s dragging us backwards.
This myth finds its loudest expression in the crimson faces of the self-appointed guardians of national identity. Angry middle aged men, usually, who scream about migrants, sneer at trans people, and rage against climate activists. Men who conflate criticism of Britain with treason, who cherish poppies more than policies, and who seem to genuinely believe that their country has been stolen from them, not by bankers or landlords, but by pronouns and vegan sausage rolls.
Scratch the surface and you’ll find something even more hollow: they’re mourning a Britain that never existed.
A Manufactured Nostalgia
The fantasy is always the same: a post-war utopia of fairness, hard graft, strong borders, and respect for authority. A world where people 'knew their place': where police were kindly bobbies on bicycles and children stood for the national anthem. Where 'we looked after our own' and 'the country ran properly'. It’s the Britain of The Dambusters, The Great Escape, and endless reruns of Dad’s Army. The white Britain. The straight Britain. The Britain of warm beer, cold contempt, and a Union Jack in every window.
But the truth is that post-war Britain was poor, brutal, hierarchical, and deeply unequal. It was a country riven with class violence and empire denial. A country where gay men were chemically castrated, where Black and Asian families were denied housing, and where women had almost no economic agency outside the home. The NHS: so often hailed as the crown jewel of this imagined golden age, was created not because of British conservatism, but in defiance of it. It was built by a radical Labour government that faced fierce opposition from the very class of men who now claim to cherish it.
A gammon vision of England: blurry, like a box of Quality Street and nothing resembling reality...ever.
The World War II Obsession: National Myth as Narcotic
Perhaps the most grotesque manifestation of this false nostalgia is the obsession with World War II, especially by those born decades after the last bomb fell. A generation of men who never faced conscription, never endured rationing, never saw a city reduced to rubble, nonetheless act as if they fought on the beaches. You’ll hear them talk about 'Churchill’s spirit' about 'Blitz resolve' about the nation that 'stood alone'. They wear poppies like religious icons and snarl at anyone who dares question the sanctity of their war. But what they’ve inherited is not memory, it’s mythology. War has become not a tragedy to be mourned but a theatre of masculine fantasy. In the hands of the Gammons, it’s no longer a brutal conflict that left Europe shattered and millions dead, it’s a story about white British moral supremacy, selectively remembered and endlessly weaponised. They forget, or ignore, that we didn’t stand alone. Without the Red Army, the American war machine, and hundreds of thousands of colonial troops, from India, Africa, the Caribbean, Britain would most certainly have lost. We didn’t win the war on pluck and Spitfires, which they also ignore were also manned by Eastern Europeans, free French and even volunteer Americans. We won it with alliances, logistics, and the lives of the Global South. This isn’t just historical pedantry. It matters, because when people cling to myths about war, they justify modern cruelty in its name. It is no accident that the very people who fetishise World War II are often the same who demand migrant deportations, cheer for the bombing of Gaza, and sneer at the idea of reparations or historical justice. Their 'war memory' is a mask for empire nostalgia and the brutality of Empire.
1940: When Britain stood alone... with the Poles, the Czechs, the Belgians, a few Yanks, A Rhodesian, someone from Palestine, Norwegians, Canadians and the French
The Real Britain They Want Back
What the Gammons really want is not fairness or sovereignty, it’s hierarchy. A social order where whiteness is the default, where maleness is respected without earning it, and where tradition is a blunt instrument used to silence dissent. They crave the psychological comfort of being on top without having to change. They are threatened not by progress but by the realisation that they no longer have a monopoly on meaning. And they’ve been told, repeatedly, that this loss is someone else’s fault. Told by the right wing press, reinforced by their mates in the and championed by the likes of grifters like Farage and Tice. Migrants. Wokery. Brussels. Feminists. Trans activists. Climate protesters. The scapegoats change, but the message remains the same: your declining status is caused by people demanding equality. That’s why a black British MP is 'divisive' but Jacob Rees-Mogg, a literal caricature of Victorian privilege, is just 'a traditional gentleman'. It’s a politics of projection. They say they want their country back, but what they really want is to stop feeling like the world no longer revolves around them. They want sovereignty, but they have no idea what it is. If they did perhaps they could exercise justified anger that our last 6 Governments have been effectively bankrolled by a foreign state that once murdered our troops and civilians and has recently bombed our war graves to prioritise it over them.
A Nation Trapped in Costume
What we’re witnessing is the breakdown of British identity. In the face of decline: economic, cultural, imperial, we’ve dressed up our failure in bunting. We’ve built a cult of the past to shield ourselves from the present. We cling to war medals and monarchy, empire and exceptionalism, while food banks spread like plague and the NHS is hollowed out before our eyes. The Gammons rage against Greta Thunberg while sewage fills our rivers. They scream about 'British jobs for British workers' while billionaires hoard the wealth and outsource their factories to the global south. They buy into every distraction because the truth is unbearable: Britain’s decline wasn’t caused by migrants or Marxists. It was caused by the same class of people the Gammons vote for: the landlords, the hedge fund donors, the privatisers, the profiteers. The past they long for is not only gone, it never existed in the first place.
When the wind blows: typical middle England, facing down nuclear dystopia - we love London, but it smells like Sunday Dinners
What We Actually Need
And this is dangerous. If it was fragile men crying into warm pints about a world that never was we could happily sidestep them and the Reform pub in Blackpool they inhabit. But their anger spills out on to the streets.
We saw this grotesque double standard play out in real time with the Southport riots and the clashes with police in Epping. When mobs of largely white men hurled bricks at police cars, set bins alight, attacked hotel staff on minimum wage and rampaged through high streets shouting about 'protecting are children'. The media bent over backwards to frame it as justified righteous anger. Community concern. Something that was always going to happen sooner or later. But when an elderly woman in Hackney quietly held up a placard condemning the murder of Palestinian children, she was arrested under counter-terror legislation. No riot, no weapon, no threat, just a pensioner with a conscience. That’s the Britain we now live in: one where reactionary violence is sanitised, even applauded, and non-violent moral clarity is criminalised. Where whiteness and patriotism are shields, and dissent: especially left-wing, anti-imperialist dissent, is treated as extremism. The Gammon myth has not only warped our memory of the past. It’s poisoning our present.
The Question Time Gammonathon. As the 'silenced' never fucking shut up telling us.
We need to confront the lies. To dismantle the myths. To tell the truth about Britain’s past and its present. That means acknowledging our role in slavery, empire, and war. It means understanding that progress is not betrayal. And it means refusing to let the loudest voices of nostalgia define who we are. Because the fight ahead is not between left and right, young and old, north and south. It’s between those who want a better future and those who want no future at all.
If we want to build a Britain worth living in, we must first bury the Britain that never was.
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