Let’s start with Orwell’s thoughts on patriotism.

Orwell said that patriotism is about a particular place and a particular way of life. Whether justified or not, people are often afraid that immigration will take this away from them but there’s no justification for calling them racist.

Are their fears justified?

I’ve been both an immigrant in a new country and a native in a place with high levels of immigration. As immigrants to California, we tended to cluster together and cling to the culture of the old country. Eventually, we learned to like burritos and baby back ribs and — eventually — the natives began to adopt some of our habits too.

Just during the time I was there, we persuaded their kids to play soccer and their pubs to serve IPA. That was great for me as I like both soccer and IPA but many folks in the native population resented this. The first time I witnessed an American couple getting VERY ANGRY that the pub they had just entered served neither Budweiser nor Miller Lite, I quietly wondered “What have we done to this country?”.

On the whole, the USA does a great job of assimilating immigrants and by the second or third generation, the culture of immigrant families is virtually indistinguishable from the culture of native families and they share the same devotion to the same particular way of life.

Immigration should be like guests arriving at a party. If you come to my party, I’d love it if you bring a new dish or a song from the old country for me to enjoy with you. Maybe you’ll share your baba ghanoush recipe and it will become part of our culture along with fish ‘n’ chips, doner kebabs and chicken tikka masala. I might get annoyed if you sit in the corner and eat your sushi on your own but if you share it with me, we can be friends. And the party vibe should change gradually over time as new friends arrive — if it changes too quickly, the early guests will be bummed.

I might resent it too if the new folks insist we only play their music or if they bring so many friends that it doesn’t feel like my party anymore. And if you don’t like bacon sandwiches — that’s fine. But don’t tell me that I can’t eat bacon sandwiches because you don’t like them.

With immigration, there’s a question of scale. If 100 people or 1,000 people come from a country where they don’t drink beer or eat pork, we can all still get along. But if it’s 100,000 or 1,000,000, all the pubs will close and the stalls selling bacon baps will go out of business and the natives will be sad. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with racism; it might just be the culture changing too fast for the natives to adapt.

As Orwell said, the patriotic natives are devoted to a particular place and a particular way of life and they have no wish to force it on other people — but they will surely resent it if you take it away from them. This is what conservatives are afraid of.

When I lived in the East End of London in the 90s, there was a great deal of immigration from Bangladesh. When our pie & mash shops and local boozers closed one by one to be replaced by Bangladeshi restaurants, there was much sadness among the troubled natives. Fortunately, I love Bangladeshi food! I did grieve the loss of the Lord Rodney pub on the Mile End Road though when it was replaced by a shoe shop.

This sense of cultural loss is entirely understandable and ‘our side’ should respond with sympathy rather than instinctively accusing the ‘losers’ of racism. A sympathetic immigration policy should take that into account.

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What a horrible place Britain was in the early 80s.

I’m reading Dominic Sandbrook’s Who Dares Wins. This is one of five books that tell the history of Britain from the fifties up to the eighties. Most of the book is about the politics of the era, with Mrs Thatcher as the star of the show.

Actually… star of the show? Make that the villain of the piece.

I was a teenager during this period, and I remember it as a period of adventure and good times, but Sandbrook reminded me that there was plenty of other stuff going on that wasn’t so jolly.

It covers probably the single most controversial period in my lifetime: the first Thatcher administration, which still evokes extremely strong feelings today. Many of the events it covers – the advent of the first woman Prime Minister, the catastrophic recession of the early 1980s, the inner-city riots of 1981, the civil war inside the Labour Party, the New Romantics, the Northern Irish hunger strikes and of course the Falklands War – could easily take up hundreds of pages. And the cast of characters – everybody from Margaret Thatcher, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone to Ian Botham, Simon Le Bon and Clive Sinclair – is almost Dickensian in its lurid variety.

— Dominic Sandbrook

Britain was already experiencing disaster before Mrs Thatcher came along. Unemployment was at scary levels, and industrial action brought strikes just about every week: miners’ strikes, dockers’ strikes, car manufacturers, truck drivers, gravediggers. The list goes on. The military was called in to cover the most critical strikes, and some friends of mine drove fire trucks when the firefighters stopped fighting fires. Unions were demanding 40% pay rises, inflation peaked at 26.9%, and unemployment reached 5.5%. There were riots.

This period is remembered as the Winter of Discontent.

Britain was already experiencing disaster before Mrs Thatcher came along. Unemployment was at scary levels, and industrial action brought strikes just about every week: miners’ strikes, dockers’ strikes, car manufacturers, truck drivers, gravediggers. The list goes on. The military was called in to cover the most critical strikes, and some friends of mine drove fire trucks when the firefighters stopped fighting fires. Unions were demanding 40% pay rises, inflation peaked at 26.9%, and unemployment reached 5.5%. There were riots. This period is remembered as the Winter of Discontent.

Mrs Thatcher moved into 10 Downing Street with the intention of leading a revolution to cure Britain’s woes. Thatcher wanted to replace Britain’s postwar economy, based on welfare and workers’ rights, with policies centred on deregulation, tax reform and privatisation. Milton Friedman was her hero.

But Thatcher led Britain further down the economic drain. Industry collapsed. Unemployment doubled to 12%. Interest rates reached 17%. I remember watching the BBC News as a teenager, seeing yet another industry closing for good every evening. All the car companies, the factories that made ships, the mines, heavy industry and the makers of textiles. All gone.

Thatcher broke Britain.

It wasn’t all bad, though. When I was 14, everyone I knew lived in a council house. We were a family of six living in a 900 sq ft (83m²) maisonette on a housing estate. The rent was £24 per month, and I loved it. Loads of friends. Loads of adventure.

Back then, nearly half the population lived in council houses owned by the government, but one of Thatcher’s defining policies was to sell off the council houses to the people who lived in them. It was a good policy, and it gave the poorer classes something to aspire to. Two million council houses were sold. Both my mother and my father (divorced by now) bought their council houses, and we transitioned from working-class to middle-class along with the rest of Thatcher’s society.

Aside from a handful of popular policies like Right to Buy, Mrs Thatcher, in 1980, was the least popular prime minister ever. Probably, the only thing that saved her was that the Labour Party were hated even more.

The chapters about the Labour leadership are astounding. Practically all the sensible leaders had been driven out of the Labour Party. By 1980, socialist Michael Foot was the only one left who wasn’t a communist revolutionary. Tony Benn wanted to nationalise all the key industries and have them run by workers’ collectives. He also wanted to abolish the monarchy and Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) earned her popularity too. Northern Ireland’s “troubles” had started in the early seventies, but the IRA’s terrorist attacks on the British mainland reached a peak after Thatcher came to power. They were appalling.

The IRA killed 50 people in London with bombs and injured 800 more. Nail bombs were especially evil when the curved nails stuck in civilians’ faces and bodies.

Several IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland went on hunger strike during this period because they wanted to be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals. Their leader, Bobby Sands, was elected to parliament during his hunger strike, but died, along with nine fellow prisoners, but Mrs Thatcher showed no mercy.

Besides politics, the book covers plenty of sports and culture — but there was plenty of violence in here, too. Football hooliganism had been a growing problem throughout the 70s, but it got worse in the 80s, and English fans took it to Europe.

The fighting at home was bad enough, but it was worse in Europe. Gangs of English thugs would smash foreign cities before every game, and attack people in the street, football fans or not. The violence peaked at Heysel Stadium in Belgium when Liverpool fans breached a fence to attack Juventus fans. 39 people died, and 600 were injured. Fourteen Liverpool fans were sent to prison, and English clubs were banned from Europe for five years.

There were plenty of race riots back home, too.

Apart from the riots, there’s a lot more on sports, but it’s mostly good news this time. Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett broke world record after world record in the 800m and 1500m. Daley Thompson became an English hero in the decathlon, and Ian Botham was a legend.

The music chapters were good, too. Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran are obvious stars of the time, but there are also bits about smaller musicians like The Specials and Gary Numan (who married my next-door neighbour). That period of music was probably the most political before or since, and Sandbrook uses their stories to make wider points about society.

The next chapter is about the Falklands War, but I have said enough about my own trip there already. The Argentinians surrendered.

I love Who Dares Wins, but Dominic Sandbrook does go on a bit. Forty pages on Steve Davis winning the World Snooker Championship was maybe a bit too much, and I know a lot more about Tony Benn now than I needed to know. But, still. I recommend it heartily. I still have the other four books waiting to be read, but I might take a break before I dive into those.

In addition to being a great writer, Dominic Sandbrook has a podcast — The Rest is History — that he shares with Tom Holland. According to Spotify and Apple, The Rest is History is the most popular podcast in the world.

They do an hour-long podcast every week with snippets of history ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the Titanic, with episodes on Nazis, slavery, and Marie Antoinette in between. You’ll be surprised at how often they make you laugh and cry (especially during the Battle of the Somme or the Holocaust).

There are 800 episodes, but you will probably only enjoy 700 of them. Give them a try!

Wilson’s ideas about Christian morals are a bit more extreme than anything I’ve come across in real life. He’s against all the obvious things, of course: abortion, sodomy, and no-fault divorce. Teaching Christianity in schools should be allowed. Teaching trans ideology should not. But he goes way beyond this.

The laws in the Old Testament will become the laws of America. Men will cast votes on behalf of their wives. Feminists will have no say in the law. Wilson says that America got along OK with Jews for a long time, and America can get on with people of other religions, too, but they’ll have to follow the Old Testament Laws, and minarets will not be allowed — and definitely no building 90-foot statues of Lord Hanuman.

When I was at school in England in the 1970s, we said the Lord’s Prayer every morning, and sang ‘What a friend we have in Jesus!’ We were taught religious education once a week and everyone went to church at Christmas and Easter.

We were brought up in the Church of England, the official church of my country. The small handful of Catholics were allowed to opt out of morning prayers and religious education. Atheists were allowed to opt out, too, but none of us did. The praying and the churching were just things we did, even though (almost) none of us believed in God.

Religion in English schools was very different to American schools. The 1944 Education Act required that every day ‘shall begin with collective worship’ and ‘religious instruction shall be given’ in every school. Parents were allowed to opt out, but almost none did because it would have meant their children being separated from their friends. We learned together.

For most of the last century, England had the Christian Nationalism that Doug Wilson wished for, even if our laws were more forgiving than Old Testament laws. And there were definitely no minarets or statues of Lord Hanuman.

In life, too, we were all baptised, married and buried by the Church of England; families said grace over their Sunday dinner and sent Christmas cards with angels on them, or the baby Jesus. We all got to play shepherds in the nativity play.

That’s almost all gone now.

The number of weddings in the Anglican Church has fallen from 166,000 in 1970 to 8,000 in 2020, and morning prayer in school doesn’t happen; not because of atheists, but for fear of offending students of other religions.

The Church of England is still the official church, but hardly anyone pays it any attention anymore.

The idea of a society built around Christianity has been at the centre of English culture for five hundred years. The Church of England broke away from the Catholic Church to satisfy King Henry VIII’s desire to change wives, but one of the advantages of its independence has been the freedom to move with the times, while Catholics still have to do what the pope says, which is the same as what the pope said five hundred years ago. This gives England the freedom to update our laws — and our church — to change with the culture.

Unlike some other churches, the Church of England allows a breadth of opinions, and as Humanists UK said recently, ‘The UK was long a society where religion was worn lightly by the vast majority.’ This liberal attitude to religion supports devout worshippers, while also welcoming people who go to church because it’s part of their culture. The Church of England offers a culture that can be shared by Christians and atheists alike.

The Church of England left room for other religions, too. In my childhood, that meant allowing Catholics to skip the morning assembly. But these accommodations became less practical as the number of people from other faiths increased.

To take one small example, offering halal options at school lunches is feasible, but what happens when the majority of students are Muslims? Should we switch over to halal for everyone? What happens to the morning assembly when most children are not Christian? Do we still say the Lord’s Prayer?

When a majority of the population comes from elsewhere, English culture will lose its significance.

This fading of English culture is what the people marching with their flags of St George are afraid of. Multiculturism has brought us many festivals to appreciate, like the Notting Hill carnival and Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan — and who doesn’t love a lamb vindaloo? But what happens when English culture is eclipsed by these other traditions?

We can pretend those protests are about racism — and, surely, there are plenty of racists protesting too — but the vast majority of protesters are mourning the slow loss of their culture, and race has little to do with that. Counter-protesters like to claim that the Flag of St George is used to intimidate people of other ethnicities, but England’s flag is not racist; it’s a symbol of our history.

What will happen to English culture when most families no longer share our history? Will parents still teach English myths and legends to their children? How many will remember Lady Godiva riding naked, or remember the love affair between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere? Will King Alfred and Lord Nelson still be our heroes?

Who will remember English folk songs?

Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school.”

— John Major

Do we still believe this to be true?

Culture changes with time. This has always been so. Peasants became factory workers, and food was mass-produced after the Industrial Revolution. Shakespeare never even tasted fish and chips. But those changes happened over decades and centuries. Culture changes faster when there are one million new immigrants every year, and when more people watch YouTube than read books. It’s changing faster than ever now.

It was only fifty years ago that the Church of England was a big part of our lives, but the culture of my childhood is fading away. I complained when we said our prayers every morning, but now I mourn the slow loss of our culture.