Cultural nostalgia has been ceded to the Far Right, reclaiming it requires a new approach

Cultural nostalgia has been ceded to the Far Right, reclaiming it requires a new approach. Reclaiming it requires the skills of people that actually live within British mainstream culture rather than awkwardly performing it from the outside.

Last week Arsenal won their first Premier League title in 22 years. 120,000 people turned up spontaneously outside the Emirates and celebrated until 5am.  Last night the party continued with more crowds gathering – as someone said on a local news report – ‘It felt like Carnival!’. The footage reminds us how indelibly multicultural and diverse London is.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DYwcuEFoTVj/

I’m from Holloway, home of the Arsenal. Holloway was always very Irish and Greek Cypriot but also Afro-Caribbean and Turkish – the fruit and veg shops on the Seven Sisters attested to that. As teenagers we all grew up together, smoked on the Heath, drove in tiny cars round the North Circular to raves in liminal outer London. I now live in that outer London, an Essex postcode, golf course at the end of the road, Epping Forest beyond. And far more multi-cultural than people might imagine. In our ward two weeks ago, neither Reform or the Greens got a look in, we remained staunchly Tory. It’s a peaceful, pretty, unremarkable corner of a huge global city.

This vision of London—the real one, from the edges to the centre—is what enrages the far right. Sadiq Khan is a lightning rod because he epitomises embedded, multi-generational, multicultural London. What it actually means to be a Londoner.

That fury has spawned a social media assault. Endless anonymous accounts posting videos of a London unrecognisable to those of us who live here. A city stripped of joy and community, replaced with racist tropes and rage.

But the campaign is not working as well as they’d like. So much of this version of London is deeply at odds with what we know to be true. More people—even Piers Morgan—preferred the scenes outside the Emirates to the much smaller Unite the Kingdom rally two weeks before.

While extremist accounts amplify hate-filled nostalgia for a “native” Britain that mostly never existed, thousands of other social media accounts quietly celebrate the rituals of everyday British life. The estate you grew up on, your neighbourhood, your school, your manor.

Shared not as grievance but as memory—unifying and pleasurable.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/282402631340116/permalink/913788064868233/

Where is the progressive counter-narrative that taps into this?

As I’ve written about before, the Far Right understands how to key into culture and nostalgia. Liberal/progressive UK strategists seem to lack the instinct entirely. Their attempts are often crude, tone-deaf, and even offensive to the people they’re trying to reach. It looks like the digital teams running these campaigns don’t really understand—or love—British culture…The image the Labour Party posted of Keir Starmer with some Tunnocks and a can of Irn Bru on Burns Night was a particular low…

https://www.instagram.com/p/DT7zgA9iKT4/?hl=en

But this is a serious problem for those of us, the quiet majority, who don’t want to live in a country fuelled by hate and rage.

There are ways to engage with what I’d call “positive nostalgia”—nostalgia designed not to pit people against one another but to celebrate what we were and still are. And it requires different ways of working. Not a narrow team of social media managers looking in at British culture from the outside.

In the music and the entertainment industry, where I have a background, we worked with “street teams”—people who were part of the culture, not observers of it. That’s what progressive politics needs now. People of all ages and backgrounds. Actual Facebook users who enjoy being on it. People who share one thing: they don’t want to live in a far-right country. This more participatory approach would ensure content was rooted in real community life, real memories and not just horribly generic and cynical.

There is a lot to be celebrated about being British, or about being a Londoner, but no one at a political level really harnessing and telling that story. I’d argue that the Greens are, as yet, not good enough at speaking beyond their core (left wing alienated Labour voters).

It’s sickening to see London presented to the world in a way that simply isn’t true. It’s up to us to reclaim the story of what we are, what we’ve been, and what we want to be.