In his new piece for British Chaos, Clive Martin watches a wreck of a man stagger through Waterloo Station and calls it Britain in microcosm. I think he misses what he’s really seeing.
The young man, staggering and wide-eyed, half-lost in some chemical fog, dressed for a protest he barely understands. To Martin, he’s a spectacle, a symbol of chaos in modern Britain, but I think he’s still dancing at a party that ended 20 years ago.
The reason the flags flutter to old rave tunes isn’t irony. It’s memory. For the men in Stone Island jackets and women in night-out leggings, the 90s and early 2000s were the last time this country felt like home. Work was real, nights out were communal, and the idea of “England” still carried warmth rather than guilt. They aren’t clinging to nationalism because they hate the world, they’re clinging to the rituals that made them feel alive in it.
If you’re under forty-five, (I am, just) you probably remember the weekends that seemed to last forever, music that brought everyone together, a sense that life, even if messy and hard at times, was fun. You could have a job, pay your rent and bills and still have enough to go out at the weekend. Pubs and clubs were full; towns and cities were alive.
For the working-class men and women who built, served, cleaned and made things for a living, those were the good years. The rave, the terrace (well, all seater stadium – thanks lads), the factory, the pub – they were part of the same fabric of belonging. You worked hard, you played hard, and the country, for all its flaws, still felt like it had something to give, a place for you in it.
That world has gone. The hope and prosperity are gone, the wages stagnant, the pubs shut, the clubs demolished. All the places that made life bearable have been dismantled or sanitised. What’s left is a country that still expects people to behave but no longer offers them a reason to.
When people talk about “division” in Britain, they usually mean politics and we all know that is true, but there is another division, and it is temporal. The top 10% still live in the future. The rest are trapped in a kind of emotional 1999 repeating the same songs, the same style, the same weekend rituals, maybe because that was the last time they felt connected to something.
So when Martin writes about “Acid Patriotism” the weird crossover between rave culture and right-wing protest, I don’t think he’s wrong about the imagery. But I think he misreads the feeling underneath it, what he’s actually seeing is a political expression of nostalgia, an attempt to turn back the clock and recapture a better, more hopeful time. The Union Jack and Darude’s Sandstorm serve the same purpose: they try to summon the feeling of togetherness that’s been lost everywhere else, and when nostalgia becomes politics, it’s easy for people to laugh.
The assertion that drugs and party music are meant to bring people together while right-wing politics do the opposite, he betrays that he’s observing but not understanding. Most of these people he observes wouldn’t call themselves right-wing at all. They’re not ideologues; they’re citizens who feel their country slipping away and want a say in what replaces it. To call skinheads dancing to ska or second-generation immigrants running for Reform “hypocritical” isn’t insight, it’s proof of how deep the misunderstanding now runs between two halves of the same nation.
That’s what’s missing from Martin’s piece. It’s vivid, funny, grotesque, but it seems to only look at the surface. There’s a sneer there, the air of condescension, the same one that’s haunted working-class life for decades. The people he describes are not political philosophers, or the university educated, metropolitan types. They’re not meant to be. They’re people trying to feel something together again, when everything else feels lost, however crudely. I think that if the same scene unfolded at Glastonbury or an Extinction Rebellion protest, the coverage would read very differently: “collective catharsis,” “spontaneous community,” “the power of music to unite.” But because it happens under a St George’s flag, it’s treated as pathology.
That doesn’t mean these gatherings are innocent, there’s violence, anger, ugly undercurrents, and yes, certainly some racism. They’re not mad. They’re expressive.
The feeling amongst the working class is one of helplessness and hopelessness. The line between hedonism and hostility has always been a fine one, from the football terraces of the 80s to the Bad Bwoys at the Blue Note in the 90s, there was a joy alongside the danger, but now that’s gone and we’re left with fury and blame.
It’s not because people changed. It’s because the country did.
When you strip people of meaning, pride, and future, they’ll go searching for it anywhere. Sometimes that means drugs and flags in a car park.
Sometimes it means marching through London shouting about a lost nation. They’re not tearing Britain apart; they’re trying to feel part of it again.