Neil Mackay: England is sick in the soul – and the illness is called ‘nostalgia’

Today, Britain goes deep into Nostalgia-World. The jubilee is the capo di tutti capi of nostalgia kicks. There are few countries which wallow in the past to the same queasy extent as Britain. We fetishise bygone times; make a cult of the dead. We bewilder foreign visitors with our endless consumption of movies and TV about ‘The War’. Some of this war porn is itself so old it’s from the black and white age, like the monochrome reruns of Dad’s Army still on TV.

Brexit was nostalgia come to life – a harkening back to some Golden Age that never was. Boris Johnson is even reintroducing imperial weights and measures, as if dealing with a litre is enough to break British hearts.

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It feels a little unfair, though, to call nostalgia a ‘British disease’. In truth, it feels much more an English ailment. Most Scots and Northern Irish didn’t vote for a return to some Tennysonian idyll of the past; most English did.

Nor, when you look at the official map of jubilee celebrations, is nostalgia evenly spread. Of the nearly 6000 public events and street parties, there’s roughly 70 in Wales, 50 in Northern Ireland, and 145 in Scotland. The rest are in England. So, much at it’s rather icky to say, in our febrile political atmosphere, nostalgia seems rather more acute in England than elsewhere.

That’s not to say the other UK nations are in rude health or fully vaccinated against nostalgia. Scottish nationalism has its fair share of moon-howling MacGlashans, forever in a state of semi arousal over the Declaration of Arbroath, Bannockburn or some other tartanised romantic nonsense used as a means of identity.

In Northern Ireland, you’ve either unionists time-travelling to 1690 by way of self-definition, or Irish republicans worshipping the ‘blood sacrifice’ of 1916. We’re a weird bunch across these islands, for sure.

Yet it’s the cult of empire which leads our pack of variegated forms of nostalgia – the endless yearning for ‘glory days’, when a decent chap in a pith helmet could conquer half the world without a jot of guilt, because weren’t we bringing the light of civilisation to savage corners of the globe?

While in England the tendency is to romanticise this frankly wicked period of our history, in the rest of Britain we wilfully dodge blame. Empire was something the English ‘did to us’, say the Scots – instead of admitting we were up to our armpits in colonial blood.

The last time an international study of nostalgia was undertaken it was 2016 – an interesting year given Trump and Brexit. Which nations topped the list? Hello America, India, France, Britain, and Turkey: all nations now gripped by a right-wing fever for years gone by; for a desire to ‘Make America Great Again’; for Hindu nationalism; for Marine Le Pen; for ‘Taking Back Control’; for the curdled authoritarianism, nationalism and Islamism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Russia was the seventh on the list.

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It’s a curio of history that the three which fixate most upon the Second World War are Britain, Russia and America – the countries never occupied, yet still in love with the notion that they individually liberated the world. Russia is now perhaps the international apotheosis of nostalgia, as a revanchist Putin tries to recover lands lost to a long-dead Empire.

When former imperial powers are ranked for nostalgia, unsurprisingly, Britain wins. In 2020, the populations of France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Japan were questioned about how they viewed the colonial past. A third of Britons felt ‘the colonies’ were better off under our control. We were also the people most likely to hanker for a return of empire. And doesn’t that quintessential Jubilee dish, Coronation Chicken, symbolise India’s conquest.

Now, none of this is to say that all nostalgia is bad. It isn’t – psychologically, there’s two types of nostalgia: reflective and restorative. For reflective, think of listening to the music of your youth, or journeying back to your childhood home. It’s sweet and melancholy – but it’s fully ‘inside’ you as an individual, it has nothing to do with the exterior world.

Restorative nostalgia, though, is the desire to literally bring the past back to life. We’ll see it today in all the medieval pomp of the Jubilee – the heralds with horns, the soldiers in Victorian uniforms. We’re getting it pushed down our throats with imperial measures. The ‘imperial’ matters there, clearly.

Brexit politics is restorative nostalgia in action – a turning back of the clock to the age of Splendid Isolation when the British empire did as it pleased. It’s impossible not to see the endless demonisation of refugees in Britain as a symptom of our nostalgia sickness.

Nostalgia enslaves us to an age in which we never lived, usually a cruel age. It asks us not to be a creature of the present or future, of the 21st century, but a creature of the past, demanding we tumble far back to the 1950s, even the 1850s.

There’s an irony here, though. If today’s jubilee is nostalgia turned into theatre – a form of performance in which we’re asked to enslave ourselves to the past – the original meaning of the word ‘Jubilee’ is rather different.

‘Jubilee’ is a Hebrew word – denoting anniversaries, like every 70th year. According to custom, each jubilee year slaves were freed.

So, perhaps do yourself a favour this jubilee and free yourself from the slavery of nostalgia’s cold hand. Read or watch some science fiction – of the utopian variety, maybe; try living in the future, instead of dying in the past.

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