In September 2022, seven months into an all-out war in Ukraine that was only supposed to last a few weeks, Russian schoolchildren started compulsory patriotism lessons. Since then, Monday mornings have been set aside for “conversations about what is important” – a class on the glories of national history; western perfidy; the virtue of self-sacrifice for the Motherland; Vladimir Putin’s wise leadership.

Authoritarian regimes never trust people to love their country spontaneously. Organic national identity, the kind that grows without state cultivation, contains stories of dissent and cultural idiosyncrasy. Variety is subversive.

Patriotism in the nationalist mode is uniform and humourless. The citizen must feel humbled by the country’s history because humility is a pathway to submission. A generation taught to venerate heroes of the past is more easily made dutiful to a leader who will restore lost greatness.

Sure enough, Reform UK also wants schools to teach a more “patriotic curriculum”. Suella Braverman, the Conservative defector named last week as Nigel Farage’s education spokesperson, has promised a history syllabus that “fosters a love of our great country”.

This is deemed necessary to correct a liberal bias that drains national self-esteem by exposing young minds to negative portrayals of the British empire. Education has never been prominent in Farage’s campaigns. As leader of a successful anti-Europe, anti-immigration pressure group, he didn’t need to diversify into other areas. But now the Reform leader wants to look like the head of a government-in-waiting. He needs a broader platform.

Micromanaging the classroom is a natural progression from fretting over numbers of foreign-born residents. A party that defines national greatness by reference to a more monocultural past has to set boundaries of interior identity as strictly as it polices external borders.........

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