A nation is a shared illusion – so a government has the power to change it

Also this week: who was the first king of England? And my favourite giant semi-aquatic rat.

A slightly surprising fact: nationalism doesn’t really become a huge force in European life until the invention of the railways. Older nations existed, of course – I’m sitting in one, right now. But they were far from the only way of structuring politics or society, and people did not automatically recognise those removed from them by hundreds of miles and weeks of travel as kin simply because they spoke related dialects and were periodically trampled by the same rulers. How can you have a political movement based on shared group identity when there is, functionally, no group?

The railways changed all that. Journeys that would previously have taken over a week could now be done in a matter of hours: that made it easier for governments to project power, which created shared political interests. It also created mass media, by allowing timely and widespread distribution of newspapers, which in turn helped standardise dialects into a common language and created a national sense of culture. I’m oversimplifying wildly, of course; but nations are composed not just of institutions, but of shared illusions. You need mass communications to create what Benedict Anderson called “Imagined Communities”.

All of which is a very long way round of saying the state of the nation is not just a matter of objective reality, but one of what we all think is happening. We all have some contact with public services and some sense of the economy, and those things do matter. But so do the conversations we have with friends and family and the long-lost acquaintances we added on social media before we’d noticed they were racists. And so do the signals we receive from the media. If a nation is an imagined community, a national crisis can be a scattering of real phenomena bound together by shared illusions.

In most ways, the fact politics floats free from actually existing reality is depressing. Last year, net migration halved, albeit from the record highs it hit in 2022 and 2023, and most of it is entirely legal. (In 2024 – the worst year of the small boats “crisis” to date – it accounted for all of 9% of net migration to Britain.) Yet a YouGov poll this morning found that immigration has just become voters’ most important issue for the first time since Brexit, nonetheless: the numbers barely matter. Almost no one will have knowingly encountered someone who illegally entered the country, let alone seen them actually arrive on the beach at Dover. They just think there’s a crisis because other people keep telling them there is.

But this presents an opportunity, too – because a clever government would understand it didn’t need to solve the “crisis” but merely stifle the story. That is obviously easier for some politicians that others: when Steve Bannon talked about “flooding the zone with shit” or (one for the history fans here) Karl Rove used to laugh at the “reality-based community”, it is striking that they were both

a) American, and

b) on the side of politics whose views corporate media is often delighted to accept, no matter how unhinged.

But it still raises the question of why the Starmer government has apparently no interest in using its extensive power to set the agenda. Why is it not flooding the zone with announcements about literally anything else it is doing? (It is, though you wouldn’t know it, doing quite a lot of things, some of them even left-wing.) Why is it still using a social media site full of Nazis and owned by a man who has vowed to destroy it, when it could use its convening power to decentralise X from British political life?

Why, come to that – given that TV news has long been regulated in this country in a way the newspapers are not – is it not tasking Ofcom to look into the more questionable editorial choices of a TV station providing a rolling news platform for the party it’s decided is its main opponent? (A lot of media enthusiasm for Reform comes from the same source as a lot of voter enthusiasm for Reform – that is, the Tories are dead and the right has to go somewhere; GB News, whose presenters include multiple senior Reform politicians, is an entirely different thing.)

Why is the government making no effort to change our shared illusion?

I’m not imagining this would be easy: it would obviously be extremely hard. But the Starmer government has spent a year now telling voters they are right to think immigration is the critical issue, and small boats the worst problem of all. And – in a manner both predictable and predicted – voters received this not as a sign ministers understood their very real concerns, but as one that immigration was the critical issue and they should thus look to the party with the strictest plans to reduce it.

Rebuilding the nation’s sense of its own condition may be difficult. Predicting the results of a strategy that runs “Nigel is right – vote for us to stop him”? That is all too easy.

Who was the first king of England?

When I was a very small child, I had a sense, whereof I know not, that William the Conqueror was the first king of England and that history began in 1066. When I was a slightly less small child, my much-loved maternal Granddad Wally bought me a huge royal family tree, and I was delighted to learn that this wasn’t so. There were more than two and a half centuries of kings before Hastings! England’s history stretched all the way back to some bloke called Egbert in the far off year 802!¹