2025-05-03T04:00:00Z

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The sunshine that recently bathed Britain in a warm, yellow glow did little to ease a cold reality: the nation still seems ill at ease with itself over issues such as immigration. The depth of political division exposed by this week’s elections proved it. Meanwhile, Britain’s economy remains flat while the heyday of the nation’s public service totems, such as its beloved National Health Service (NHS), are a distant memory. But whatever else it may be unsure of, Britain still knows how to throw a great party. The 80th anniversary next week of VE Day, marking the allies’ second World War victory in Europe, will be a display of the kind of military pomp and pageantry that few nations can match. That should be reassuringly firm ground, then, for Britain, as it continues to grapple with existential questions about the nation it wants to be and the direction in which it is heading. The echoes of Britain’s military and imperial past still strongly shape the nation’s sense of self. READ MORE “What else does Britain have to hold us together?” says Anthony Seldon, one of the country’s best-known historians. “It has the royal family, the BBC and the everlasting memory that we were on the right side of a noble war. That is still a big and romantic part of British people’s lives.” But as Britain’s demographic make-up has evolved over the years, has the national understanding of its war past, and especially its imperial legacy, evolved with it? Next week’s VE Day revelry in London includes a grand military parade with a flyover from the Red Arrows – a grand British tradition. An actor has also been drafted in to recite in Westminster stirring VE Day speeches of the wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, the perennial protagonist of the war stories that Britain tells itself. Bridges in London will be lit up in red, white and blue. Concerts are planned across the nation. Meanwhile, the bunting will also be up for hundreds of joyful residential street parties. Contrast the exuberance of VE Day with the typical solemnity and restraint of Remembrance Day each November, more closely associated with the first World War. Remembrance Day services are typified by the laying of wreaths and the national embrace of a sense of loss. The two occasions are so utterly different, yet both are so typically British – indelible elements of the nation’s military, and hence national, identity. But in the minds of Britons, what is that identity? What do they think of war, and how does it make them think of themselves? VE Day is celebrated by crowds at Trafalgar Square in London on May 8th, 1945. Photograph: Fred Morley/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Thomas Colley is a senior visiting research fellow in war studies at King’s College London. He wrote Always at War, published in 2019, which examined the attitudes of ordinary British people to the nation’s military past. He says war “makes British people feel special”. “I became fascinated by the rhetoric. There is always British enthusiasm for playing a leading role in a big international conflict, especially if leaders can frame it as good versus evil. There always has to be a new Hitler,” says Colley. He gives the example of Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq when British and US troops attacked it in both Gulf wars. [ Why Ireland can take pride in both neutrality and VE dayOpens in new window ] “Someone always quotes Hitler, the new danger. They say, ‘we must intervene . . . a dictator should not be appeased’. But for ordinary people, they see war as ‘just something that Britain does‘. They think we’re always at war.” Colley says some Britons define their nation’s war identity by pointing to what it is not: Switzerland. “When I asked people to contrast us with another country, a striking number said Switzerland, which embodies a sense of neutrality. They see that as un-British. People framed our country as one that defends freedom from tyranny. When a problem goes down, they think ‘we’ve got to go in’. Or more usually nowadays, we have got to be seen to go in, even if we can’t do much.” He says Britain’s reaction in 2022 when Ukraine was invaded by Russia was a “classic example” of this “performative” approach. “Look at the way Boris Johnson rushed to get to Kyiv. It is almost like it was a race for Britain to be there first.” Britain’s staunch and heartfelt support of Ukraine is one of the country’s few unifying themes at a time of great division. Colley is currently based in Latvia where, he says, the impact of war on national identity is framed in the context of subjugation and of being occupied. “The way Britain thinks about wars comes from a place of having won plenty of them. Winning wars and, before that, colonising others, will always shape your thinking. British people look at it as us trying to do the right thing. But they might also say that ‘sometimes we get it wrong’.” Eminent Irish historian Roy Foster, who spent much of his career as a doyen of the University of Oxford, came to Britain in 1974. That was the era of former leaders Ted Heath, a passionate European, and Harold Wilson, who Foster says “adroitly” kept Britain out of the Vietnam War. Margaret Thatcher 'made use of the Falklands War to re-present Britain as an imperial power'. Photograph: Getty Images “Things have changed noticeably since. One big change came in 1982 when Margaret Thatcher made brilliant use of the Falklands War to re-present Britain as an imperial power still capable of sending a force halfway around the world to fight.” Another “great shift”, according to Foster, came with Brexit. He recalled with some irritation the “idiotic posturing” of former Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg immediately after the vote, when he contextualised it with references to great military victories such as the Battle of Agincourt. “Rees-Mogg, all teary-eyed, kept saying ‘we’re a nation that wins things‘. But this was a democratic vote, not a military battle. Then you also had the Brexiteer MP Mark Francois who kept reminding us that he was an ‘army man’. All this macho military posturing took over.” Foster agrees that current angst in Britain over the hollowed-out state of its armed forces feeds into the nation’s sense of insecurity over its place in the world: “People who know about military spending say it will take decades of investment to bring the defence forces back to where they were. That must be hard for the British to admit to themselves.” As for the joy in VE Day celebrations, Foster believes this is an intergenerational memory of a time Britain feels was its best moment in history. “It preceded many of the issues that have confused Britain’s sense of itself since, such as immigration.” [ Britain seemed to have turned a corner on immigration after Brexit. Then October 7th happenedOpens in new window ] Sathnam Sanghera, the English-born writer son of Indian Sikh immigrants, has probed deep in recent years into British thinking – or the lack of it – about the effects of its military and, especially, its imperial past, through his books Empireland and Empireworld. In addition to widespread praise, he has also faced opprobrium from British traditionalists for challenging the country’s remembrance of the impact of its military adventures on people of different ethnicities. “The narrative around second World War is that when we had to, we stood alone,” says Sanghera. “But the British Empire gets forgotten. Without the resources of the empire, Britain would not have won either World War. Consider the Bengal Famine in which three million people died. There is almost no commemoration of that in Britain, no statues. Insofar as war is part of Britain’s national identity, it is based on a partial remembrance.” A family arrives in Calcutta in search of food in 1943. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images For Indians the Bengal Famine in the early 1940s remains a bitter memory. Resources were diverted from the poor to fuel a military bulwark against a potential wartime invasion of the empire, causing widespread death from hunger. Many Indians blame Churchill’s actions for making the famine worse. In the Imperial War Museum in London, one corner of a single gallery now hosts a small memorial to the famine. Beyond that there is nothing. It isn’t even on the school curriculum in Britain even though it was probably the biggest civilian disaster endured by any Allied land during the war. Sanghera continues to take flak for nudging Britain towards a more inclusive remembrance of its military past, at a time when the very idea of inclusiveness has become a battleground in the left-right culture wars roiling Britain and its self-identity. Other historians, such as Dominic Selwood, who wrote Anatomy of a Nation, a study of British identity, have also pointed to how the modern “factionalisation” of Britain over issues such as race and immigration has complicated war remembrance, and hence the story that Britain tells itself of what the nation and what it has become. A street party at London Bridge to celebrate the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995. Photograph: Steve Eason/Hulton Archive/Getty Images “Thirty years ago for the 50th anniversary of VE Day, Britain would have looked back at the second World War and thought it really knew what it was all about,” he says. “It would have been all about bunting and the Blitz spirit. ‘We got rid of the nasty guy [Hitler] and the world should love us for it.’ But with all the political factions we have now, it is becoming harder to coalesce around that idea.” Selwood says many people still remember Churchill as an untouchable icon, but to some other people nowadays, they might think of him as a “psychotic bigot”. Such gulfs in thinking are reflective of the internal wrangling that Britain is experiencing over aspects of its national identity. “What has changed, largely, is the demographics of the country. We live in a postcolonial world. Britain just has to deal with the perspectives of others.” Seldon, meanwhile, is sanguine about Britain’s ability to navigate its way through its identity issues, including its remembrance of its military past. He says the Bengal Famine is better remembered now than it ever was before. He also highlighted the number of memorials for Walter Tull, a black former footballer who died a British war hero in 1918. “I believe we are seeing a more determined effort nowadays to properly write up these bits of history,” he says. Selwood, who is writing a new book, the Path of Light, comprising a historical walking tour across war sites of Europe to Poland, is hopeful, too, that this year’s VE Day celebrations could herald a “new spirit” to galvanise Britons to defend democracy from threats such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “Five years ago for the 75th anniversary, people thought that the fight for democracy was over. That was all taken for granted in 2020. Now it all seems up for grabs again and people will think more deeply about why we fought the second World War in the first place,” says Selwood. “I think that is a good thing. A new type of VE Day has arrived, where we will look again at the values that we share in common, and hopefully foster a new sense of coming together.”