Britannia Rules the Waves
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I saw you yesterday.
Flags out, chest proud, chanting about taking your country back.
About greatness. About the Empire.
About the good old days when Britannia ruled the waves.
You want the empire back. I understand the feeling: the world felt ordered then. Britain was on top. Strong. Certain. Respected — and feared. Which would fill a lot of people with pride.
In that empire you're mourning — who were you?
Not who do you imagine you were. Who were you actually.
You weren't Churchill. You weren't Cecil Rhodes. You weren't the admiral on the ship or the governor in the mansion.
You were the man in the mine. The child in the mill. The woman in the workhouse who was told that poverty was her own moral failure.
In the 1850s — the golden age you're gesturing toward — a working man in Manchester or Liverpool could expect to live to his mid-twenties. Your children had a one-in-three chance of dying before they were five. Not in Calcutta. Not in Kingston. In England. In the empire's beating heart.
You worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week. There was no NHS. No sick pay. No pension. No vote. Only 1 in 5 men had that right — and it certainly wasn't you.
If you fell on hard times the state offered you the workhouse — deliberately designed to be more miserable than the worst job available. That wasn't an accident. It was written into law. Your dignity was removed on purpose, to keep you grateful for whatever scraps the mill owner threw down. Sounds familiar?
And when you dared to ask for the right to vote — when the Chartists marched, when workers organised — the same imperial army that put down rebellions in India and Ireland came home to put down you.
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My ancestors knew the empire too. They knew it through different eyes — dispossession, extraction, being told their culture was barbarism and their language was embarrassing. That was a specific kind of wound that I won't pretend was identical to yours.
But here is what we share, you and I.
The same class of men who sent your great-grandfather to die in a trench in a war fought to protect trade routes and foreign investments — those men also stripped my grandfather's country bare. Same logic. Same ledger.
They gave your grandfather a uniform and a flag and told him he was part of something magnificent. They gave him an empire to be proud of precisely because they had taken everything else from him.
Pride is cheaper than wages. Always has been.
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Your town is struggling. So is mine. The high street is gone, the NHS is on its knees, and the food banks are full. We are living the same crisis. And somehow, I am the villain they're selling you.
It wasn't immigrants who cut your Sure Start centre. It wasn't refugees who sold off your council houses. It wasn't foreigners who closed your factory or mine.
It was policy. It was choice. It was people with names and addresses — seats in Parliament, offices in the City, and money in tax havens. Decisions made in rooms you and I will never be invited into. The same kinds of rooms, the same kinds of decisions, as 1850. Just slightly better suits.
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So when I see you marching, flag in hand, nostalgic for Britannia — I don't see a villain. I see a man who has been sold a story.
A story where the problem is people like me. The immigrant. The foreigner. The one who is different.
And I understand why the story is appealing. It's simple. It's angry. It points somewhere.
But I am not the answer to your question. I am just the distraction from it.
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The Britain worth being proud of was never the empire.
It was the men who came back from the Second World War — broke, exhausted, having given everything — and said: never again. And they built the NHS. They built the welfare state. And immigrants came — staffed the hospital wards, drove the buses, kept the lights on — because Britain asked them to, and because they believed in what was being built.
That is your inheritance. Your Britain. Our Britain.
The Chartists who demanded your vote. The suffragettes who demanded your mother's. The trade unionists who bought your grandfather a weekend with their blood and their livelihoods.
Those are your people. That is our glory.
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You and I are not each other's enemy.
We never were.
We are just two people, from different parts of the same story, still being told to fight each other so we don't ask the same question at the same time.
And I think, somewhere underneath the noise and the flags and the anger, you already know that.
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I came here and worked. Paid taxes. Raised children who call this country home. I clap for the NHS, dine on a roast, and hope that this summer — football is coming home.
And like you, I want to be safe. I want this country to do well. I want my children to have a future.
And just like you, I am not optimistic.
But trust me, mate — I promise you — it is not my fault.
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With more solidarity than you might expect,
Ahmad Baker
17.05.2026
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