It’s another Friday night for me. Another week of work has been and gone. I signed off mid-afternoon, tuned into Sara Cox’s “All Request Friday”, danced around the kitchen whilst I rustled up a lovely Asian-inspired dinner and gave my liver a good kicking on cans of Guinness and a lovely bottle of Rioja. Nostalgia demanded I chucked on a 2008 live Keane set, leaving my neighbour questioning their life choices as I tried to hit the high notes while they brought their bins in. The evening naturally mellowed, and I slipped into my usual pensive state of mind.
It happens to be the day of the May 2026 council elections, and I’m left chewing over the current state of affairs in my country. A brief, but predictably ill-advised and inevitable flick through Instagram offered no surprises; it was the usual sea of despair (or triumph) as the results were still trickling in. To an outsider looking at this all-too-familiar social media circus, it would be easy to believe that the UK is more divided than ever. Similarly inevitable, I found myself yet again wondering whether we have perhaps lost our sense of perspective.
“Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.”
In this particular set by Keane, this line was read by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and preceded the song “A Bad Dream.” I’ve heard this song dozens of times before. Though tonight, aided perhaps by the profound clarity that only a few Guinness and glasses of wine can bring, it struck a different chord.
It was the timelessness of the core idea: ordinary people finding themselves swept up in conflicts they themselves haven’t authored, directed at people who are likely not so different from themselves. We find ourselves “fighting” not out of genuine malice, but because we’ve inherited a script of tribalism we feel compelled to follow. We participate in the outrage, not because we’ve reached a deep, personal conclusion, but because it’s the price of admission to our chosen “side.”
Without diminishing the sacrifice of those who fought on literal battlefields, I couldn’t help but see the similarities in our “deep divides” today. We are increasingly a nation of people engaged in ideological warfare for reasons we haven’t fully interrogated, against “enemies” who are doing exactly the same thing. If we were to judge Britain purely through the lens of social media, we might assume we were a country on the brink of collapse; irreparably fractured, incapable of compromise and devoid of any shared identity whatsoever.
And yet, when viewed through the longer lens of history, are our current anxieties really so unique?
Our country has endured numerous wars (including many civil), religious division, poverty, terrorism, economic crises, most brutally, Eurovision failures (though at least football is finally coming home this summer…). Entire generations before us inherited problems far greater than the ones we face today, and yet somehow found ways to push the country incrementally forward. Perfectly? Absolutely not! At times, progress in Britain appears to move at roughly the same pace as our potholes get fixed. Slow, uneven and often deeply frustrating. Yet progress, nonetheless.
Perhaps this is the defining characteristic of Britain: not perfection, but adaptation?
Our national story has rarely been one of sudden reinvention. The roots of democracy in the UK can be traced back to a charter in 1215, which established that our monarchy cannot be above the law. Hell, it took until 1928 and a generation of brave women to fight for their right to vote, but slowly and surely, we have been making progress.
Unlike many modern democracies born through revolution or total rupture, Britain has tended to evolve, albeit awkwardly. Despite this awkwardness, we must remain cognisant of the organic nature in which this progression has occurred. We have managed to preserve some traditions, reforming others and slowly widening the circle of participation of democracy over centuries. The result is often untidy, inconsistent and frustrating (just as it is today), but is this also not an undeniable demonstration of the resilience of the British people?
Appreciation for our history, and our institutions does not require blind loyalty to them. Now more than ever, we should encourage people to engage in peaceful debate and engagement in the evolving issues we face. But perhaps just as importantly, we should approach those conversations with a degree of humility; the understanding that none of us possess a complete authority over the truth, or a definition of “what is right”. Those with whom we disagree are rarely as wicked as modern discourse encourages us to believe. Where we differ is often not in our desires, but in our understanding of how best to achieve them.
This alone should encourage a little more humility in the way we engage with one another. Opposing views do not inherently represent malice, nor does disagreement automatically signal a lack of morality. More often than not, they simply represent different experiences, priorities and interpretations of this wacky world in which we were all born into.
Whilst recognising the flaws within our system, we should still value the stability, freedoms and continuity it has provided. Perhaps we can support reform, without believing that everything inherited from previous generations is inherently rotten.
I recognise this is largely unfashionable thinking in modern political discourse; every disagreement and election is often framed as existential. I just find myself longing for the idea that most ordinary people still live somewhere in the middle ground; concerned about the future, frustrated by genuine problems, yet still quietly grateful for the relative peace and liberty in which we are able to argue about them in the first place.
In an age increasingly drawn towards outrage, tribalism and absolutism, it really feels like some of these often-forgotten values are worth preserving.
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