But there’s another item in his wardrobe that is more revealing of the man, and more revealing of contemporary politics in general. It has gone remarkably unremarked-upon that Starmer is, as far as we can tell, the first British prime minister to wear a Stone Island polo shirt — formerly a calling card for football hooligans — off duty. It’s not unauthentic. He’s a middle-aged Arsenal fan. Of course he owns a bit of Stoney.

This is a leading aesthetic indicator of what we could call blokeism: a progressive, 21st-century incarnation of the middle-aged white working-class men who came of age under Tony Blair. They are not quite like centrist dads, whose equivocal politics are primarily shaped by comfortable middle-class upbringings. These progressive blokes owe their outlook to Britain’s blissful run of years in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when economic growth and cultural confidence gave Blair’s liberal refashioning of the country a weighty cosign, even to those with more hardscrabble origins.

They are earnest; mostly Left-leaning but not radical; patriotic but not nationalistic; worried about the future of the country, but not as much as they ought to be. They might be buying Gareth Southgate’s book, Dear England: Lessons in Leadership — the former England manager, a conservative tactician who mused on modern patriotism in a 2021 open letter, is blokeism incarnate.

Sources of authority recognize blokeism’s power and use its language to instruct the public: the British Transport Police’s “See it. Say it. Sorted” slogan; the Mayor of London’s “say maaate to a mate” anti-misogyny campaign. Blokeism’s working-class nature anchors its authority with a power rootless, middle-class centrist dads can only envy.

Blokeism holds sway at the top of the Labour party and in Left-leaning culture and media. As well as Starmer and Southgate we could pick out Andy Burnham; Gary Lineker, podcast empresario and Gaza advocate; Gary Neville, an on-off Labour outrider who recently said he tore down a Union flag put up at one of his construction projects for its nationalist implications; and John Fisher, the influencer better known as Big John, who found fame consuming hefty Chinese takeaways and saying “bosh” but has been drafted in as an icon of progressivism for his media appearances defending migrants.

Remember Burnham’s navy worker’s jacket, which went viral in 2020 when he wore it in a speech criticizing the then Tory government’s Covid rules? Mix with his black North Face cagoule, and his black Clarks Wallabees, and you have a strain of dadcore with distinct class implications — no burgundy chinos here. The month before the 2024 election, Labour released a promo video of Neville lobbing softball interview questions at Starmer with a bucolic Lake District backdrop. Both were in black straight-legged jeans and technical black jackets. They talked about going on humble family holidays in the British countryside as kids; about the importance of government delivery. The purist of blokeism.

All these men were born within 14 years of each other, the youngest being Neville, 50, and the oldest Lineker, 64. They all have working-class backgrounds, or at least working-class affects. Lineker’s dad was a greengrocer; Burnham’s was a telephone engineer; Starmer’s was, as you certainly know by now, a toolmaker. Fisher used to run a small cheese business. Neville is a semi-exception: his dad, the emphatically named Neville Neville, was a cricketer and football administrator. Besides Big John’s outer-London home of Romford, none of them are from the capital, though Starmer and Lineker now have nice houses there.

In May 1997, when New Labour came to power, these men were between the ages of 22 and 37. What phase is that in a man’s life? Maturing. Marriages, mortgages, kids. If a political gear-change syncs with a personal gear-change, of course it’s going to seep deep into your understanding of the world. The Blairite liberal revolution came early enough in their lives that they were open to it, but late enough that they had a full sense of what it was replacing. John Major’s sleazy Tories to Blair’s shiny teeth and shiny government — the improvement was obvious. It’s no wonder they cling to “grown-up politics”, as the comfort-blanket phrase has it. This is the politics that came in when they were themselves growing up.

And so we have this reflexive rhetorical allergy to “division”, as if division wasn’t a fundamental part of politics itself. “Anyone else feel politically homeless?” Lineker tweeted in 2017, after the lose-lose election between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. “Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?” “You’ve got extremists on the left, and extremists on the right, and neither of them are any good for society,” Fisher told GQ in September. “We are reasonable people,” Starmer said of Britain in a New Statesman interview this June. When asked about the recent flag-raising campaign on his book tour, Southgate affirmed that “there’s more that bonds us all than separates us”.

What looks like complacency from a lower generational rung makes more sense when you consider that the Blair settlement is associated, in these men’s minds, with long, sustained prosperity. By the time of the 2008 crash, since which UK real wages have stagnated, our blokes were between the ages of 33 and 48 — more than old enough to have established a career and bought at least one house. Hence their tenuously founded optimism about Britain’s prospects. “I don’t agree when Farage and others say we’re a broken country, I don’t subscribe to that, and I actually think it’s unpatriotic. True patriots don’t say their country is broken,” Starmer has said. “There is no place like Britain,” thinks Big John. “When we’re down on the floor, we can joke about it, do you know what I mean?”

Blokeism has always been pretty relaxed about moneymaking. Lineker first advertised Walkers crisps in 1995; was the BBC’s highest-paid employee for seven straight years; and co-founded Goalhanger, the media company behind the podcast phenomena The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics. Neville has a Manchester-centered property empire that includes co-ownership of two hotels and Salford City football club; his company, Relentless Developments, is in the middle of a private-equity-backed £400 million redevelopment in central Manchester.

It’d be easy, then to cast the Garys’ social progressivism as hypocrisy. Easy but wrong. The young online Right’s mockery of middle-aged men reverent of “diversity” ignores how prominent xenophobia was in everyday life until quite recently. Lineker says he was subjected to “racist abuse” at school and by fellow footballers, for having “darkish skin” despite being white; monkey chants and banana skins were still being directed at black players in the early years of his sporting career. In 2004, monkey chants were also being directed at Neville’s black England teammates during a friendly against Spain in Madrid.

For football players, and for football fans like Starmer and Burnham and many other blokes, the Premier League’s modern pre-eminence is a lesson in the virtues of cosmopolitanism. Look what happens if we let in talented people from around the world! What works for Arsenal and Everton must surely work for the rest of the economy! The uptick of migration in the Blair years, and the adoption of diversity as a hegemonic establishment value, was twinned with, again, economic prosperity. If life is good when X thing is happening, surely X thing is itself good?

Blokeism emphasizes that, contrary to what the new Right think, social liberalism is not just an elite practice. From 1983 to 2022, the British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion of people who thought same-sex relationships were “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9%. In the World Values Survey conducted in two dozen countries from 2017 to 2022, Britain presented itself as impeccably tolerant, with citizens the least (or among the least) bothered about having neighbors who are gay, immigrants, or of a different race or religion.

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As for the hyper-online derision for a purely civil conception of nationhood in the form of “British values” — 2024 BSA data shows that, of all ethnic, religious and civic markers, “to respect British political institutions and laws” is the most widely supported test of being “truly British”, with 86% agreeing. These numbers are more than capacious enough to swallow up a good chunk of middle-aged, white working-class men, and perhaps explain why the Blairite liberal settlement has lasted so long after Britain’s post-2008 slump. Cultural predilections that have successfully filtered down through society are hard to attack and hard to shift.

Britain has changed a lot over the lifetimes of our blokes. Maybe to the point where they can’t believe things can change much more. But we are where we are, with insurgent populist parties, Reform and the Greens, now often outpolling the traditional, sensible duopoly of Conservative and Labour. Blokeism is not oblivious to this — it is, by virtue of its demographic basis, more tapped into Britain’s discontent than blissfully ignorant middle-class centrism. “I’m a bit disillusioned by politics as a whole”, Fisher told The Sunday Times, and said he understood why people felt they had to “take it on themselves” and raise the St George and Union flags on lampposts across the country. He even tweeted that he planned to vote for Reform himself, “as a protest against the big 2”, until Zia Yusuf accused him of being an establishment “counter signal” to Thomas Skinner.

Skinner is another “bosh”-loving influencer, but one who’s distinctly Right-leaning – and, at 34, of a notably younger age than Fisher. Skinner was six when Blair entered government. That’s the only political settlement he knows, and as such, he has no particular love or sentimentality for it. Younger blokes do not subscribe to blokeism. That’s one of the things their older peers are worried about. Burnham, for his part, has spoken of an “existential” threat to the current order from Reform, and how politics has to “change quite radically” to face it. But in general, the rest are too old, and too entrenched in their worldviews, to understand this. Blokeism’s power came from it being a generational phenomenon, the very same thing which will make it helpless in the political world to come.

He needn’t worry, of course, since there’s no such thing as British values. No country has a monopoly on justice, tolerance, integrity and compassion. It’s true that some nations are better known for certain values than others: the Arabs and Irish for hospitality, the Americans for freedom, the British for decency and fair play and so on. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any inhospitable Arabs, just as there aren’t many Swedes or Nigerians who believe in indecency and foul play. Cultural differences of this kind shouldn’t distract us from the fact that the most fundamental moral values are universal. Indonesian peasants or Jamaican motor mechanics want much the same for their children as English stockbrokers. They’re no more likely to be lusting for blood or genetically inclined to robbing banks than Fiona Bruce.

Those who doubt this should take a look at world literature. Having spent much of my life reading the stuff, I know of hardly any significant piece of poetry or fiction from anywhere in the world which advocates rape, torture or genocide. This is such a remarkable fact that it passes largely unnoticed. The mythical law of averages would dictate that buried in the millions of novels, poems and plays churned out from every corner of the globe, you would find quite a few pernicious moral agendas. With the odd exception like the Marquis de Sade, however, this simply isn’t true. There are no great fascist novels.

Perhaps this is because the Huns and Vandals were too busy sacking and pillaging to write poetry. It’s also true that there’s a rift between the largely civilised values of Virgil or Horace and the atrocities perpetrated by the empire they served. In the modern era, however, with the gradual spread of humanitarianism from the 18th century onwards, it’s hard to find many people eager to defend crucifixion or mass murder. You might claim that these things are regrettably unavoidable from time to time, but not that they’re inherently good or morally indifferent. This is one way in which the age of Gladstone differs from the era of Caligula. We may not be ethically superior to the ancient Romans, but at least we feel bad about it. We are aware that there can be a discrepancy between what we value and our actual behaviour, a gap which most of us are conscientious enough to regret.

A good deal of political life involves what philosophers call a performative contradiction, where what you say is at odds with what you do. This is more bluntly known as hypocrisy or lying through your teeth; but it’s actually more complex than that, because people can believe that they believe something without actually doing so. (They can also believe something while not knowing they do.) To determine what someone in this situation really thinks, it’s advisable to examine the beliefs implicit in their behaviour rather than rely simply on what they say. If I profess to love white mice but spend all my free time dissecting them without anaesthetic, then it isn’t true that I love white mice, whatever my protestations. Compassion is a matter of what you do, not what you feel. It doesn’t diminish the value of handing a coin to a beggar that you don’t feel a warm glow as you do so.

There is, then, a surprising degree of global consensus about what constitutes sound moral values. As far as I’m aware, there are no political parties anywhere in the world fighting for inequality, injustice and a callous indifference to the suffering of others. Plenty of political organisations promote these values in reality, but we haven’t yet reached the point where they inscribe them proudly on their banners. We have yet to witness the emergence of the Screw the Poor party or Put All Women On the Moon campaign, though this could still happen. There may come a time when the desirability of genocide is once again touted, as it was with the Nazis. In the meanwhile, however, vice pays homage to virtue by denying its own nature and masquerading as a form of righteousness, or at least as an unfortunate necessity.

Surely, though, there are regimes, perhaps autocratic Islamic states in particular, which flagrantly flout much of what we in the West hold dear? There are indeed such set-ups, but we should recall that one of the most regular offenders against so-called Western values has been the West. What of the atrocities committed by the British in Kenya, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam? The list could be extended indefinitely. Some Islamic countries preach intolerance, but those who abhor this bigotry should try being a communist in some parts of the US or a Muslim in some areas of France (one might soon have to add: a Catholic in Ireland).

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Tolerance is a rightly limited commodity: Britain doesn’t tolerate those who practise hate speech, or those who blow up children for ideological reasons. In any case, the values of authoritarian regimes are largely rejected by the people forced to live under them, which is why we witness regular outbreaks of rebellion in such places. They are a sign that these men and women are just as devoted to justice and freedom as the citizens of the West, and that many of them, like Alexei Navalny, are ready to give their lives for them. When there is no dissent, it doesn’t mean that men and women are delighted to be locked up and beaten but that they are fearful of voicing their own views.

It isn’t that some people think that mass beheadings are a splendid idea while others don’t, still less that these groups correspond respectively to the West and the Rest. The United States may not celebrate mass beheadings, but it certainly believes in mass electrocutions. The true difference lies in how we justify our values. Almost everyone objects to rape and murder, not just flag-waving British patriots from Hampshire or Sussex, but we can’t agree on why we agree on this. And this is a genuinely novel historical situation, one which would have struck a citizen of ancient Athens or 14th century Florence as bizarre in the extreme. The modern age is the first in history which must acknowledge that we disagree on the most fundamental of questions; that we shall probably never achieve a consensus on these matters; that we consequently have to find ways of peacefully coexisting while radically dissenting from each other’s most cherished convictions; and that this is known as liberalism. Ethics isn’t a list of decrees but an endless argument. Oscar Wilde valued lying, indolence, insincerity, superficiality, extravagance, hyperbole and saying the most outrageous things purely for theatrical effect. The Sussex flag-wavers may find this scandalous, but so-called British values demand that it be given house room.

Farage’s targeting of the young is unsurprising, given that Right-wingers like himself have a disreputable history of picking on that particular cohort. The young, and not just those of Muslim persuasion, are more likely to question the conventional mores of the time than the middle-aged, which is why they make a lot of conservatives uneasy.

Maybe national service will get them to shape up. This is really quite a smart idea from a Tory standpoint, since many of the values which young people in Britain are wary of are military in origin. Like hospitality in Arabs, they are cultural traits rather than basic moral values. Loyalty, team-spirit, toughness, honour, character, valour, austerity, self-discipline, leadership, physical prowess: the nation divides between those like the present monarch who consider these values utterly vital, and those who think they have their origin in a tiny, unrepresentative sector of society (the officer class, public schools, Boy Scouts and so on), and stem ultimately from Britain’s repressive colonial history. Why should you conceal your emotions, sometimes with psychologically devastating results? Because if you don’t, you may betray weakness in the eyes of your colonials, and in doing so risk even more devastating consequences.

Finally, there is a curious phenomenon known as family values, which are particularly popular in the US. Families centre on children, and children aren’t supposed to know about sex, so family values really means “no sex”. If children can’t talk about it or be interested in it, neither should we. Family values means a way of life permanently arrested before the 9pm watershed.

America is, of course, an intensely Christian nation, unlike Godless Britain, which makes its love of the family rather puzzling. The New Testament is consistently hostile to this institution, a fact which seems not to have been noted in Delaware or Wichita Falls. It begins with a sexual transgression on the part of God himself, who enters the womb of a Palestinian virgin. The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is a parody of a regular domestic unit. Jesus answers his parents sharply after he is lost in the temple, and gives a similarly abrupt response to Mary when she asks him to perform a miracle at Cana. When he is told that some of his family are waiting to speak to him, he tells them brusquely to wait. A woman who cries out that his mother should be blessed also gets the rough edge of his tongue. He has come, he declares, to set one family member against the other, pitting son against father and mother against daughter. It doesn’t sound at all like the kind of thing that would go down well at a Trump rally — let alone a party organised by Nigel Farage.

“Strong Britain, Great Nation
Strong Britain, Great Nation
Strong Britain, Great Nation
Strong Britain, Great Na-a-a-tion”

The lyrics do rather make it sound like it could have been an anthem from some Balkan or central Asian country which has repeatedly suffered military humiliation over the past centuries. (Although to be fair, it was written by a group of primary school children so I don’t want to get too Simon Cowell about the whole thing.)

Since OBON day got the support of the Department for Education, the idea of children singing the country’s praise attracted the usual measured response. Some compared it to North Korea, while others, inevitably, reached for the only historical analogy that every Tory initiative reminds them of. “One country? Sounds like EIN REICH, Read this article on ‘14 signs of an upcoming fascist takeover’.” One Scottish nationalist MP compared it to Soviet imperialism in the Baltic.

There were few fans, and just as Orwell observed that Britain could never become fascist because we laughed at military parades, so today we could never become nationalists because any official attempt at unity would make everyone cringe.

Sure “Strong Britain, Great Nation” is not quite “La Marseillaise”, but then the cynics are hardly sympathetic. In particular, I have little sympathy for complacent ageing liberals who guffaw that such things are “Not British”; a lot of things that happen in this country might once have appeared very un-British, and you didn’t do anything to stop those. Times change.

Indeed, our historic lack of flag-waving reflects the confidence that comes from having an ancient political history, the kingdom of England being almost 1100 years old; it comes from being a country which until the mid-20^th century had little racial diversity and no memory of foreign rule. A country like that didn’t need its schoolchildren to sing about the dream of unity; it went without saying.

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Multicultural countries in contrast need to shout about what they have in common, which is why the United States made such an effort to enforce a secular national faith, making children salute the flag and forcing poor southern European immigrants to deny the obvious superiority of football and instead pretend to enjoy America’s incomprehensibly boring national sports. Multicultural Britain needs to do something similar, rather than relying on ancient cynicism and irony.

Unlike most modern patriotic movements, which tend to be funded by big Quaker organisations like the Joseph Rowntree Trust, OBON is authentically grassroots, organised by a Yorkshireman called Kas Singh, who arrived in Britain at the age of six and rose to become a police inspector.

With the unjaded patriotism often found in immigrants, Singh aims “to create a spirit of inclusion with a collective purpose and a common future where we all seek to eliminate hatred, intolerance and discrimination of any kind so that all our people can feel and develop a strong and shared sense of belonging in order to showcase their pride, passion and love for our great nation”.

Rather than being a Tory creation and a sign of the upcoming fAsCiST taKEoVER, One Britain, One Nation dates to the later Blair era, when the idea of teaching “British Values” in order to unite the nation was first proposed. It had became a government concern when it became clear in the early 2000s that significant numbers of second generation Pakistani and Bangladeshi Britons held views well outside the mainstream on gay rights, anti-Semitism, terrorism and the role of sharia. What was most concerning was that the younger, British-born generation often seemed to have more hardline opinions than their parents, a reversal of the expected pattern of assimilation.

Yet the whole idea faced contradictions right from the start, namely that Britain was still in the midst of a cultural revolution that was completely overhauling its own values. The most obvious absurdity was the claim that gay rights were linked to British Values. It was only in living memory that Iran was more tolerant towards same-sex couples than Britain, while France and Italy legalised same-sex relations over a century before us.

True, the Sixties might seem a long time away, but some schools even list “combatting transphobia” as a core British value, something that wouldn’t even make sense to someone during the Blair era. Last year British home cinema channels began issuing trigger warnings before films, stating that they reflected the values of their time — including films made in 2019. How can such a society teach values when its own values evolve more quickly than Covid?

What British Values tended to mean, and this wasn’t exactly an accident, was liberal or progressive values, ideas that plenty of people of all backgrounds might feel completely alien to them. Beyond that the things they emphasise — tolerance and respect — are worthy, and something we’d like to teach our children, but they’re not particularly British.

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But the main problem with all these programmes is that this is not how nations are forged. Countries don’t have values, they have characteristics, which can also change; before the 18^th century the English were famous for their melancholy, while since then they have been characterised by their sense of humour (and very low suicide rate).

A country’s characteristics are a product of what does make a nation — a history, and a common narrative. And here, at least, the idea of writing a song is closer to the mark than previous attempts. Nations are stories that have been told about a people, often a story of struggle. The first thing that nation-builders do, after trying to enforce a common language, is to create a narrative history; in France, which before the Revolution was a hugely diverse place in which only 10% of people spoke French, this was far more deliberate. “Our ancestors, the Gauls” was a policy of unification to a group of people who spoke 55 different languages.

In Italy, where statesman Massimo d’Azeglio famously said that L’Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani — “now we have created Italy, we must create Italians” — a conscious attempt was made to turn the medieval Tuscan poets into national bards. Italian nationalists saw that if Italy were to become a nation, it needed a Shakespeare, a storyteller who helped write English identity.

Irish nationalism owed huge amounts to song, in particular rousing tales of heroic military defeat at the hands of the English, such as “The Rising of the Moon”. In opposition to this, Ulster Loyalist identity was passed down through tunes such as “Green Grassy Slopes of the Boyne”, tales of defiance and courage. You don’t have to have a favoured tribe in that interminable conflict to find these anthems rousing, because that human desire to love the homeland, and to make sacrifices for it, is universal.

Similarly Scottish nationalism has been hugely spurred by narrative, in particular Braveheart, a film that did more to promote national identity than a million campaign groups, and, arguably, the folk music of The Corries. (Nationalists always have better song than unionists, I’m afraid.)

If the rulers of multicultural Britain wish to forge a nation, then songs and stories are far more powerful than ideas about values. The problem is that liberal democracies tend to be weak at nation-building, because the principles of consensus and tolerance do not provide the oxytocin necessary for group solidarity. That hormonal high is only triggered by a sense of out-group threat, and the subsequent desire to defend — and make sacrifices.

A few years back an anti-extremism programme for schools instructed teachers to watch out for Muslim boys who expressed a belief in dying for what they believed in or defending their honour by force if necessary. These weren’t “terrorist values”, though, they were the same urges that inspired every nation-builder in ours and everyone else’s history.

That programme wasn’t aimed at fostering patriotism, it was aimed at crushing any potential forms of patriotism that conflicted with the state. There was no alternative offered, but then it’s hard to build a common narrative because the different peoples of Britain in 2021 don’t really have a common history. What little they do share is often unhappy and exploitative — and cannot possibly be taught in a way that satisfies everyone. That explains the meteoric rise to prominence of Mary Seacole, a woman who lived an extraordinary life but has become a bizarrely overly-important historical figure in schools. All history is about the age in which it is written, and so it is with Seacole, the Jamaican-born nurse who has become a 21st-century construction.

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Alternatively, there is the desperate and inane idea of “progressive history”, featuring a parade of losers from the Levellers to the Chartists. But if a 14-year-old in a London comprehensive isn’t inspired by Nelson bleeding to death after destroying the French fleet with massive cannons, do you really think listening to Tony Benn talking about the Putney Debates is going to do it?

Historical narrative is limited by nature — collectively we can only remember a few stories at a time, which is what people forget about when they complain that they weren’t taught at school about the Benin Empire or the history of French colonial rule in Gabon. There is only a limited amount of history that can be taught in schools, yet still it’s noticeable that the organisers behind OBON Day seem to have chosen a completely random date. They could have shifted it by just a week or so to coincide with Magna Carta Day, a genuinely central event in our national history, and one that shaped who we are.

Future governments are going to have to wrestle with this issue, to teach a new idea of Britishness for a new nation. Songs are not a bad start, sneering aside, but they need to tell us something more meaningful if they’re going to move us. They need to tell a story, of heroic failure and victory, of hope for the future, and the nation united in wanting to win. It’s just a shame that we can’t use the obvious, but sadly too English, choice: “Three Lions”.

So wrote the Mongol leader Hulagu Khan to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt in 1260. Two years earlier, the nomadic horsemen had sacked Baghdad, the river Tigris running black with ink as its libraries were destroyed, ending the city’s golden age with pyramids of skulls built from the slaughter.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Mongols have rather got a bad press from historians, so it seems counterintuitive that a newly published book praised in the Economist cites them as potential role models for the 21^st century. Yet it also says something about our time.

Johan Norberg’s Open: The Story of Human Progress makes the argument that many empires were forces for openness, encouraging the spread of ideas and people, along with a certain amount of social mobility. As well as the Roman Empire, which unarguably brought many benefits, Norberg praises Genghis Khan for domestic policies that “would today open him up to accusations of being a politically correct, latte-drinking virtue signaller”. So, when people tell me “I’m just right of Genghis Khan” they actually mean it as a comment on my moderation.

“The Mongols practised ethnic and religious tolerance,” as an Economist review puts it sympathetically: “which is one reason why they were so effective. They promoted skilled fighters, engineers and administrators of all backgrounds. Of the 150,000-strong horde that invaded Europe in 1241, only around a third were ethnic Mongols. Habsburg soldiers were surprised to find that one captured officer was a middle-aged literate Englishman, who had fled persecution for heresy at home and sought refuge among the more open-minded Mongols.”

This line of argument is an interesting indication of where current thinking is moving, since over the course of the 21^st century there has been growing sympathy for imperialism among sections of the intelligentsia — and with good reason.

This might seem an odd claim, since on one level empire has never been more controversial. Less than three years ago, some 170 academics signed a letter condemning Oxford University even for presenting a “balance sheet” on the British Empire, stating that they were “alarmed” by such an exercise which lacked “scholarly legitimacy”.

Then there was the case of Bruce Gilley, a political science professor who was published in the peer reviewed journal The World Quarterly arguing that there were many advantages and benefits to colonialism. The article was swiftly retracted, after 16,000 people signed a petition led by fellow academics.

Yet these controversies are not about empires as such, but race and racial supremacy, the most offensive idea to 21^st century westerners. Non-European empires often receive quite sympathetic hearings, including two relatively recent BBC documentaries on the Ottomans — and that is because the values of the 21^st century global elite align far closer with pre-modern imperial rulers than with the 19^th and 20^th century rulers of nation-states.

The modern era proper, which we might approximately date from the Battle of Waterloo or the first railways, was the age of the nation. During this period, politics aligned largely on class lines, with a working-class Left pushing for redistribution and equality, and a largely upper and middle-class Right favouring order.

Over the course of the past couple of decades, that has decisively shifted — a process known as the “great realignment” — so that politics is more about values. The leading Right-wing party is now more working-class than the leading Left-wing party, which would have been an absurd idea 20 years ago, but not 200 years ago when the wealthy were less conservative than the masses — as has been the case throughout much of history.

This new divide is sometimes characterised as being between “open” and “closed” societies, the one favouring more freedom of ideas, trade and immigration, the latter opposing outside influences like the proverbial castle raising the drawbridge. It’s an imperfect distinction because of the pejorative undertones of the term — no one thinks of themselves as “closed-minded” — and that is partly why it is so favoured by advocates of globalisation and liberalisation.

Yet there is something to it, and liberals — as opposed to socialists or progressives — are more likely to favour free exchange of ideas, free movement of capital and goods, and especially free movement of people.

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And historically, there has been one form of government above all that has done this — empire, the most effective form of globalisation and cultural cross-pollination. The author Laurence Bergreen described the Mongols as “early practitioners of globalisation, seeking to connect the entire world. They were conquerors and marauders, but more than that, they were unifiers.” And because empires are defined by diversity, their mix of languages, cultures and religions, so it is natural that supporters of globalisation might seem more sympathetic. Genghis Khan today would most certainly have read the Economist, even if their solutions might have appeared a bit technocratic for his tastes.

Empires have always been cosmopolitan. Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt describes the country in the centuries after Christ as a mixture of influences, a place “where people married across the religious and cultural divide; where reliefs in Egyptian temples could depict strange, winged creatures from Zoroastrian mythology; and where second-generation Persian immigrants could adopt Egyptian nicknames… a dynamic melting pot of peoples and traditions.”

Or there was Spain under the Umayyad Caliphate, where “the emir was served by a well-run cadre led by Umayyad relatives and staffed by Syrians, muwalladun, [Muslims of Spanish descent] Jews, and Mozarabs [Arab-speaking Catholics]”. And yet, as David Levering Lewis of Moorish Spain, its people “coexisted in a flammable symbiosis”.

The Ottoman Empire is perhaps the most cancel-proof: open to racial mixing, with little sense of ethnic supremacy compared to later European empires, and even with powerful people of colour, women and even intersex people right at the top: among the most important figures at the Topkapi Palace were the Chief White Eunuch and the Chief Black Eunuch, and the latter was more powerful (claps).

And yet, like all such empires, it was authoritarian and conservative. People could practise their religion and indeed minority religious leaders were given quasi-official status — so long as they accepted the status quo. Like empires before it, it was a society terrified of changes that might throw the whole delicately-weaved network of peoples into imbalance. With good reason.

It was the very diverse nature of these imperial societies that made them unpromising ground for the political ideas that appeared in the West — liberalism, representative democracy and freedom of religion (and freedom from religion). That these novelties emerged in the far more ethnically-homogenous societies of England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia is not a coincidence, since the nations adjoining the North Sea were characterised by strong institutions, high levels of trust and little fear of competing nationalisms, or what we would now call “identity politics”.

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The correlation between diversity and low trust is well-established, and trust is crucial in the formation of civil society and of capitalism, which require strangers to share risks outside of their extended families. Over the 18^th century, 130 types of society were created in the British Isles, and some 25,000 clubs sprang up in the English-speaking world. A German resident of London wrote: “Everyone may choose his company according to his liking” and there was nowhere “where a man may live more according to his own mind, or even his whims, than in London”.

The imperial age would begin its decline with the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism, which was originally a modernising and liberal force; as Krishnan Kumar wrote in Visions of Empire, nationalism was allied “with the noble causes of spreading freedom and enlightenment in the world”. Nationalists wished to counter the rule of clerics and princes, who had always seen themselves being above such petty concerns as national identity. As Count-duke Olivares of imperial Spain wrote: “I am not nacional; that is something for children”. This, as Kumar put it, was an “expression typical of the imperial mentality”. The old aristocracy were beyond such low-status beliefs as nationalism — just like their 21^st century successors.

Most of all the age of nationalism was tied to the rise of the middle class, just as today nationalism’s fall is linked to its decline, and with the rise of a new globalised tech and finance aristocracy.

Though once aligned with liberalism, nationalism would become intolerant and violent, and its legacy was disastrous for minorities in particular. Today the cities of Eurasia are littered with the ghosts of long-established communities wiped out in the 20^th century, in Jewish Krakow, Orthodox Constantinople, Christian Baghdad and elsewhere.

On the treatment of minorities, empires can certainly claim to have a better record than nation-states. European Jews enjoyed great freedom and tolerance under the Habsburgs but when that empire fell, the results were catastrophic. Tragedy also afflicted the Greeks in Alexandria and the Arabs and Persians in Zanzibar, all of whom had to flee when the age of empires came to an end (among the latter was a young Farrokh Bulsara, whose family home in Middlesex had a picture of their former protector, the Queen of England, on the wall).

Today, while national identity is in steep retreat in the west, it has come to be replaced by a form of patriotism for an idea, the “British values” coined by New Labour and repeated by Keir Starmer last week.

As Tony Blair said in 1997: “I am a British patriot…The Britain in my vision is not Britain turning its back on the world. We are a leader of nations or nothing.” Yet what he is patriotic for is a set of values, an imperial, not a nationalist, idea. As Krishnan Kumar put it: “Imperialist ideologies are universalistic, not particularistic. That difference has to be borne in mind. Imperial peoples do not, unlike nationalists, celebrate themselves; they celebrate the causes of which they are the agents or carriers.”

Likewise if America is defined by a creed — “it is who we are”, as Barack Obama said of diversity — then that makes it less recognisable as the nation of the founding fathers and more what Rashid Dar called “a progressive caliphate”, a polity arranged around a belief system.

Nations don’t have “values”. In Nationalism and the History of Ideas, John Breuilly observed that “Nationalists are highly inward-looking. They tend to celebrate themselves — ‘we English,’ ‘we Germans,’ ‘we French’ — simply for their good fortune in being who they are, rather than for any cause or purpose in the world that might justify their existence.”

So as western societies become multicultural, they have also come to resurrect imperial models of government, with officials working among the “community” performing a similar role to that of the Ottoman millet system — repressing ethnic conflict and injustice while also imposing ideological conformity and loyalty to the empire. Faith leaders are not just tolerated but given sway over their self-appointed communities, but anyone who offends the values of the state — by, say, expressing opposition to homosexuality too openly — is deemed beyond the pale.

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Because of their vulnerability, multicultural empires must also become less hospitable towards dissenting ideas. As the United States has become more imperial, so Americans have become much less tolerant of opposing beliefs because majority ethnic nationalism, usually described as racism or “white supremacy”, threatens the fabric of society just as it haunted past empires.

That today empire is such a controversial issue is not because the rule of sultans or khans offends our principles, but because of the same ethnic politics that once plagued multicultural empires and now play a large part in American and European political life.

Everywhere, as western nation-states have evolved into modern empires, so liberalism and democracy have begun to diverge, with populist movements arising to defend “the people”, the ethnic majority, against elites who resemble imperial governors trying to protect social peace (and their own interests).

As Kumar wrote: “In the case of empires, one of the most important is to recognize the danger of nationalism, not just of the subject peoples but, perhaps even more, of the ruling people themselves. The moment the ruling people start stressing their own national identity, whether as Turks, Austrians, Russians, English, or French, that is the moment empire begins to decline… The national principle denies the imperial principle.”

And it is this question, between the new imperialism and the old nationalism, that now defines western political life in the 21^st century.