Back when Twitter was an enjoyable place to while away a lazy evening on the sofa, I used to follow a photographer called Marc Davenant, whose black-and-white portraits of social deprivation would often stop me in my tracks. One photograph in particular has stayed with me: a Victorian back-to-back terraced house somewhere in the north-east of England that didn’t have any windows at all – a bricked-up square of misery. Davenant captured this image with a phrase I hadn’t come across: “Nostalgia is a seductive liar.”
I thought of this over the summer attending a family gathering in Ireland. We were there to celebrate the 80th birthday of a wonderful man who as a teenage orphan in the 1960s came to England, where he became something of a surrogate son to my grandparents, themselves orphans. At the party, I heard the stories of Mike’s childhood in Offaly and how he came to be in care: his mother had died in childbirth, leaving behind her eight children and their widowed father, who was a kind man but unable to cope alone. There I was, standing in the modern, beautiful home of Mike’s daughter, looking at images of the grandmother she never knew, separated by just two generations and yet what felt like an entire age. No one would seriously entertain returning to the world that existed then, however seductive the sepia-tinted images of rural Irish life otherwise appeared.
And yet I still find myself being drawn to nostalgic visions of the past, often when thinking about my own childhood: of summer days on the village green, making dens in hay bales, and “tree-jumping” with friends in the grounds of the nearby hotel. Even writing these words makes me smile at how otherworldly they now seem – as if I grew up in some version of Danny the Champion of the World when it was, in fact, just County Durham in the 1990s.
Recently, I’ve begun to wonder whether holidays play similarly deceptive roles in our imaginations. Having returned from Brittany this summer as foot passengers on the ferry, my wife and I dragged our bags – and children – to Portsmouth Harbour train station, crushed by the contrast with the holiday resorts of the Breton coast. The station was a mess: a rundown rusty shed. The sight of a dog relieving itself on the platform did not make the scene any more welcoming. Perhaps it was little more than rosy longing for some of the nicest parts of France, and yet I can’t help feeling that Britain really does seem to be declining in comparison with its neighbours. I would be interested to know what New Statesman readers think.
Either way, the political power of nostalgia is real, with its visions of half-remembered histories. This week’s Cover Story by our culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, reflects on the radical right’s Powellite turn on migration, fuelled by such fantasies. In a matter of years the rhetoric driving British politics has escalated from calling for restrictions on the numbers arriving in Britain to calling for the mass expulsion of those already here – including those who were born and raised in this country. As Tanjil writes, “In the age of deportation, future governments intend to exhibit through mass deportation their authority to decide who gets to be English at all.” It is a powerful intervention.
Alongside Tanjil’s essay, Andrew Marr sets out the stakes facing the Labour government if it is not able to assert control. Meanwhile, Jill Filipovic reports from the US, where Donald Trump has used American concerns about immigration to set up what she calls his own personal paramilitary force.
Elsewhere, Nicholas Harris sketches the absurd spectacle of parliament’s return. Meanwhile, our newly promoted political correspondent Megan Kenyon writes her first politics column on the rise of Zack Polanski, the new Green Party leader. Anoosh Chakelian meets one of the so-called Independent Gaza MPs, Shockat Adam.
In the New Society we cover the full range of modern culture, from Michael Prodger offering a guide to the new exhibition of neo-impressionism at the National Gallery to George Monaghan’s review of Sabrina Carpenter’s new album.
Finally, I wanted to mention one letter in particular. John Teller from Bristol rightly points out that I have not yet mentioned Nicholas Lezard’s column in my Editor’s Note. As ever, this week’s Down and Out is “the last tasty morsel left on the plate”, as John puts it. Tuck in!
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 03 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Age of Deportation