The Self-Serving Myth of a Golden Past

April 3, 2026

In one of the tales of Ghanda, the eccentric, globe-trotting adventurer and polymath created by Premendra Mitra, he recalls a visit to the East End of London in the 1930s. What unsettled him was not some distant colonial hardship, but the blunt, grinding poverty at the heart of the British Empire. He notices overcrowded streets. Rooms packed beyond reason. Families pressed together with no space to breathe. Hunger sits plainly on people’s faces.

It is not theatrical. It is worse than that. It is ordinary.

That memory feels close to home now. Across the UK and Europe, politicians still reach for a softened version of the past. A calmer time, they say. Before immigration. Before disruption. Before things became difficult.

But what are they actually looking at?

Ghanda’s account cuts through the fog. The past was not neat or stable. It was uneven, often brutal, and largely indifferent to those at the bottom. Even in the centre of a vast empire, many lived without comfort or dignity. That reality does not fit the story, so it gets left out.

There is another truth that rarely makes it into speeches. Migration has not simply drained societies. It has fed them. People arriving from poorer parts of the world often build better lives. That is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working. And as they settle, they contribute. Businesses appear. Labour fills gaps. Cities reshape themselves, slowly but constantly.
The equation does not break. It changes.

Nostalgia, then, is doing more work than it admits. It selects. It edits. It keeps what flatters and discards what complicates. It offers comfort, but not clarity. And beneath that comfort sits something more dangerous. A preference for things to stay as they are.

Stillness can feel like safety. It rarely is.

Water that does not move begins to turn. You can see it cloud. You can smell it. Leave it long enough and it stops sustaining life altogether. Societies are no different. When movement is resisted, when change is treated as threat rather than condition, energy drains away. Growth slows. Confidence thins. Decline does not arrive with noise. It settles in quietly.

This is the harder point. There is no intact, harmonious past waiting to be recovered. It never existed in the way it is now imagined. What has always existed is movement. Pressure. Adjustment. Sometimes uncomfortable, often messy, but necessary.

Maturity, at a national level, means accepting that without flinching. Not polishing history into something it was not, but facing it as it was. Ghanda saw something in 1930s London that still matters. Not just poverty, but the ease with which people look past it when it does not suit the story.

If water does not move, it dies. The same is true of nations, whatever their politicians choose to promise.

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