Fighting the far right: against the ideology of nationhood

To mobilise against fascism, Thomas Necchi argues that we need to build radical movements that care not about countries, but the people who live in them.

With the rise of the far right in Britain, much has been made of patriotism. In its electoral form, Reform UK has capitalised on its perception as the most patriotic party to put forth such things as a ‘patriotic school curriculum’, which would involve quashing critical discussion of British imperialism and slavery through ‘balance’, and the removal of any ‘transgender ideology’ (that is to say, making it acceptable to abuse and harass transgender pupils). At the street level, an astroturfed campaign by the name of ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ (OROC) went round marking territory, raising St George flags and the Union Jack as a means to intimidate migrants and racialised people in neighbourhoods across the country. Despite claims from the organisers that such an operation was not racist, news outlets reported some of them had marched with Tommy Robinson and taken trips to France to attack migrants. There is likely little difference between the street thugs of OROC and Reform, especially given the repeated allegations towards Nigel Farage and his schoolboy days of neo-Nazi chants and Oswald Mosley fanboying, but they operate as two different flanks of the same movement. And looking at these two flanks, it is clear that far-right ideology is starting to grow in influence and disperse across civil society. The culmination of this was the Tommy Robinson march in London last September, where around 100,000 people attended.

The political mainstream has helped these far right forces build legitimacy by capitulating to this advance almost immediately. Keir Starmer made a show of calling Farage a ‘plastic patriot’, a tactic which did not appear to work, as noted by Melanie Phillips (famously cited by A. Breivik). The Liberal Democrats participated in tacky spectacles emphasising their patriotism, with leader Ed Davey taking part in an Orange marching band, and former leader Tim Farron draping himself in the Union Jack. The likely choice for opposing the far-right on the electoral front, Zack Polanski, has made a point of proposing an alternative patriotism. At the Green Party conference in September, he gave a shout out to care workers around the country, remarking: ‘Caring for people, working for the public – showing kindness and compassion. That’s the most patriotic thing I could possibly imagine.’ Even internet figures were drawn in, with ‘takeaway influencer’ Big John asked to weigh in on the flag debate after a Chinese takeaway was defaced with racist graffiti. Whilst declaring his love for his country and the flag, he decried the racism that had risen up, something which earned him plaudits from many on the left. But this is not something that should sit easily with us.

As the old saying goes, when something is declared to be beyond politics or ideology, that is when something is at its most ideological. Patriotism means, in its crudest sense, to show support or loyalty to one’s country. But a country, as we shall see, is often spoken of as divorced from the history which made it. And it does not help us to be naive about that history. Even Marxists who have argued for socialist patriotism in Britain have conceded that for ‘years the most reactionary, corrupt and parasitic elements in society have manipulated people for their own ends by appealing to patriotic sentiment. Blatant acts of aggression have been “justified” in this way.’

Where patriotism is discussed on the British left, it is usually by its reformist flanks. And even within those sections, different angles are taken. Sometimes patriotism is described as a force by which we can mobilise the public, and other times it is acknowledged as a kind of sweet tooth indulgence, a guilty pleasure. Aside from Polanski, different kinds of attitudes to patriotism can be found in the trade union bureaucracy. A more hands-off approach can be seen in RMT General Secretary Eddie Dempsey’s recent interview, where he said: ‘The problem with people on the left of politics, and has been for a long time, is they spend so much time worrying about what goes on in people’s heads, they forget what’s going into their bellies,’ and admitted that RMT members had probably gone on the Tommy Robinson march and asylum seeker hotel protests. His attitude is that if you meet people’s material needs first, far-right politics will have less of a hold on them. 

Dempsey’s somewhat ambivalent attitude to patriotism pales in comparison to the Unite General Secretary, Sharon Graham, who has stated outright that Keir Starmer is not patriotic enough. She grounds this claim in what she sees as his failure to invest sufficiently in British industry, a critique she extends most clearly to defence. ‘I spend a lot of my time at the moment with defence companies’, she explains, ‘pushing the government in terms of spending more on defence. I am very vocal about the fact that we need to spend more money on defence, but then you need to buy British. We are hugely skilled at this.’ Here, patriotism and loyalty to a concept of Britain is directly entwined with militarism and imperialism which relies on a well-funded military industrial complex. More than that, the welfare of British workers is tied to it as well. 

It’s not entirely clear to me how effective these angles of attack are when it comes to tackling the rise of far right forces. If anything, they seem to reinforce them. In her diatribe against Starmer’s ‘unconvincing’ patriotism, which then degenerates into an attack on multiculturalism, Phillips states:

People think Farage is patriotic because, in fighting first for Brexit and now to restore the country’s shattered border controls and end mass migration, he’s seen as standing up for Britain as an independent nation state with a particular culture that needs to be defended and preserved. He’s tapped into the widespread feeling that people no longer recognise the country they’re living in.

She then goes on to define patriotism:

It’s about a sense of belonging and love of your country. You love it because you feel deep connections to your fellow citizens as belonging to a shared national project, bound together in a very particular tapestry of history, geography, religion, institutions, cultural characteristics and core principles. Even though newcomers to the country don’t share that history, they sign up to those values and characteristics which they also learn to love and share. The key point is that there is a recognisable national identity.

Phillips refers to a shared project, to a collective effort, to a whole number of things which might make up those ‘deep connections.’ It should be clear from this that Phillips believes in a completely conservative idea of patriotism and the nation. In stark contrast to Polanski’s assertion that compassion and kindness are British values, Phillips declares that patriotism in ‘Britain […] means love for the Crown, the armed forces and the common law, and attachment to faith, family and flag.’ An astute reader might notice that in all this talk of patriotism and ‘shared national projects’ there isn’t actually any mention of everyday issues which unite a lot of people living and struggling in Britain today, such as food, housing, wages or healthcare. While some leaders on the left seek to present patriotism in a more compassionate or workerist sense, by doing so they miss how the far-right mobilises people. Phillips’ words remind us that patriotism as loyalty to a nation or sense of national belonging are not empty, vague concepts: they are filled with pre-existing ideologies and assumptions about what Britain is. They cannot easily be changed. And in attempting to recapture the terrain of nationalism and patriotism, figures on the left can even find themselves agreeing with Phillips, as Graham does on the matter of defence.

But it is not just that Phillips presents a different, colder and white nationalist idea of British patriotism which tricks people. The sleight of hand that patriotism performs here is crucial to its function as an ideology, as it allows reactionaries to claim they are the only ones doing something about the current state of things whilst in reality doing nothing of the sort. Just think of the fascists who claim to protect ‘women and children’, many of whom are abusers. To help us develop a better understanding of this, we need to turn to the work of another reactionary. In Journey to the End of the Night, written several years before he would gain infamy as a Nazi sympathiser, the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline lays out a scene where his literary alter-ego, Bardamu, attempts to suck up to a doctor caring for shell-shocked soldiers such as himself. The doctor asks Bardamu:

‘And what, Bardamu, I ask you, what is the highest known concept, the concept best suited to arousing the altruism of the elite subject and compelling it to manifest unequivocally?’

‘Patriotism, Professor!’

‘Ah, you see? The word is yours, not mine. You understand, Bardamu!… Patriotism and glory, which is its corollary and proof!’

The use of ‘altruism’ here is quite telling. Rather than simply demand obedience to a higher cause, the doctor instead frames patriotism as activating selfless behaviour within a subject. The doctor then goes on to state that the nation is a ‘truth of the heart’ felt deeply by the common people regardless of its actuality. By referring to a collective entity such as the nation, anyone engaging in patriotism might feel they are acting altruistically, regardless of whether or not they help other people in a material way. By acting for the nation, you affirm a self-image that you are acting for others within that nation, and crucially by doing so in a way that is unlikely to change how that nation actually runs. As French communist Paul Nizan explained: ‘We can imagine a fascism exalting the values of brotherhood, but it would justify them by the myth of a racial community which is in the end justified only by the terrorist domination of banks.’

Referring to another, quite different piece of media might help elucidate this further. In the Japanese film Death by Hanging, directed by Nagisa Oshima, a condemned man who has survived a hanging only to lose his memory faces the attempts of state bureaucrats to accept his punishment again, only to confound them at every turn. When he states that for killing him they should suffer the same punishment, they retaliate that they are allowed to kill him because the nation permits them. The condemned man R responds: ‘I don’t accept that. What is a nation? Show me one! I don’t want to be killed by an abstraction.’ For me, this notion of abstraction in the context of the nation captures how the ‘nation’ or ‘national identity’ is treated like a fixed, unchanging entity or essence – a belief that isolates or abstracts it from its actual cultural and political development throughout history. Or in the words of Achin Vanaik: ‘The nation is a state of mind but one with a political thrust. Since it is a state of mind, the nation can die out; it can be newly born; and is historically contingent.’ By using such an object, patriotism as a mobilizing strategy for the nation keeps its adherents in a feedback cycle that will never be complete. But it’s important not to make patriots sound entirely like dupes. To draw on Nizan again, the response to fascism must come from:

within a humanism that takes into account the concrete conditions of human life and not of the abstract conditions of human thought, which includes the dual conquest of the earth by all men, of the maximum of humanity and consciousness for every one of them.

The nation that arises out of historical social relations and patriotism is the poison of various ideologies, prejudices and reactions from across that history. Any response to fascism must deal with this history and the population it has produced. In his overview of different theories on nationalism, Vanaik covers how Marxists such as Benedict Anderson and Neil Davidson linked the process of Britain becoming one nation of unified kingdoms with the rise of the bourgeoisie. As Marx and Engels said:

Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

That fascists see patriotism as the obvious outlet and cover for racial hatred, islamophobia and their various other bigotries is not by chance; it is the result of a national history which has long been entwined with imperialism and colonialism. Patriotism lures many into a self-satisfying mockery of altruism, but it accomplishes this because its altruism is centred around subjects who are similar to the patriot. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie ‘creates a world after its own image.’ Patriotism is the defence on the domestic level of this ‘world after its own image.’ The patriot is exposed to all the peoples of the world, and asks only for a mirror. And within the supposed altruism of patriotism, a narrowing, a purification of the people occurs. The patriot claims ‘altruism’, but really what he wants is the gratification that comes from belonging. What he wants is glory. In this sense, compassion and kindness are indeed British values, as Polanski said. But of this fact we must ask the following questions: compassion and kindness for whom?

If we are to resist the far right, then some of our work will come in undermining the ideas and rhetoric of nation and nationhood. In holding up compassion and kindness as ‘British values’ the reformist left can often simply reproduce the altruism of Céline’s doctor, the self-centred kindness of an ‘elite people.’ We must show people that caring about others, about showing solidarity, does not need patriotism to make that happen. We must encourage a critical attitude to patriotism and the nation state, and take up the old slogan that ‘The working [class] have no country.’ We do not care about nations, we care about the people who live in them, in all their diversity. When people gather outside hotels and protest against asylum seekers, they seek to threaten, harass, attack and maybe even desire to kill those people. But the Britain they seek to kill them for is merely an abstraction. This fact will no doubt matter little to them: British white nationalism pays a psychological wage, and that is more quickly gratifying than the hard work needed to actually fix the problems in this country. We must call this what it is: racism. By countering that racism with a focus on the concrete struggles of communities across this country, we may not bring them over to our side, but we’ll stop more of the left conceding ground to them.

On 21 February 2026, far right group ‘Britain First’ are organising a so-called ‘March for Remigration’. In response, a coalition of anti-fascist organisations has issued a nationwide call for a counter-protest.

Save the date. Get organised. Travel to Manchester to stand together in opposition to Britain First.