why does being born on one side of a border make a place feel like yours? i don’t think that feeling comes out of nowhere. it’s family stories, school, accents, football, holidays, the map in the classroom, the passport in your pocket. most of us learn what “our country” is before we’re old enough to ask who drew the lines around it.
there’s a useful difference between a state and a nation. a state is the government, laws and institutions running a territory. a nation is a group of people who feel they share a history or a future. a nation-state is meant to be where those two things line up. in real life, they don’t always. people talk as if a nation and its borders have always matched. they haven’t.
the borders have a history
take England and Britain. England and Scotland were separate kingdoms. in 1707, their parliaments passed Acts of Union and created the Kingdom of Great Britain; a British identity developed over time after that. the UK Parliament’s history of the union lays out how political that process was. it happened through negotiations and decisions made by people. it wasn’t a border that had always been sitting there, waiting to be discovered.
that doesn’t make English or British identity fake. people really do feel attached to places, family histories and shared memories. but those identities change, and the boundaries around them change too. historians and political thinkers argue about exactly how nations form; this Cambridge overview describes how states have helped shape national identities over time. made by people doesn’t mean made up. it means we can question it.
the royal family is a funny example too. if someone says King Charles isn’t really British because the royal family has German roots, they’re using the same shaky bloodline test people use to tell British-born kids with immigrant parents that they’re foreign. George V changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in 1917, during anti-German feeling in the First World War. the royal family says so itself. it doesn’t make Charles less British. it shows that ancestry can’t be the thing that decides who belongs.
rupert lowe and the idea of “restoring” a country
Rupert Lowe, the English MP for Great Yarmouth, leads Restore Britain. on the party’s own site, he describes Britain as being run into the ground and puts mass immigration alongside economic collapse and other causes of national decline. the pitch is that Britain has lost something and needs to be restored for its “ordinary” people. Parliament lists him as the current MP for Great Yarmouth.
that kind of language makes a country sound like one person with one past and one set of interests. but a country is millions of people who don’t all want the same things or share the same family history. “restore” also begs the question: which Britain, and who gets to count as properly British?
the bit i don’t buy
nationalism takes something ordinary — caring about where you live — and turns it into a rule about who belongs more. i think that’s where the logic gets dumb: being born here is treated like proof you deserve more, while people who arrived later have to keep proving they belong. a passport tells you which state you’re part of; it doesn’t tell you whose life matters more.
it also gives people an easy target for problems that have more than one cause. housing, wages, public services and local decline need actual explanations and decisions. saying the country has gone wrong because it isn’t culturally pure enough doesn’t explain much. it just tells you who to blame.
then there’s who actually owns the land. people talk about “our country” as if we all have the same claim to it, but if you rent, the place you call home belongs to somebody else. under capitalism, homes and land are assets; people without enough money can be priced out of the places they live. the flag says this is ours, while the property market says you can stay only if you can afford it. that feels upside down to me.
and all the flag shagging gets louder when people’s lives are going to shit. when wages, housing and services are bad, pride in the flag can get offered as a replacement for having any real say over why things are bad. i think this is where fascism comes in: a left-wing way of reading it is capitalism in crisis, with anger about money and power redirected towards outsiders, while the people at the top keep their position. the link between fascism and capitalism is argued over by historians, but this review of the debate shows why people keep making it.
i get loving your family history or feeling attached to where you grew up. but if the only thing you can feel proud of is an accident of birth, that’s a bit silly. you didn’t earn your ancestors or the place you were born. when the present gives people little to feel good about, heritage can become an easy thing to hold onto. that doesn’t make it a reason to think you’re better than somebody else.
states matter in practical ways: they make laws, provide services and need to be accountable. none of that requires treating a nation as one natural family, or using birthplace to rank people. a country can be shared without everyone having the same roots.
i can like being English and still think England should make room for other people to belong. it doesn’t have to stay one fixed thing. honestly, maybe we’d only remember we’re one human race if an alien race showed up. a bit ridiculous, considering we’re already stuck on one planet together.