The ‘Blitz Spirit’: Britain’s Dangerous National Delusion

“We need some ‘Blitz Spirit’ to get our NHS back on its feet and make it fit for the future.” So said Wes Streeting at an event, ostensibly held to canvass NHS staff members on ways to fix our ailing health service, in February. “We’ve probably got the toughest challenge of any government since the Second World War,” he continued, referring to 150,000 NHS vacancies and a historically low number of new nursing applicants. “The health of the nation and the defence of the nation go hand in hand.”

Less than five months later, resident doctors are set to strike after protracted negotiations with the health secretary failed to restore their real-terms pay to pre-2008 levels. Streeting says that £22.50 per hour is too much, and that doctors should accept less for the greater good of our healthcare system. The doctors, instead, took that collectivist spirit to the ballot box, and will now commence five days of industrial action on Friday.

It’s almost as if sentimentalist slogans, as emotive and manipulative as they may be, don’t pay the bills. And the supposedly interlocked hands of our nation’s health and its defence appear somewhat more disparate when outstretched, side by side, in hope of government cash.

Tellingly, the ‘Blitz Spirit’ was summoned by parts of the media again during last month’s NATO summit — this time to champion Keir Starmer’s commitment to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by the year 2035. Ghoulish excitement at the prospect of ‘nuke-laden jets’, ‘attack submarines’, and a potential invasion of Britain accompanied conservative estimates of a £30 billion per year increase to the defence budget. Meanwhile, thousands of medical procedures will be cancelled over the coming week — and potentially many more in the months to come — because the government cannot find the £1.7 billion required to adequately remunerate its doctors.

In this sense, the ‘Blitz Spirit’ adopts an almost magical quality. So dazzling is the romanticism of bombed-out British cities that it can simultaneously necessitate austerity and extravagance; doctors are morally obligated to accept unsatisfactory pay, and the government is duty-bound to commit historic levels of spending to nuclear bombs and warplanes.

Of course, whether the ‘Blitz Spirit’ even existed as we’re frequently told to believe is widely contested. During the bombings in the early 1940s, crimes such as looting were rife, a black market for illegally procured goods flourished, businesses defrauded the government, and ‘urban poor’ refugees often faced resentment, rather than welcome, in Britain’s middle class rural communities. Though a myth devoid of any anchor to reality is perhaps the most fitting origin for what the ‘Blitz Spirit’ has essentially become: a platitude to justify whatever arbitrary behaviour its conjurers desire.

Whether politicians expediently downplaying the potential damage of haphazard Brexit negotiations or entire neighbourhoods throwing VE Day street parties during Covid-19 lockdowns, recent examples of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ being widely invoked are hardly redolent of the stoicism, self-sacrifice, and civic-mindedness we’re told it represents. The latter, in fact, is less analogous to people sheltering in a tube station with the rest of their terrified community than it is to them leaving the blackout curtains open, German bombers be damned, because neither war nor government regulations will impede their right to do as they please.

Ultimately, the ‘Blitz Spirit’ is the multipurpose narrative tool. At its best, it can be used to forge a sense of community and collective resilience during times of communal hardship. At its most bland, it helps people to form ambiguous notions of British identity. More perniciously, we see it summoned to reinforce anti-immigrant rhetoric, legitimise acts of war, and justify unprecedented levels of peacetime defence spending at the expense of the beleaguered, chronically underfunded public services upon which we all rely.

Vital civil infrastructure and public services, by the admission of frontbenchers like Streeting, are crumbling, welfare policies routinely fail to protect the most vulnerable members of society, and millions of people are struggling to survive on a day-to-day basis. But instead of expecting the government to spend the £3.3 billion per year required to remove the two-child and household benefit caps — and lift 620,000 children out of absolute poverty — we’re encouraged to eulogise over an era of ubiquitous food rationing.

Collectively, as per the bastardised ‘spirit of the Blitz’, we must do better. The decades ahead promise their own slew of challenges, ranging from food, energy, and water scarcity, mass displacement, and potential new pandemics, to AI-induced mass unemployment, demographic aging, and whatever other unforeseen adversity lies in wait. The right combination could create a global crisis bigger than even the Second World War. And less drastic outcomes will still require a much more collaborative, compassionate response than we’ve come to expect from our politicians and, indeed, much of our society at large.

Slogans will be of little help. Platitudes devoid of truth or meaning, even less. We must finally recognise the ‘Blitz Spirit’ as the disingenuous, diversionary instrument that it is, and dispense with it. If it was ever of use to us, that time has long passed.