The director's cut of history is definitely worth a look

IN order to finally turn the tide on the dangerous populists whose influence is ever growing we need to assert a simple truth - the past was pretty shitty for almost everyone.

A sort of hazy nostalgia for a time not so long ago is a powerful tool for extremist parties such as the AfD, MAGA Republicans and the UK's own Reform.

If only, they argue, we could get back to when our countries were simpler, quieter and (let's be honest) whiter. A period sort of around the late 1990s but without Tony Blair in charge. When we could have a touch of the Blitz spirit without the actual bombing. Indian takeaways but rather fewer actual Indians. A green and pleasant land but none of that green transition nonsense. And maybe a bit of childhood meningitis (because no vaccines, obviously).

You swiftly get the whiff of wistfulness in Facebook heritage groups when a picture of an old high street conjures up memories of an era when kids were safe to play out, men whistled on their way to work and it was only fallen women living in Whitechapel who need fear violent crime.

Except we have to be honest that throughout most of history living conditions and personal freedoms have been pretty damn awful for pretty much everyone. If you find yourself angry about all the litter in the road - as I admit I sometimes do - you have to remind yourself that a while before the crisp packets there was human faeces.

People wax lyrical over a yesteryear which in many cases they're not even old enough to remember and even if they were they might be surprised to discover it wasn't the paradise they now recall. When after all was Britain's golden era? 

Was it the 80s when the country was reeling from the effects of social unrest and widespread deindustrialisation? The war, when most people spent their nights cowering in Anderson shelters? Or some time before that when we were savouring cholera outbreaks and hearty workhouse grub? Many seem to land on a slender strip somewhere between VE Day and when Windrush ruined everything. Which amounts to all of three years and all of it without a free health service. 

It would of course be wrong to claim that the arc of the universe bends only towards justice, or that all change has been for the better for everyone. If you live in an old mining town you may well yearn for the bygone age of steady work and a proper sense of community. Any nature lover will tell you that the countryside is less busy with bees and birdsong than it once was. Sudden shocks like pandemics or slower moving trends, like climate change, can rob of us small comforts and simple securities we have long taken for granted.

And yet the snake oil salesmen who claim that things would improve immeasurably if only we could turn the clock back a generation or two are hiding the fact that it doesn't take long to find yourself somewhere far from familiar and not necessarily friendly.

The progress that has led to democratic process and decent living standards for some parts of the world at least is, if we're honest, really the work of the 20th century. The idea that people living 12 to a house or being publicly executed is the product of weird foreign habits rather ignores that these things only disappeared from "civilised" shores not so long ago. 

Would it surprise you for instance to learn that France last guillotined somewhere in the same year ABBA charted with Dancing Queen? Or that in 1979 - the year Thatcher rose to power - the Commons returned only 18 other women?

Let's wind the dials back a tad further to the late 1800s. We had the same flag back then but it was an otherwise utterly alien land. Britain may have been great but it wasn't particularly fair. Large numbers of working men didn't have the vote. There was no NHS or old age pensions (never mind a winter fuel allowance). It was an age when the nation was both the world's largest economy and a great imperial power, yet that didn't change the fact that many lived in filthy slums and the average life expectancy at birth was 40.

Returning to the present imagine you're a white man around that age, perhaps living in Skegness. Recent election results suggest you may well feel your life is being made worse by what is often framed as pandering to the priorities of minorities. It is worth reminding yourself that some of these struggles for greater acceptance - or a fairer deal - were playing out not in the age of the ancestors but often in the lifetime of relatives still living. You are the recent recipient of the very freedoms and courtesies now - to howls of outrage from tabloids and talk radio hosts - being extended to others.

The populists revel in their endless war on "woke" - a pretty meaningless term that can be applied to anything from basic health and safety legislation to efforts to ensure the planet's ecosystems don't collapse. Perhaps most often it's attached to attempts to encourage equality and understanding.

This is not merely a modern-day obsession with trying to be right-on, it's part of a move towards making things fairer that almost every one of us has benefited from.

Were people "virtue-signalling" when they railed against apartheid in South Africa, or were those who demanded action to stop people dying in colleries simply "snowflakes"? Was the BBC obsessed with diversity quotas when, in the early 60s, it started to realise there was such a thing as regional accents? And what of those union barons who demanded radical nonsense like an eight-hour working day?

No doubt different slurs were used in days gone by, but these historical campaigns demonstrate that the push for progress cannot be blamed on slightly hysterical twenty-somethings at the National Trust.

The scary thing about populism is that while promising to remove the rainbow flags from shop windows and refugees from the country it doesn't trumpet quite so loudly that, in exchange, almost every section of the electorate will have to surrender many of their own freedoms. Being in a comfortable majority does not necessarily protect you when you cast your mind back to a past when everything from literacy to property ownership was the preserve of a tiny elite. 

Even as the Tories thundered about the threat of small boat people, they were passing laws to impose probably the greatest clampdown on trade unions since the first years of the 20th century. If it starts with curtailing the rights of refugees it generally continues with the restrictions on peaceful protest and addressing injustice in the courts. Of making it harder to hold our rulemakers to account, or even remove them.

There was a time when I warned against alarmist rhetoric. It would be entirely odd if everyone you disagreed with was a Nazi - but the people who set fire to asylum centres or have covert talks in East Germany about the forced deportation of migrants perhaps do have a whiff of Nuremberg about them. And when a man running to be the leader of the free world hints that actually getting elected might not be an obstacle to power for much longer you might forgive a little consternation.

The authoritarian turn of so many political parties should worry anyone who recognises that it's not so long ago that we were almost all of us marginalised. It is often forgotten that while universal suffrage finally arrived in the UK in 1928, just a decade earlier a sizeable chunk of the male population secured the vote for the first time.

In this context of course so many tech-billionaires and oligarchs cheer for the far-right. Their drive towards exerting greater control of all of us is very much in the interests of those whose power and wealth would only swell. Division is a handy distraction from the reality that the gulf between you and say a Dulwich College-educated stockbroker millionaire is rather wider than you and an Albanian Deliveroo driver. 

A vested interest in putting the clocks back is also to be found among despots who never really left that era. Inevitably modern-day dictators are rather keen on the world's democracies going the same way. This removes the belief that progress can be made; that ordinary people might become more powerful or that demagogues can fall. Those who rail against the tyrannies of the European Convention on Human Rights should be reminded that the post-war pact, as much as anything, sent a signal to those in the world's most repressive regimes that a more hopeful way of life endured. 

If we want to get our country back "the way it was" we must then remember all that might come with it. For that we need not simper over sepia pictures of sweet shops and street parties but turn to states which exist now, in 2024. Sure Russia isn't big on pronouns or open borders but it isn't much a fan of free elections or an independent press either. In the same way change can have unforeseen or unwanted consequences (greenhouse gases and online polarisation offer proof of the perils) retreat can be similarly fraught with danger.

I'm sure a Daily Telegraph columnist would pour scorn on the suggestion that a campaign against vegan scones can only end in dictatorship. But isn't it instructive that far-right YouTubers allegedly being funded by Moscow to influence the upcoming US election were being encouraged to dial up tensions over such hot button issues as - I shit you not - diversity in videogames.

Of course if Trump's platform for government only extended to a debate on the narrative of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us it wouldn't be half so frightening. What we see instead is efforts to lever these sort of petty grievances to ban abortion without exemption, give free licence to fossil fuel giants and run roughshod over democratic norms. That simple sense of something being slightly amiss - of irritations being existential - is distracting us from properly frightening reversal of progress.

And those who yearn to roll back the years should remember that old phrase. "The past is another country, they do things differently there..." In that case all of us would be immigrants on arrival. And in my views at least, we'd be finding ourselves in a place far poorer and less free than that distant land which many today dream of coming to. 

It would, in short, be a dangerous journey to an unsympathetic destination. So perhaps it is us and not those fleeing war or persecution - often in the very autocracies that the populists speak warmly of - who would be better to remain where we are.