Thinking Aloud: Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be

How Misremembering History Can Blight Our Future

The power of nostalgia in political life is damaging on both sides of the Atlantic and it’s easy to see why. You cannot have a clear vision on how to move forward if you keep looking in the rear view mirror. When Donald Trump started reciting his vacuous yet superbly effective slogan “Make America Great Again” the most obvious question was this: when precisely did America cease to be great? Similarly, when UK Brexit campaigners told us they would “take our country back” what exactly did they meant by “our country” (England? The UK? Great Britain? Northern Ireland?). And what did they mean by “back?” To Victorian times? The Empire? 1945? Last Wednesday afternoon around 2pm?

Seeking meaning in political slogans is not especially useful. Labour won a landslide majority in the House of Commons in July 2024 on the excellent slogan “Change,” but that can mean that anything you do not like, Labour will change, and anything you do like they will keep. Unfortunately the one thing Labour will probably be reluctant to change is the constitutional ladder up which they have so emphatically ascended. The antiquated First Past The Post (FPTP) system gained them such a massive parliamentary majority - two thirds of the seats with just a third of the votes. Roughly 40% of those of us who could vote chose not to, although the Apathy Party if it existed probably could not be bothered to form a government. (Incidentally the FPTP system is only used in two European countries - the UK and Belarus, the dictatorship of President Alexander Lukashenko. )

All these cases - America supposedly ceasing to be great, the British mysteriously  taking “our country” back in some unspecified way, and even the strange electoral system retained at Westminster yet abandoned in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for their own parliaments - touch on the same question. Why are intelligent humans bedevilled by the glories of the past to such an extent that at times their political nostalgia creates problems in the present and ultimately blights the future?

The British (mostly English) riots of 2024 are a case in point. As we all know, white rioters were stirred up against people of colour and especially against Muslims. That in itself is a subject of perhaps several other Substacks. But listening to some of those at the disturbances giving interviews on various types of media, the bizarre and sometimes utterly bonkers misremembering of history, especially the history of the British Empire came through time after time.  One historically accurate counter demonstration included a banner about people of colour an Muslims bearing this slogan: “We are over here because you were over there.” But another strand in the riots was the misremembering even of well-known popular history. Perhaps you saw on social media the middle aged white woman fulminating against migrants by pointing out that the reason the Titanic sank was because there were too many people on board. Britain was sinking for the same reason, apparently. Too many migrants. It is difficult at times to know whether to laugh or cry.  

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Rewriting History

Coincidentally just a few days before the riots Perspective magazine, where I am a contributing editor, published a long essay I wrote on the perils of historical ignorance. It was twinned with an interview I did with Sathnam Sanghera the journalist and brilliant author of Empireland and Empireworld. These two books examine the at times wonderful, at times cruel, and always extraordinary history of British colonialism and its impact today. Here’s a quick and relevant quote from the Sathnam interview on history as it should perhaps be understood. I asked him what surprised him from his research on imperial Britain:

“One of the big surprises was how many British people emigrated because the narrative here is always about immigration. My God! Britons, because of the empire have probably emigrated more than any nation on earth. I think something like five per cent of the population emigrated between 1900 and 1914. We were just everywhere.” Another surprise discovery for Sathnam was that “one of the reasons there’s Indians everywhere in the world is because of British indenture – they sent a million Indians to places like Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana. I often wonder, sitting in airports, ‘why are there so many Indians?’ It’s because of that. Those million people had children and created states like Mauritius, which are run by Indian majorities. The Indian diaspora wouldn’t be [so] big if it wasn’t for the British Empire. We permanently changed the demographics of the world… which in itself reflects the incredible length and complexity of the British Empire. When I mention that British migrants prefer to be known as “expats”, because immigrants are always someone else, Sathnam laughs. “Yeah, and it’s happening again. You’ve probably seen the memes of all these people who are Reform supporters saying they’re going to leave the country because of immigration. So they’re going to become immigrants... and not seeing the contradiction because “we” are always ex-pats! I also struggle with the phrase ‘second-generation immigrant’. I used to use that phrase in relation to myself but I’m not, and that’s the point. We were born in this country. In no way are we immigrants. To use that phrase implies that in some way we don’t really belong here, when we do.”

(I’ll link below to the full magazine piece.)

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Ireland’s English Question 

Just to prove that the woman who missed the iceberg in the Titanic story is not along in her mis-understanding of our shared history, here’s an excerpt from my own enormous historical mistake, about Ireland. Like many British people, and despite the fact that Ireland was once part of “Us,” in British schools the history of Ireland is often barely regarded as significant. That was true for me and also for British historians I have talked with. Ao here’s a bit on my own historical ignorance, quoted from Perspective:

“Buswells Hotel on Molesworth Street in Dublin has a fascinating history. In 1861 it was the Queen’s Institute for the Training and Employment of Educated Women, an attempt by a Quaker activist to help women into the workforce. Nowadays it’s a haunt of journalists and politicians, two minutes’ walk from Leinster House, home of the Irish parliament. When I was in my early twenties and lived in Belfast I often reported on events in Dublin, and on one visit a friend, an editor at the Irish Times, suggested we have a pint together in Buswells, followed by dinner. As the pints were poured, half a dozen members of the Irish government strode in and invited us to join their company in a memorable evening of Guinness, whisky (no dinner) and excellent conversation. It turned into a profound lesson for me about how history is understood, or misunderstood. We discussed everything from nurses’ pay to the violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. We agreed nurses needed more money. Then we discussed the damaging inability of the British (they meant the English) and the Irish to understand each other. We had a shared history, but no sign of a shared understanding of what that history might mean at the end of the twentieth century. 

One of the politicians mentioned Ireland's Great Famine of the 1840s. Unwisely – I blame the Guinness – I offered some… context. These were “the Hungry Forties” all across Europe, I said. Oliver Twist was written in 1838 and in the 1840s London was, as Dickens showed, a terrible place to be poor. Silence followed. One of the Irish government ministers, Brian Lenihan – a lovely man, by the way – “had a word" with me and politely but very firmly put me straight. He listed in detail the appalling and exceptional cruelty visited upon Ireland, the failures of British leadership and the avoidable suffering which led – estimates say – to at least a million deaths. Another million or more Irish people emigrated, mostly to the United States and Britain. Ireland’s population before the Famine was eight million. Even today it has only recovered to just over five million. Lenihan said the British were disinclined to learn the awkward bits of our shared history (Cromwell? The Siege of Drogheda?). Historical illiteracy, he suggested, was not confined to the English but it made solving Northern Ireland’s violence in “the Troubles” difficult.  This conversation was an eye-opener.”

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I hope you’re enjoying some of these thoughts. I’m sharing the links in case you want more. Perspective is new and glossy and we are also growing fast - check perspectivemedia.com and @perspective_tw on Twitter/X and you’ll find these and other stories to catch the imagination and - I hope - help put a different perspective on here and now.

Finally, the reason I joined Substack was in the hope of solving problems, not in creating them, and so constructive comments are always welcome. Thank you.