As many of my peers do, I remember the 2012 London Olympics vividly.

I’m still unsure of why it had such a profound impact on me at the time, but I was enamoured by it. The colour, the vivacity, the unity, the pride of its location; the flag held high, the Union Jack plastered as far as the eye could see; the diversity of the athletes and the attention the nation paid to it all. Arguably, this was the first time I felt patriotism. The feeling was pure and unsullied- I was proud of how my home country was represented, and how it felt like an age of success and supportiveness. 

It feels tainted, now, thirteen years on, to define myself as ‘patriotic’. The literal definition of the word remains unchanged, of course. Patriotism: ‘the feeling of loving your country more than any others and being proud of it’, as per the Cambridge Dictionary. However, in recent years, the word has become bastardised; shifted into something resembling chauvinism, jingoism; a dog-whistle, if you like, for a politically contentious issue that is currently permeating English society: something incredibly touchy to discuss. Propagating this change significantly is the backdrop of declining faith in recent governments- having had 4 PMs since 2022, this decline holds a rationale behind it, however the scapegoat for consequent discontent has been made out to be the ‘issue’ of multi-culturalism and immigration. 

The popularity of a party such as the Reform party may have seemed implausible a decade ago, when multi-culturalism held a much more optimistic future: other contemporary issues of equality were making leaps and bounds, such as the establishment of the 2010 Equality Act, or the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013. Although there have always been parties in the UK political system (the National Front and the BNP, notably) that mark a history of chauvinistic influence, this sentiment only now seems to be taking huge precedence in English politics. The next general election is one of the first that will likely alienate both the traditional two-party voting pattern of Labour and Conservative, and put more ‘extreme’ parties such as Reform and Green in the running. Not only is this a clear manifestation of social discontent, but it is a clear manifestation of a ‘hot-button’ divisive topic in current England: pro-, or anti-multiculturalism? 

In my own interactions, I have observed how commonplace these beliefs have become: family members strongly backing Reform, the casual racism and discrimination I witness in public, and the flying of St. George’s cross in towns and cities all over England- not as simple patriotism, but as a show of force, a display of jingoistic sentiment. We won’t accept ‘outsiders’. ‘Keep out’. Would we have felt so comfortable in this a decade ago? I think not. The diversity and pride in the people of Britain that we observed during the 2012 Olympics seems now impossible to hearken back to- and it’s all the proof needed that patriotism in its true definition does not exist anymore. It has been redefined, and many young people have fallen out of love with England- or, at the least, their relationship with it has been seriously complicated.