National Identity in a Time of Crisis

We live in a martial country,

How else did we get that empire

On which the sun never set?

We live in a martial country,

Spending a disproportionate amount on defence,

The ridiculous symbol of Trident,

The hankering after great power status,

Still lost in that world of Dean Acheson,

Where Britain had lost its empire,

But still hadn’t found its role,

A confusion revisited a generation later with

The Brexit somnambulism.

We live in a martial country,

So it’s hardly surprising that military metaphor

Dominates discourse in all our spheres of life …

Customs war, trade war, war on terror,

The Home Front trope, the Dunkirk trope, the Blitz trope,

And in March 2020, Boris Johnson:

"We must act like any wartime government,

and do whatever it takes to protect our economy."

And patients, of course, ‘battle’ with cancer,

And Boris Johnson, of course,

Was endlessly described as a ‘fighter’ and ‘battler’,

By the likes of Dominic Raab,

Thereby individualising his plight,

And heroizing him with a Churchillian subtext,

This sycophantic approach epitomised by Nadine Dorries:

‘The boss is in a better place.

The nation can breathe more easily’,

Or some such adulation.

Posted by Stuart Butler