Laudator Temporis Acti

Roger Scruton (1944-2020), England and the Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2006), p. 33 (note omitted):

Nobody brought up in post-war England can fail to be aware of the educated derision that has been directed at our national loyalty by those whose freedom to criticise would have been extinguished years ago, had the English not been prepared to die for their country. To many of the post-war writers, the English ideals of freedom and service, for which the war in Europe had ostensibly been fought, were mere ideological constructs—'ruling illusions' which, by disguising exploitation as paternal guidance, made it possible to ship home the spoils of empire with an easy conscience. All those features of the English character that had been praised in war-time books and films—gentleness, firmness, honesty, tolerance, 'grit', the stiff upper lip and the spirit of fair play—were either denied or derided. England was not the free, harmonious, law-abiding community celebrated in boy's magazines, but a place of class-divisions, jingoism and racial intolerance. Look beneath every institution and every ideal, the critics said, and you will find the same sordid reality: a self-perpetuating upper class, and a people hoodwinked by imperial illusions into accepting their dominion.