Poor Jameela Jamil. No one gave her the memo. She thinks it’s still 2021 and that a spot of sassy Britain-bashing will be greeted by a chorus of ‘Preach, kween’ on social media. Someone update her, please. Someone let her know that we roll our eyes now at rich celebs wanging on about the sins of history from their pampered enclaves.
That was the most striking thing about Ms Jamil’s drivel about Brits being ‘the most evil [people] in history’ – just how hilariously obsolete it sounded
That was the most striking thing about Ms Jamil’s drivel about Brits being ‘the most evil [people] in history’ – just how hilariously obsolete it sounded. Jamil is a TV presenter turned actress. She was born in Britain but lived it up in LA in recent years. There is not one flavour of woke Kool-Aid she has not heartily drunk. If Teen Vogue and Novara Media had a lovechild, it would be Jameela Jamil.
It was on a podcast called Yestergays (me neither) that she let rip against Blighty. You Yanks are crazy to think Brits are ‘sweet’, she said, because actually ‘British people are truly the most evil people in history’. We owe India 43 trillion quid, apparently. ‘We colonised the world’, she said. Rich Brits are the biggest bastards of all. ‘They are horrible’, said Jamil, to the naked glee of her hyper-camps hosts.
Doesn’t it all just sound so… tired? There’s been a trickle of anger online – hey, people don’t take kindly to their country being slagged off. But the main response has been second-hand embarrassment at a celeb’s tacky rehashing of the performative anti-patriotism that was all the rage among the coddled classes five years ago. What’s she going to do next – declare her pronouns?
There was a time when her gaudy anti-colonialism would have been lapped up. Cast your minds back to the BLM years. Teen Vogue was publishing insane screeds on ‘white supremacy and capitalism’. Publishing houses were churning out books on the wickedness of white people, which were all bought by posh white people. The educated middle classes loved nothing more than an orgy of self-flagellation over the crimes of Empire.
Jamil’s comments would have landed back then. There’d have been a deafening cry of ‘THIS’ from armies of silver-spoon radicals. But in 2026 her am-dram anti-colonialism feels like a dusty relic. It feels lame. Because things have changed. The vibe is shifting. Most importantly the working classes have rudely intruded onto the public stage to say what was once unsayable – that Britain is actually a pretty fine country, or at least it used to be.
The self-indulgent national shame of the cossetted classes is being swept aside by the patriotism of working people. This is the meat of the culture war. On one side of the battlefield stand clout-chasing leftists and celebs who noisily dry-heave at the sight of the ‘Butcher’s Apron’, and on the other working-class communities who’ve never seen a lamppost they didn’t want to decorate with the St George’s Cross.
We are witnessing the revenge of the sensible. After years of top-down haughty groaning over Britain’s history, its blood-stained flag and its ‘horrible’ people, normies are starting to say: ‘Nah’. That’s what all the flag-raising was about last summer: it was the people striking back against the luxury self-loathing of their supposed betters. It was a working-class rejection of the elite culture of shame.
It really is a class divide. You know you’re in a working-class part of Britain when you see Union flags fluttering. And you know you’ve crossed back into hipster or leafy territory when the eyesore Pride flag appears, or, worse, the ghastly Palestine flag. Imagine hating on the ‘colonialist’ British flag even as you wave a flag under which more than a thousand Jews were butchered not even three years ago.
Anti-patriotism became the moral glue of the leftish middle classes. I still chuckle when I recall that the ‘radicals’ who yanked down that statue of Edward Colston were called Milo and Sage. It was ever thus. ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality’, said Orwell. Jamil and the other permanently online history-haters are like a pantomime version of that old well-to-do anti-nationalism.
Celebs seem not to have clocked that we are living through the twilight of luxury beliefs. The masses have gloriously blasphemed against their gospel of genderfluidity and their religion of post-patriotism. People laugh now when they hear someone with more money than sense declare their pronouns or say ‘Ew’ because they saw a St George’s flag. This laughter will change the world.
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