The Country Is The People

Not the Government…

I saw a post on social media the other day that stopped me mid-scroll. Someone had written, with what I can only assume was the confidence of someone who’s never had to test the theory, “I wouldn’t fight for this government.” (This was in the context of the UK government, incidentally, but I feel it is relevant to most countries).

And I sat with it for a moment. Because, on the surface, in the way that bumper-sticker politics always sounds reasonable on the surface, I understood the frustration behind it. The NHS is creaking at the seams. The cost of living is quietly strangling ordinary people. Politicians caught fiddling expenses while the rest of us are calculating whether we can afford the heating this month. The anger is real. The disillusionment is earned.

But the statement itself… it revealed something worth unpacking. Because it contained a misunderstanding so fundamental, so quietly dangerous, that I think we need to talk about it properly.

The government is not the country.

It never was. It never will be. And the moment we confuse the two, we’ve already lost something important.

What You’re Actually Fighting For

Let’s imagine, just for a moment, that the unthinkable happened. That some external threat arrived at the shores of your home country with genuine malice and genuine force. Not a hypothetical. Not a Hollywood plot. A real, breathing, catastrophic threat to the place we call home.

In that moment, nobody picks up a rifle for David Lammy. Nobody stands in a trench for Rachel Reeves. Nobody marches into danger with Keir Starmer’s face in their heart.

You do it for your mum.

You do it for the person sleeping next to you. For your children, your neighbours, the bloke down the road who always waves when you put the bins out. For the woman at the corner shop who remembers your name. For your mates. For the landscape you grew up in. For the particular smell of summer rain on warm tarmac that you can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it but would recognise anywhere in the world.

That’s what the country actually is. It’s not a flag. It’s not a parliament building. It’s not a manifesto or a policy paper or a party political broadcast. It’s the accumulated, living, breathing, arguing, laughing, grieving collection of people who share this particular corner of the earth with you.

The government is a temporary tenant. The people are the permanent residents.

The Confusion We’ve Inherited

This conflation of “country” and “government” isn’t accidental. It’s been cultivated, on both sides of the political aisle, for a very long time. The right uses it to wrap nationalism around policy. The left uses the inverse… rejecting the country in the act of rejecting its leaders. Both are making the same category error.

When someone says “I wouldn’t fight for this government,” what they usually mean is: “I’m fed up, I feel unrepresented, and I want someone to know it.” Which is a completely legitimate feeling, by the way. I share a good chunk of it.

But there’s a version of that sentiment that slides, almost without noticing, into something more corrosive. Into the idea that because the political class has disappointed us, the whole project is not worth defending. That the people around us, who didn’t make these policies and didn’t vote for these outcomes and are just trying to get through the week… are somehow not worth standing up for.

That’s where I have to part ways.

Ordinary People in Extraordinary Moments

History has a habit of revealing character at inconvenient times.

Think about the men who went to the beaches of Normandy. They weren’t fighting for Churchill’s rhetoric, though Churchill was undeniably brilliant at providing it. They were fighting because their brother was in the next foxhole. Because their sister was back home working in a factory. Because the alternative to fighting was to allow something monstrous to win, and that monstrous thing had a very specific list of what it would do to the people they loved.

The political leadership of the time was full of flawed, complicated, often self-serving human beings. Just like now. Just like always. And yet ordinary people, people with every reason to be cynical, people who had lived through the depression and the poverty and the broken promises of politicians before them… those people showed up anyway.

Not for the government. For each other.

There’s a reason war memorials don’t say “He died for the Prime Minister.” They say “He gave his life for his country.” And country, in that context, has always meant people.

The Luxury of the Comfortable Protest

I want to be careful here, because I’m not trying to shame anyone for political disillusionment. God knows there’s enough to be disillusioned about.

But I do think there’s something worth examining in the timing of the “I wouldn’t fight” sentiment. It tends to emerge from positions of relative safety. When the threat is abstract. When the stakes are theoretical. When you can afford to make the statement as a political gesture rather than a moral reckoning.

I don’t say that with judgment… I say it with recognition. Because I’ve caught myself in the same posture. The comfortable cynicism that mistakes detachment for sophistication.

The truth is, most of us don’t actually know what we’d do if the stakes became real. And I suspect that when the thing you love is genuinely under threat… when it’s not a government policy you’re defending but the actual human beings who share your life… the calculation changes completely.

I’ve spoken to other men and women who’ve served in the armed forces, as I did for 7 years. Proper service, not the theoretical kind. And almost to a person, when you get past the official language and the recruitment-poster framing, they’ll tell you the same thing. You don’t fight for abstractions. You fight for the person next to you. You fight because abandoning them is unthinkable. Everything else… the flags, the politics, the grand narratives… those are the scaffolding. The real structure is the human bond.

A Distinction Worth Making

I think there are actually two separate conversations happening when people say “I wouldn’t fight for this government,” and it’s worth separating them.

The first is a legitimate political statement. “I don’t consent to being sent to war by leaders I don’t trust, for reasons I don’t believe in, in conflicts that serve interests other than mine.” That’s not cowardice. That’s discernment. Blind obedience to government military adventurism has caused enormous suffering throughout history. Questioning it is healthy. Demanding accountability before you send human beings into harm’s way is moral, not weak.

The second is something different… a kind of nihilistic withdrawal from the idea of collective responsibility altogether. “Because I’m disillusioned with politics, I owe nothing to the community around me.” And that one I find harder to defend.

Because the people around you didn’t make you disillusioned. Your neighbour’s kids didn’t set the fiscal policy. The elderly woman two streets over didn’t gerrymander anything. The community you grew up in, the culture you were shaped by, the relationships that give your life meaning… none of that is the government’s doing. And none of it deserves to be abandoned because Westminster has disappointed you.

What Love Actually Demands

There’s a quote I keep coming back to, and I can’t remember who said it first, which is typical of the best ideas… “Patriotism is not loving your government. It’s loving your people enough to hold your government accountable.”

That reframing matters. Because it transforms the whole question.

If you love the country, meaning the actual people, the communities, the culture, the way of life… then your response to a failing government isn’t detachment. It’s engagement. Fury, even. The kind of protective anger you feel when something you love is being mistreated.

The person who says “I wouldn’t fight for this government” and then does nothing… that’s a complete sentence that leads nowhere. But the person who says “I wouldn’t fight for this government, so I’m going to hold it accountable, challenge it, push back, demand better, because the people it’s supposed to serve deserve better”… that’s someone who actually understands what’s worth protecting.

Love isn’t passive. Love, when the thing you love is threatened or mismanaged or diminished, gets loud.

The Deeper Question

What I think the social media post was really expressing, underneath the political frustration, was a crisis of belonging. A sense that the social contract has been broken. That the implicit deal, “you contribute, you sacrifice, you follow the rules, and in return the system looks after you and yours”… has been voided by the people at the top.

And they’re not wrong that the contract has frayed. It genuinely has.

But the answer to a broken contract isn’t to burn down the relationships that depend on it. It’s to renegotiate. To demand better terms. To refuse to let the people who broke it off the hook.

The country is the people. All of them. The ones you agree with and the ones who drive you absolutely round the bend. The ones who voted differently to you and the ones who didn’t vote at all. The ones who are struggling quietly and the ones who are managing and the ones who are thriving. All of them, together, constitute the thing worth protecting.

And that thing has never been the government. The government is just the mechanism we use, imperfectly and often badly, to organise ourselves. It’s the software, and it’s buggy as hell right now. But the hardware underneath… the actual human community… that remains worth defending.

Not because it’s perfect. Not because it’s grateful. Not because the politicians deserve your loyalty.

Because your people are in it. And your people are always worth fighting for.

The next time you see that sentiment online… “I wouldn’t fight for this government”… maybe respond with something they might not expect. “Neither would I. I’d fight for you.”

See what happens.

Until Next Time