Original Post >> Anti-Capitalist Musings

I have never really thought of myself as British, despite being born in England and holding a British passport. I support the independence of Cymru and Scotland, and the unification of Ireland.

I suppose that makes me English by default. But not in the flag-waving, flag-kissing sense that Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain seem to demand. Lowe is the independent MP elected on a Reform ticket and holds far-right views.

If Britishness is meant to be about belonging, about tribe, about some natural coming together, then I fail that test willingly. I do not want to be associated with the version of Britishness or Englishness they are trying to define.

I do not want my nationality to be the most important thing about me, here or abroad. Being white and English means I cannot easily step outside it, but I would rather disappear into anonymity than perform it.

Take football. I love my club side. The England national team leaves me cold. The faux crusader costumes in the stands, the chants about “one World Cup and two world wars” are not a community I recognise as mine.

And yet I cheered myself hoarse when the England cricket team won the World Cup. Do you remember how hot it was? Proper heat. The kind that makes a country complain about the heat while secretly enjoying it. That afternoon felt shared, uncomplicated. No war chants. Just a game won on a knife-edge, and a collective exhale.

The contradictions do not end there. I took one of those DNA tests. I know they do not really say very much. They slice history into percentages and sell it back to you as identity. Mine came back almost entirely English, with small traces of Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. A neat pie chart of northwestern Europe. As if that settles anything.

I can trace my family tree back to the 1600s. Parish records, stubborn names, the same villages appearing again and again. I am, in that sense, rooted. Still here. Still in roughly the same place. If belonging were about blood or soil, I would pass easily.

But that is precisely the problem with Restore Britain’s claim. If even someone like me, with the paperwork and the parish registers to prove it, does not perform the right version of Britishness, does that make me suspect? If the test is cultural rather than legal, then it is never really about ancestry at all. It is about conformity.

I like my village in summer. The thatched cottages, the sound of cricket down the lane. It is almost a cliché, like something from the Kinks’ “Village Green Preservation Society.” But I also dislike the hunt when it parades through the main street. I dislike the nimby meetings about keeping new homes out. The same idea of England runs through both. One I recognise as home. The other, I do not.

Belonging is not simple. It never has been. It is made of attachments and refusals simultaneously.

I know what the Butcher’s Apron is, and why it still provokes fear and loathing. When I was a child, I read my father’s encyclopedias. He grew up in the 1950s, when the empire was still treated as a living thing. The maps were shaded in that pale pink, which meant “ours”. But ours is only just.

You cannot spend generations claiming half the world as yours, insisting your language, your institutions, your ways were superior, and then feign surprise when people come here. The empire was not only a territory. It was people, pulled into Britain’s orbit, told in a thousand ways that this was the centre.

The movement did not begin with migration. It began with conquest, trade, administration, and rule. The direction of travel was set long before anyone boarded a small boat.

So where does that leave someone like me? I do not wave the flag. I support the breakup of the British state. I feel no instinctive pull toward the national team. Does that mean I do not belong?

If a passport is not enough, what fills the gap? Do I need to prove my loyalty? To demonstrate enthusiasm? To sing the anthem with the right degree of feeling? At what point does scepticism become suspect?

Would someone like Rupert Lowe look at me and decide I am insufficiently British? If so, what follows from that judgement? Exclusion? Surveillance? Re-education? Or simply a quiet, permanent mark against my name?

I like the sound of a Spitfire or a Lancaster overhead. Not because it stirs some Churchillian fantasy, but because those machines helped defeat Hitler and Nazism. That is not tribal pride. It is historical clarity. It is possible to honour what was fought against without submitting to a performance of national virtue.

And yet, according to the law, I am British. My passport says so. It does not ask whether I sing the right songs or salute the right symbols. It records a status, not a sentiment.

That is where Restore Britain’s claim collides with reality. If a passport isn’t enough, what is? If belonging depends on cultural performance or ideological alignment, then citizenship ceases to be a legal fact and becomes something to be judged.

This is not a new move. Orwell warned about it long ago. His writing on politics and language was never really about grammar. It was about how words are bent until they can be used to narrow who counts. Detach “British” from law and attach it to culture or loyalty, and rights begin to rest on approval rather than status.

The Marxist cultural theorist and activist, Stuart Hall, took the argument further. Britishness, he argued, was never a fixed inheritance waiting to be recognised in the worthy. It was built, contested, and fought over. Post war Britain, imperfectly and under pressure, settled on a civic idea of belonging. Citizenship confers membership. Migrants and their descendants forced that settlement into existence against open hostility.

The “passport is not enough” line tries to unwind it. It shifts the ground from legal status to cultural authentication. You are British only if you conform, and someone else decides whether you do.

Follow that logic through, and the implications are stark. If citizenship does not settle the question of belonging, who does? A minister? A party? A movement that claims the authority to define the nation? Once nationality becomes a matter of political judgement, it can be revised, narrowed, withheld in practice, even if it remains intact on paper.

The asymmetry is obvious. Nobody questions the Britishness of a white banker from Surrey. The test appears when the subject is a migrant, a Muslim, a Black British citizen, or anyone politically inconvenient. Hall described this as the construction of a national “we” against an internal “them”. The nation is defined not by what it includes but by what it excludes. Legal status remains real. Belonging is placed on probation.

Restore Britain presents this as common sense. It is nothing of the sort. It is an attempt to make citizenship conditional while pretending to defend the country.

Once citizenship comes with a loyalty test set by a political faction waving a flag, no one’s belonging is secure. That is not national strength. That is what a country says when it is unsure of itself.

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