Love for the Nation in the Time of Covid-19: British expressions of Second World War nostalgia, 2015-2020

Abstract

Amid the initial stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 in Britain, nostalgia for the Second World War was vastly turned to as a response to the crisis; the Queen quoted Dame Vera Lynn’s ballads and the Prime Minister upheld that his cabinet ‘must act like any wartime government.’ Looking back at the past as a greater time has become increasingly common in British politics, exemplified four years ago in the EU referendum’s Leave campaign ambiguously longing to ‘Take Back Control.’ This thesis explores how specifically mythicized and rose-tinted remembrances of the war have functioned in political culture throughout the period 2015-2020. Research was conducted through quantitative surveys and qualitative readings of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror. Alongside the academic field of the cultural memory of the Second World War, Svetlana Boym, Micheal Billig, and Paul Gilroy, offer this with its theoretical and methodological pillars. After establishing the vast extent at which British written press is romantically fixated on wartime myths that linger in the collective memory, this thesis critically analyses the ideological implications of such a phenomenon. Boasting pride for the nation, the memory of the war is mobilised to legitimise and reproduce intolerant right-wing ideas, such as the defence of white conceptions of ‘Britishness’, the glorification of conservatism, and aggressive nationalism. This paper seeks to explore the identity that contemporary British society banally extracts from the war, and to problematise the exceptionalism that inextricably inhabits the distorted and glorified memories of the war.