It takes a certain kind of gall to survey a broken country ( the underfunded schools, unaffordable homes, food banks in every postcode) and declare that the real problem is not enough nationalism. MP Rupert Lowe’s puffed-up nostalgia reads less like a call to action and more like a eulogy for an imaginary country that never really existed.
Britain once was, not that long ago, the single best country in the world to live and raise a family. We can be so again. I am absolutely sure of that.
— Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) July 10, 2025
A small island, that built a vast civilisation. It didn’t happen by chance, and it certainly didn’t happen because of…
Let’s be clear: Britain did not “build a vast civilisation.” It built an empire. Through conquest, extraction, slavery, and violence. You can dress it up with talk of duty and decency, but there’s no moral high ground in the plunder of Bengal or the famines engineered by imperial policy. “We abolished slavery,” Lowe crows, omitting that Britain was also one of the chief architects of the slave economy, and that the compensation went not to the enslaved but to the slaveowners. A little historical humility wouldn’t go amiss.
The idea that immigration didn’t play a role in Britain’s so-called greatness is laughable. The NHS, the postwar rebuild, the cultural and scientific richness of modern Britain. None of it exists without migrants. People from the Caribbean, South Asia, Ireland, and beyond helped make Britain liveable after the war. To erase them from the story is not just bad history, it’s political cowardice.
This isn’t about pride. It’s about power. Lowe’s “restoration” fantasy is a cover for a reactionary programme: border crackdowns, culture war posturing, and authoritarian drift dressed up in the language of decency and resolve. But there’s no decency in scapegoating the vulnerable, no courage in rewriting history to suit your politics. If anything is being “diluted,” it’s the truth.
What we are watching is not national decline. This is the ongoing failure of the British dominant class. The country wasn’t brought low by refugees or woke teachers, but by deregulated finance, asset-stripping privatisation, and a political elite that hollowed out public life while enriching itself. If Rupert Lowe wants to know why things feel like they are “slipping through our fingers,” he should look at the landlords, hedge funds, and newspaper barons. Certainly not the kids learning English as a second language in an underfunded classroom.
This is not restoration. It is retreat. A retreat into myth, into grievance, into the fog of post-imperial melancholy. The real fight is not to reclaim a fantasy of Britain past, but to build a future where decency isn’t a slogan but a lived condition: housing as a right, health as a public good, borders that don’t kill, history that tells the truth.
You want courage? Try telling the truth about power. Try standing with the people actually trying to make Britain liveable. The nurses, renters’ unions, climate activists, and teachers. Rather than flogging a broken nostalgia to those desperate for someone to blame.
Britain doesn’t need restoring. It needs rebuilding from the ground up, by and for the many.
