Nostalgia: it's not what it used to be
A friend of mine sent me this on a meme to see what I made of it:
Funny how before diversity made us stronger there was less crime, better healthcare, rigorous education, less social angst, no issues of integration, no fixation on 'racism', more national confidence, and grooming just means personal hygiene
Well unlike the people who buy into this drivel I actually gave it some thought. And this is an open response to them. Why is the fucked up partially educated right harking back to a time that never fucking existed?
You know what - it’s always been easier to sell fairy tales than face facts. And the the right, especially the intellectually bankrupt end of it, thrives on nostalgia precisely because it doesn't have to be real. It's not about history, it's about mythology: a comforting bedtime story for people who can't cope with the present and are terrified of the future. The ‘good old days’ they pine for, with white picket fences, polite children, cheap homes, The Sullivans on at lunchtime and no foreigners in sight is a nothing but manufactured hallucination designed to piss them off. It’s post-war Britain viewed through a soft-focus filter, scrubbed of smog, poverty, slums, domestic violence, ice on the inside of bedroom windows and the fact you needed a bath schedule because your house didn’t have central heating.
Lets clear something up first. This isn't poor bashing. I was born in an upstairs bedroom in a terraced Victorian street house in a suburb next to steel works. Up the road from me for a 99 years they mined ironstone. There were docks there making ships. My first school had outside toilets, as did our hous. People made a living but most only just. They died before their time and many had diseases like bronchitis because the air was so shit. To this day we are called smoggies. Being poor doesn't mean you need to be uneducated but we seem to be living in a world now where ignorance is a fucking life choice.
The right clings to it because it flatters them. In that fantasy, they were important. They had status, by virtue of being white, straight, male, or British. Not because they earned it, but because the bar was set so freakishly low that just existing in the ‘right’ identity got you a leg up. Except if you weren’t rich of course it didn’t. And that's the big lie.
This kind of myth-making thrives where education is poor and critical thinking is absent. You get a diet of tabloids, Facebook memes, and right-wing dog whistles instead of history, economics, or empathy. It’s not their fault entirely, they’ve been fed this crap by politicians and media barons for decades. But at a certain point, bloody minded wilful ignorance and acting like an industrial grade wankspanner becomes a choice. So let’s break down that reactionary bullshit in the meme: this reactionary drivel harks back to the golden age that only ever existed in the warped nostalgia of bitter, red-faced pub bores and Daily Mail comments sections.
So I’m going to unravel this steaming pile of bollocks one deluded fantasy at a time.
"Before diversity made us stronger there was less crime..."
You mean back when police forces were institutionally racist, domestic abuse was considered a private matter, marital rape was still legal, and the criminal justice system largely ignored entire swathes of the working class? Less crime? No, just less recorded crime, because if it didn’t happen to a white middle-class man, it didn’t fucking count.
"Better healthcare..."
Oh, you mean before the NHS when everyone had to pay for healthcare at source? when the healthcare sector was so starved of staff that women routinely gave birth on trolleys, mental illness was a shameful secret, and your odds of surviving a heart attack depended on your postcode and whether you were lucky enough to see a doctor who didn’t think angina was just a 'woman thing'? And everyone died about a couple of months after they were handed their retirement clock. And let’s not pretend the NHS didn’t improve because of immigration, it only functions because of immigrant staff, from cleaners to consultants. You want better healthcare? Stop scapegoating diversity and start taxing fucking billionaires.
"Rigorous education..."
Ah yes, the old model of caning kids into submission, flogging them for being left-handed, and writing off anyone who wasn’t Oxbridge-bound. Unless you were a white boy in short trousers reciting Latin, you were basically cannon fodder or factory labour. Rigorous, sure, in the same way a prison yard is ‘structured.’ Only a prize dick would think this was a better way forward – enter stage right, Lee fucking Anderson.
"Less social angst..."
Translation: fewer people were allowed to speak. Mental health wasn’t ‘better,’ it was just buried, often literally, in asylums. Women, LGBTQ+ people, Black and brown communities weren’t angsty, they were silenced, pathologised, and brutalised. Social peace maintained by repression is not peace, it’s just fucking fascism with a smile.
"No issues of integration..."
Because the people you didn’t want to integrate weren’t allowed in the country, and those already here were told to shut up, keep their heads down, and thank the Queen for the privilege. Integration isn’t a problem, your inability to tolerate anyone who doesn’t look like you or share your flag shagging fucked up weird obsession with Empire is the real issue.
"No fixation on 'racism'..."
Of course not - because racism was just how things were. Black people being denied housing, jobs, education? Standard. Housing for rent with ‘No Blacks – no dogs – no Irish’ signs outside. Police calling people the N-word while smashing their heads in? Business as usual. Now that people actually talk about racism, it’s suddenly a ‘fixation.’ Grow the fuck up you fucking arseholes. That’s not fixation, that’s reckoning. And while we’re at it ‘free-speech’ doesn’t mean you can say what you want without consequences – even if those consequences are a punch in the fucking mouth. Most of you are overdue one.
"More national confidence..."
More like national arrogance built on delusion and denial. A country puffed up on colonial hangovers, pretending it still ran the world while everything at home crumbled. Confidence built on bullying smaller nations and gaslighting its own working class isn’t confidence, it’s toxic bravado. Only most of you are too fucking stupid to see this.
"Grooming just meant personal hygiene..."
What an absolute sewer-dweller’s take. Grooming gangs have existed forever. They were just ignored when it happened in posh schools, churches, and the family home. When MPs were touching up kids in childrens home. What’s changed is the exposure, not the existence. And trying to frame ‘diversity’ as the cause while ignoring the decades of abuse covered up by British institutions is as vile as it is transparent. And only the severe lack of thinking would see this in this frame.
Behold the master race
Of course, the people buying into this are too fucking stupid to realise this is all political. Nostalgia is politically useful. If you're a right-wing grifter with no answers to modern problems: collapsing public services, cost of living crises, climate change - you redirect anger away from the billionaires and landlords who are actually screwing everyone, and towards immigrants, trans people, or some fictional lefty elite. You dress it all up in the language of ‘remember when things made sense?’ and suddenly you've got a mob of voters who don't ask why they're suffering just who to blame
So, the uneducated right doesn't hark back to a real past. They cling to a fabricated one because it demands nothing of them, no change, no effort, no growth. Just resentment and a flag.
And the people feeding them this poison? They know damn well it’s fiction. But they don’t care. Because keeping the working class angry, divided, and nostalgic is the easiest way to stop them questioning why they are being arse raped by the rich.
This is because the far right have fuck all real to offer. No solutions, no policies that work, no plans beyond ‘kick out the foreigners and hope for the best.’ So instead, they sell narratives, emotionally charged, fact-free fantasies that turn fear, decline, and inequality into something someone else did to you. It’s not your crap wages, dying town centre, or broken NHS that’s to blame, oh no, it’s ‘diversity,’ ‘wokeness,’ and some imagined golden age stolen by ‘the left.’ It’s pure propaganda, and it works on three levels:
1. Blame-shifting The far right are backed, often quietly, sometimes blatantly, by the same elite interests that have gutted public services, deregulated the economy, and handed the country over to corporate greed. But they can't admit that. So they offer up scapegoats instead. Refugees. Trans people. Single mums. Black footballers. Anyone but the rich and powerful. These rich tax avoiding fuckers convince working-class people that their real enemy is their neighbour with a hijab or the gay teacher at their kid’s school, and suddenly no one's storming the gates of Downing Street demanding justice. Divide and rule, it’s the oldest trick in the imperial playbook. And you swallow it all.
2. Emotional manipulation The far right doesn't deal in facts. It deals in feelings. Fear, pride, anger, humiliation. “You used to matter. Now you don’t. They took it from you.” Who is they? Doesn’t matter. It changes daily: immigrants, the EU, the BBC, drag queens reading stories. The vagueness is the point. It’s a permanent state of siege, a rolling moral panic that keeps the hard of thinking agitated and looking for enemies. It’s not about accuracy. It’s about vibes. And if you’re exhausted, underpaid, and ignored, that emotional logic is seductive. It feels true, even when every fucking word of it is a pack of lies.
3. Mythmaking as control The far right loves a myth because myths can’t be disproved. "Britain was better before." When? Show us the data. What exact year was this utopia? But they won’t of course, because they’re not talking about a real point in time. They're selling a feeling of order, purity, dominance. It’s sugar coated fascism wrapped in bunting. And once they’ve sold you that myth, they can use it to justify anything. Deportations, censorship, violence. After all, you're not being vile and cruel: you're just “restoring the country.”
The far right pushes this garbage like this because it works. It turns powerlessness into hatred, confuses nationalism with self-worth, and keeps people punching down while billionaires walk off with the spoils. It’s snake oil. A slick, poisonous, deeply British scam: with a Union Jack in one hand and a dog whistle in the other.
And when you scratch off the veneer, all that’s left is an ideology built on rot: racial resentment, gender panic, historical amnesia, and the fear that if things change, they’ll be exposed for what they really are: small, bitter, and profoundly wrong about fucking everything.
So back to the beginning and that quite frankly fucking ridiculous meme. In short: this is not a lament for a better time, it's piss poor tantrum over lost privilege. Diversity hasn’t broken Britain, your braindead pathetic yearning for a fake past where white, straight, cis men ruled unchecked is what’s holding this country back. And you are too fucking thick to see it.
Keep your fucking fantasyland. The rest of us deserve something better. And I’ll leave you with this: in 20 years-time when all the blood pressure red faced angry gammon are dead, the next generation – the ones that have been pushed off the property ladder, the ones that have to live with cause and effect of climate change that the deniers have created for them and future generations. The ones that saw this weapons grade BS for what is was: their self-absorbed angry bigoted fucked up empathy free parents, unable to collect a single home grown idea that wasn’t spoon fed to them by Reform, Teeny tiny Tommy Ten-names, some billionaire tax avoiding press cunt or Katie fucking Hopkins. This generation will look back at the rise of the far right as a temporary horse-shit covered speedbump towards a future where they are left to clear the mess up. The kids you brought up in a toxic household with a fucked up worldview: They’ll move away. Get educated, meet people from different cultures and be introduced to something a bit wider than the echo-chamber of GBeebies. And they’ll grow. And they’ll realise what an ovine reactionary bunch of backwards, angry, thought-free cunts their parents were.
And hopefully that will motivate them to make a better world from the piece of shit one we’re currently leaving them.
