I’ve read a couple of books lately that while quite different, seemed to mesh.

The first was Rule Nostalgia by Hannah Rose Woods, a look into why, particularly in the UK, nostalgia for previous times is so powerful, and why our country in particular seems to continually look backwards and cling on to anachronisms, looking for a golden age. One of the interesting things is that people have always done this

Tangentially related was Stuart Maconie’s The Full English, where Stuart does a modern recreation of J B Priestley’s English Journey.

It’s interesting that the first book identifies the particularly damaging nostalgia- that misty-eyed view of empire tied together with English exceptionalism, where we English are assumed to be superior just by being English- all looking back to a time of

widespread ‘nostalgia for a time when life was easier, and Britain could simply get rich by killing people of colour and stealing their stuff’

One of the book’s main points is that nostalgia is highly selective, so we’re expected to accept the duality that the post-war years were a time of austerity and everyone pulling together, except that actually they were

an age when the country had rebuilt itself into prosperity through massive government investment

So we invoke all the “Keep Calm and Carry On” bullshit- a slogan that never actually saw the light of day during wartime- and align it with austerity, when actually, this was never the case. Of course history quite often means a certain variety of history:

I am not sure what is more frightening: that fact in itself, or the enthusiasm with which politicians and right-wing newspapers warn that historians who seek to debunk these foundation myths and dispassionately examine the past are sinister Marxist ideologues seeking to undermine the freedom of ‘Western civilisation’ as we know it. It sounds a bit fashy to me.

So any dissenting voice- one that suggests that (for example) our Empire was built upon trade from behind a gun and by exploitation is seen as unpatriotic and “doing Britain down” in the same way that Brexit would be a huge success if we’d all shut up and just believe. It’s all a basic refusal to acknowledge that we past we’re looking back to isn’t as it was presented anyway, and it’s long gone.

Meanwhile, Stuart’s book starts with:

As I left, Britain had no HGV drivers thanks to Brexit, empty shelves and a collapsing gas industry thanks to rampant idiotic privatisation. There was no petrol in the pumps, no pasta or loo rolls on the shelves and rumour had it the army was about to be deployed on the streets. While in Norway I caught their most popular TV satire comedy show, their equivalent of Have I Got News For You. In it there was a long riff about Britain’s malaises greeted with hearty gales of Nordic laughter. It concluded with one contributor saying, effectively, ‘well, England’s had a good run. But it’s over for them now.’ It was hard to disagree.

and continues on the rose-tinted view of a simpler life in the country that’s received wisdom in the UK (and predominately England):

bucolic simplicity tends to also involve quite a lot of back-breaking physical labour, starvation wages, bullying aristocratic bosses and rapacious landlords. If we think that Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie describes the ultimate Cotswolds idyll, it’s worth remembering that there was quite a lot of disease, poverty and sexual abuse mixed in with the cider and snogging. As Lee puts it, ‘Manslaughter, arson, robbery, rape cropped up regularly throughout the years. Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers. Drink, animality, and rustic boredom were responsible for most.

and tempers his love of the Cotswolds with

But then I remember the snobbery, the innate conservatism, the private schools, the forelock-tugging, the foxhunting, the parson and squire, the agricultural subsidies, the unearned wealth, the Range Rovers, the pink trousers, the preponderance of wankers

and here is where I felt the two meshed: the imagined perfection of older times, tied in with the overarching desire for some English people to be told what to do by a posho. Over to Stuart again:

England regularly retreats into stupidity and deference, still in thrall to the vain, the dim and the laziest loudmouth in the workshop. Jeeves is dead. But on shining Southampton Water and the misty Fens, in the busy streets of Birmingham, Bradford, Liverpool and Manchester, in ancient, secretive Lincoln and newborn, futuristic Coventry, we are still bowing and scraping to Bertie Wooster and his private club. The personnel may change. Some of them are asked to leave, having been particularly obnoxious or useless. But the club remains, and it remains members only.

For a country that has been here for a thousand years, we are still taking our baby steps towards adulthood.

What is this illusion, this phantasm of greatness these people chase? Is it the one where we trampled on the lives and rights of people all over the world and exploited them to death? Why do we yearn for some imagined greatness when right now England can’t feed its kids, heal its sick or run its trains? How about forgetting about being great? How about being happy? How about being competent?

The whole thing is rotten. The political classes, the broken first-past-the-post election system that skews our allegedly democratic process, the unelected House of Lords, the ridiculous ceremonies and titles instead of actually, you know, running a country. The politicians with outside, conflicting interests, the corruption, and yes, an unelected, billionaire head of state. The continual looking backward, the glorification of war, the racism. The endless privatisation of things that should be public, and in general, the constant boot-licking in search of a non-existent golden time.