Are patriotism and the nation-state back?
This speech at the Battle of Ideas festival by Ada Akpala, who works at The Equiano Project, explains well how an inclusive patriotism can serve the UK.
I’m just catching my breath from a wonderful, 20th-anniversary edition of the Battle of Ideas festival. There were so many fantastic debates over the course of last weekend that it might take a year to catch up! We’ll be doing our best to make these discussions available to everyone via our YouTube channel (please subscribe!) and our podcasts as fast as we can.
To begin, we reproduce a fantastic speech by Ada Akpala, a writer and commentator who works as head of content at The Equiano Project. She does a great job of making the case for a patriotism that includes and inspires everyone, a national idea that can bring us together in a way that the identitarian politics of recent years has failed to do. We should not apologise for being proud of our country and determined to make it a success.
I think patriotism is experiencing a revival. It never truly disappeared; it simply became quieter, more private and less visible in public life. Michael Billig once described this as ‘banal patriotism’, the subtle, often-unnoticed ways people affirm belonging through ordinary habits. He argued that these quiet rituals sustain a nation’s sense of itself, even when no one speaks of it openly.
You don’t usually notice something that already feels like part of you. For a long time, patriotism in Britain was like that. It was quiet, instinctive, woven into the fabric of everyday life. Like oxygen, you don’t think about it when it’s there; you just breathe it in. But when it starts to thin out, when it becomes harder to breathe, that is when you appreciate how vital it is. There is a quiet discomfort across the country, a feeling that something once shared has faded, and it helps explain why patriotism has found its way back into public conversation.
Our ability to breathe can be hindered in several ways:
Neglect: through bad habits or lack of care, such as smoking, poor health or inactivity.
External factors: such as illness, pollution, or other conditions beyond our control.
Suffocation: when something or someone deliberately cuts off our air supply altogether.
Patriotism works much like oxygen. Just as oxygen gives life to the body, it gives life to the body politic, binding people together and inspiring service, sacrifice and care. Yet this spirit of national belonging has also weakened through neglect, been strained by external pressures, and at times deliberately stifled by those who hold it in contempt.
Firstly, neglect. People grew comfortable and complacent. We stopped sharing the stories, rituals and values that once rooted us: myths of origin, memories of glory or trauma, heroes, holy places, and a common language. It is easy to put the blame on schools and educational institutions, but there was also a loss of intergenerational storytelling. Families, elders and communities no longer pass down stories as they once did. This is partly because people assumed those traditions would sustain themselves. But it is also because the structures that once held families and communities together have weakened. With family life more scattered, the shared moments that once allowed the passing on of memory and meaning have faded.
Secondly, external factors. These are the pollutants that have made it harder for ordinary people to feel connected to their country. Globalisation, mass migration, supranational governance and deindustrialisation have all eroded that sense of ‘we’. When industries such as coal mining, shipbuilding, steel and manufacturing collapsed in the 1980s, people lost more than their jobs; they lost the shared economic identity that came from producing, building and providing for the nation.
Finally, suffocation. This comes from the deliberate cultural and institutional disdain for national pride among sections of the elite. In universities, newsrooms and cultural institutions, patriotism has often been recast as something unsophisticated or morally suspect.
Yet in spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, people have become determined to push back. Whether it is hanging flags on lampposts, attending marches, or supporting political movements that promise to ‘take back control’, they are reclaiming something that was once instinctive: the right to feel proud of their country without apology.
The people are rediscovering their voice. But now my question is: who are the people? Who are those expressing love for the country and a desire for sovereignty? I think, sadly, it is still culturally coded as those being ‘white and right’ (right in political terms).
I would like to see more ethnic minorities from across the political spectrum, who call this place home and want the best for it, become a visible part of this revival. Too often, the debate assumes that minorities stand outside patriotism, as if national pride excludes us or ought to. Yet the evidence suggests otherwise. Polls consistently show that most ethnic minority Britons are proud to be British. Research by Policy Exchange also found that a ‘majority of minority respondents believe children should be taught to take pride in British history’.
This annoying and persistent idea that patriotism offends minorities is not grounded in reality; it’s an invention of elites uneasy with national pride and who also want to keep divisions alive in our name.
Historically, ethnic-minority patriotism is nothing new. Across the empire, millions saw Britain as the ‘mother country’. During the world wars, men and women from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia volunteered to fight – not out of compulsion, but out of conviction. As RAF veteran Noel Brown once said: ‘The king was our king, the flag was our flag.’ They knew the Britain they fought for was imperfect, but they believed in its ideals.
After the war, many of those same people answered the call again, not to fight but to help rebuild. The Windrush generation came to be part of Britain’s story. Their patriotism was quiet but steadfast. Of course, that early loyalty was tested. They faced discrimination in housing, in employment, and sometimes even from the very institutions they had served. Yet most did not respond with bitterness. They pooled resources, started social clubs and built support networks. In other words, they did what true patriots do: they took responsibility for where they were and worked to make it home.
A new mood of postcolonial guilt took hold in the 1970s, and with it came a steady erosion of patriotic confidence. A generation of elites, along with prominent Black and Asian voices, rose to expose racism, inequality and Britain’s imperial blind spots. Justified at that time? Sure. But over time, that critique hardened into a single story, one told almost entirely through the language of oppression and moral debt. Britishness itself became synonymous with guilt.
And then multiculturalism from the 1990s onwards didn’t help matters. The integration model aimed for adaptation and participation within a shared national home. Multiculturalism, by contrast, began to idealise and idolise cultural difference rather than shared identity. In fact, the more distant you were from the national culture, the more moral status you seemed to acquire, and the more protection you were offered. It rewarded distance instead of belonging.
So where are we now? The challenges described here have not disappeared. The cultural tensions we face today can often seem insurmountable. That is why this steady revival of patriotism and the nation-state is both a necessity and an opportunity, not a threat. If we can strip patriotism of its partisan and racial coding, it could once again form the foundation of a shared national purpose. This is where good and purposeful leadership is vital.
We are a multiracial nation, and that is a reality. While there are circles on parts of the right that speak of ‘remigration’ or demographic reversal, such ideas are politically, legally and ethically unrealistic. The real question is what holds us together now. It cannot be religion; we are too secular for that. It cannot be ethnicity or race. All we have left is the nation itself.
Of course, some might ask whether the nation is just another identity, like the rest. I do not think so. Religion, race, class and ideology each speak to part of who we are, but the nation gives us the space to live together despite those parts. It is the only identity that asks us to see ourselves as citizens first. It is what allows a country as varied as ours to still have a shared ‘we’.
Ada Akpala is a writer and commentator who explores the complex narratives of race and identity in modern society. She currently serves as the head of content for The Equiano Project. Her mission is to dismantle defeatist mentalities and victimhood culture, encouraging personal empowerment and rejecting narratives that divide communities. Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s Analysis and Antisocial, where she provides a nuanced perspective on some of today’s most challenging issues. Follow her on X: @ada_akpala