TODAY, in the midst of what even our rulers describe as the worst crisis since 1945, the people of Britain will be enveloped in a cloud of toxic ideological matter ejected from the British state’s propaganda vents. 

The country continues to reel under the Covid-19 crisis: its death toll now the highest in Europe; its dilapidated social and economic infrastructure — asset-stripped by years of neoliberal reform — brutally exposed; the corruption, complicity and complacency of its ruling class on show for all to see. 

What better time, therefore, to dust off the gilded upholstery of the monarchic state, wheel out the monarch to intone about our shared heritage in the British wartime spirit, put Churchill’s speeches on repeat and start mainlining conservative nostalgia?