Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2026
Nationalism sources the entire political spectrum when assembling its ideological language, a spectrum within which conservatism is only one significant strand. It might seem surprising to disentangle neoliberalism from conservatism, given that many of those who champion neoliberal resolutions also seem to hold basic conservative talking points. This chapter synoptically unpacks those sites of British life, intellectual and cultural, where politically potent nostalgias for the nation are most prominently mainstreamed. It maps how the various modalities, through which a distinctively conservative political vision is articulated, culminate in the thickly textured and nostalgically recalled veneration of provincial Englishness, Empire and whiteness more broadly. The organising myth central to the entire edifice of a common British past is the presumed continuity of a homogeneous whiteness. The centrality of the Second World War to contemporary British history becomes constitutive of a broader brand of nationalist politics that Anthony Barnett has identified as Churchillism.
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