If you’re reading this, it’s too late. In 2011 a friend and I smartly fled to the phone-reception-bereft Scottish Highlands to avoid the royal wedding, escaping just as Victoria coach station began to resemble a republican Bosch painting. But the celebrations for the Queen’s 90th birthday have crept up; if you’re lucky, you’ll suffer nothing more than a bombardment of Union Jacks this weekend – but many of us will experience something much worse: the performative cheeriness of the street party.

Friends of mine who live in areas where street parties are in the works have, without exception, reported that the people responsible are the perennially furious residents who spend most of their lives in a rage about parking. Shifting their attention from the contentious temporary ownership of asphalt, they have decided the neighbourhood needs to commemorate the birthday of a 90-year-old woman none of the residents have met.

The party will follow the usual template: tea, cupcakes, flags upon flags upon flags, wartime slogans and songs, and the performance of a very specific type of Englishness – the Englishness of Fry and Laurie rather than This Is England. One harks back to the empire while the other attempts social realism.

This kind of middle-class nationalism, rooted in a confected history of postwar austerity, has been resurgent in the years since the last royal wedding. The ubiquity of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster is the most obvious symbol. As the writer Owen Hatherley puts it, the cultish signifier points to the “enduring pretension of an extremely rich (if shoddy and dilapidated) country, the sadomasochistic Toryism imposed by the coalition government of 2010–15, and its presentation of austerity in a manner so brutal and moralistic that it almost seemed to luxuriate in its own parsimony”.

Nationalism now has two faces: that of the far right, signified by a certain sort of caricature of a football supporter and England flags, and now the middle-class right, posh enough to wear chinos while raising a glass to “her maj” in front of a Union Jack. The two aren’t entirely separate: the former is openly racist, the latter a frequent apologist for the British empire.

The twee side of nationalism harks back to a bygone era of a “stiff upper lip”, and is intrinsically bound up with the legacy of boarding schools. Its practitioners have a tendency to suggest people have been too harsh when criticising our colonial history. Several years ago they would have been laughed out of the building, but now this brand of chummy nationalism is widespread. David Cameron is only able to tell Jeremy Corbyn to “put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem” without realising how ludicrous he sounds because of the kitsch nationalism that has taken hold.

The Day Today, Brotherhood of Flags sketch

In an episode of The Day Today from 1994 Chris Morris announces a state of national crisis after John Major punched the Queen. A propaganda reel is aired, with scenes of saccharine and hyperbolic nationalism including a woman standing on the cliffs of Dover with a bulldog, and men in suits and briefcases playing with skipping ropes on the Bank of England’s steps; a calming voice declares: “We know that conflict will always vanish in the brotherhood of flags. This is Britain and everything’s alright.”Back then it seemed like satire; now it feels like an instruction manual. The coming weekend will feature an assault course of men in red trousers telling you how “jolly good” it is that “our Liz” has reached the age people in her income bracket often do, as they wave paper Union Jacks.

When people talk about how Britain 'used to be', they mean that it was better when it was more of a monoculture

But this isn’t harmless. All the warm Pimms and cupcakes with corgi icing feed into a narrative that says the empire was a force for good, and its destruction is to be mourned. When people refer to the “blitz spirit” and say we should heed lessons from how Britain used to be, they usually mean two things: when it comes to austerity, suck it up; and Britain was better when it more resembled a monoculture.

It’s possible to be a good neighbour without indulging in these performative pastiches of community. Speaking to people on your street should be an everyday occurrence, not prompted only by an unreciprocated love for the unelected Queen. Enforced pageantry with nationalistic undertones and a forelock-tugging subservience towards someone who has suceeded in surviving nine decades mainly because she is fantastically wealthy is enough to make many people lock their doors, close the curtains and pretend they’ve fled for the weekend.