What happens when the only way of talking about something is to say it needs talking about? Brexit opened new fractures in the UK’s national culture but it also deepened existing ones. Since 2016 there’s been an unending chorus of voices calling for renewed attention to national identity. This conversation, supposedly so urgent, about Britishness and the several other national identities contained in the United Kingdom, has been looming since long before Brexit. The nations that compose the country have their own relationships to nationhood and patriotism, and their own conversations about it. These topics have become ‘live’ in Britain as a whole since the early-to-mid seventies, and the gradual fading of the War as a binding force of common identity. The discussion shows no signs of going away, and yet it hasn’t really started. Calls for its commencement come from across the political spectrum. Right-wing opinion-mongers screech, anointing themselves Soul of a Nation finally making itself heard. The glum centre-left metropolitan commentators concede that someone should probably find out what the provincials are so het up about. Apart from a scattering of thoughtful analyses from academia and journalism, though, no-one seems to say much other than to highlight how much needs saying.
‘A Communitarian Dimension To Life’
It’s a sign of how badly Labour got drubbed in the local elections of May 2021 that one of the most thoughtful diagnoses of their plight appeared before, not after, the vote. Julian Coman, associate editor at the Guardian, published a long analysis of Labour’s trouble focused on Hartlepool, where a by-election took place alongside the other polls. Considering Labour’s chances, Coman warns that Labour’s traditional supporters in Hartlepool might be about to desert the party, just as they had done in nearby north-eastern constituencies such as Bishop Auckland and North West Durham in 2019. He was right: voters did desert Labour, returning a Tory MP for the first time since the constituency’s creation in the seventies. Coman rejects the idea that Brexit is the primary cause of this desertion. Some Labour-voting Brexiters might have been so keen for Brexit to be ‘done’ that they voted Conservative in 2019, but by 2021 Brexit was – in England, at least – widely perceived to be over; Labour under Starmer had chosen not to re-open the issue. Coman argues instead that Labour has lost the ability to speak the language of British patriotism, to harness national sentiment to its distributive and progressive cause. Labour will keep on losing, the argument goes, until it figures out being patriotic.
This kind of analysis risks flattening Labour’s heartlands into a homogenous mass, its inhabitants patronisingly characterised as the left-behind, yearning for vanished communities based on industrial work. Here looms into view the ‘Red Wall’ which suddenly became a commonplace of political analysis after 2019 (and which originates, as a term, in Tory strategy). Yet Coman avoids falling into the ‘Red Wall’ trap, pointing to the recent UK In A Changing Europe report which analyses the class of voters it calls ‘Comfortable Leavers’, a constituency of ‘nostalgic optimists’, not always affluent but not struggling or ‘left behind’, who voted for Brexit. Some of the men who worked at closed mines and erased steelworks have become ‘left behind’; others and their families have become Comfortable Leavers. Yet this doesn’t disguise the fact that they once, typically, voted Labour, and now have stopped.
Coman’s most vivid claim is that for Labour’s lost working-class voters ‘ideas of Britishness, England, place, pride, honour and industry’ do not represent a drift to the right. Such notions, he argues, are in fact ‘a way of talking differently about the values of the left; of excavating a buried but still felt communitarian dimension to life’. Despite its apparent simplicity, this framing is rather rare in contemporary political commentary, where British and especially English patriotism is interpreted either as a symptom of right-wing political allegiance, or under the category of what gets called ‘culture’ – as if nationhood were a matter of personal opinion, or aesthetic taste, unrelated to mainstream leftist concerns about communal work and life. Centre-left analysts don’t (contrary to hysterical accusations from right-wing warriors) paint all patriotism as far-right nationalism in sheep’s clothing. But they do tend to assume that patriotism is inherently antithetical to leftist values, that its presence in a former Labour voter indicates a gentle drift rightwards not only in voting choice, but in mindset. The idea that national feeling for Britain or England could prove not just reconcilable with leftist and progressive politics, but actually expressive of them, could be of infinite use to Labour and the left. Yet despite its simplicity this is a strangely difficult argument to make. Why is this excavation of a buried, organic leftist communitarian patriotism so difficult?
The Privatisation of Patriotism
In Coman’s view the nation is a large and loose community which naturally accompanies smaller spheres of region, home-town and neighbourhood. In an ideal version of this communitarian nation, the family is merely the smallest and most intimate of the concentric circles of belonging: the near community of neighbourhood is an extension of one’s family, something the family belongs to rather than the stock of resources from which it feeds; the far community of country is an extension of the town or region. Since the 1980s both family and nation, at either end of a spectrum of affiliation, have been detached from other circles of belonging. If Thatcherism’s economic revolution was the hastening of Britain’s deindustrialisation and the creation of an economy based on a deregulated City of London, its complementary cultural legacy was the rupture of the link between community and nation, and between family and community. In Thatcher’s vision the family is the supreme social unit and the only sacred one. Concern for communities, and state intervention in the distribution of wealth across them, reflects the outmoded legacy of war planning. The centralised state exists to guarantee the rights of rationally self-interested entrepreneurs to make money for their families; the field in which they make money is not a community with an identity and interests of its own, but a jungle, a blank and mutable market. Patriotism is the defence of fending for one’s family, and of the capitalist state that clears the ground for this fending.
This process might be described as the privatisation of patriotism. Thatcherism’s severance of an intuitive association between the communal and the national was never repaired. In the post-pandemic era, however, the idea of a nation as a society whose members are connected in the most intimate of ways, breathing the same air and touching the same door-handles, has become suddenly, weirdly commonplace. The integration of the national with the social in the stark terms of contagion might, oddly, enable more positive articulations of a nation whose inhabitants form a society, their lives implicated in one another. On the other hand, the Tory mishandling of the pandemic, and the lack of co-ordination between Westminster and the devolved administrations, has hastened the fracturing of national identity.
Marxism and the Nation
Labour is hampered, however, by another problem, which is the uneasiness of the socialist or post-socialist left with the idea of the nation. A certain section of the Labour left rolls its eyes at Coman’s framing of patriotism as congruent with communal, egalitarian politics. In Marxist analysis national feeling can only ever be false consciousness. Modern nations are inventions of the capitalist bourgeoisies which emerged in the nineteenth centuries, designed to disguise the naked exploitation of industrial labour by which those bourgeoisies enriched themselves; how could any worker, or anyone who stands to benefit from egalitarianism, sign up emotionally without having been deceived? Pre-political ideas of community, meanwhile, are too woolly for this rigorous brand of socialism, for which the only valid form of social togetherness is socialism itself, the takeover of the means of production by the working class. How persuasive this socialist interpretation of nationalism can prove today is not especially relevant, because it remains influential. Though Marxism now informs precious few of Labour’s policies, Marxist analysis casts a long shadow over the thinking of many of the party’s members. (It’s slightly inaccurate to allege that Marxists cleave to their beliefs with the blind faith of religious fundamentalists, because Marxists don’t so much think that a certain state of affairs is secretly self-evident as that it will self-evidently one day become self-evident.) Among Labour socialists the primacy of Marxist thinking means that nationhood, especially British nationhood, can necessarily never be perceived as leftist; it can only be appeased, either by harnessing other fealties and grievances, or by invoking ideas of the nation in order to mop up an uncommitted fringe at elections. Rebecca Long-Bailey demonstrated this arm’s-length, tactical engagement with nationhood when, running for Labour leadership in 2020, she uneasily invoked the need for ‘progressive patriotism’.
What Marxist analysis identifies, and what Coman elides, is an ultimate tension between communitarianism and national sentiment. For all their unhelpful obsession with origins, constructivist critiques of nationalism are right to stress that nations do not come into being organically; they rely for their existence on the states which imagined and propagated them. Attachment to a nation can take many forms, ranging from ironic affection to fervent love, but in each of them the fealty expressed has a vertical axis, an element of service and deference as well as horizontal comradeship. Coman discerns among disaffected former Labour voters in England a hankering for ‘forms of belonging that absorb the individual into something greater than themselves’. Given its validation and even partial creation by the state, a national community is ‘greater’ than the individual not just in size, like a football club’s fanbase or a trade union, but in power. The individual attached to their local community self-affiliates to a group untouched by, or defiant of, the vertical axis of state power. The individual attached to their national community self-affiliates to a group inextricably entwined with, if not wholly defined by, state power – with all its monopoly on the right to coerce revealed so vividly in the pandemic. Patriotism, therefore, will probably always exist in tension with communitarianism of a radically egalitarian kind. This tension can’t be fully removed, but it can be subdued. Conceptual distance has to be placed between nation and state, in order to displace from the object of affection the face of coercive, vertical authority. And it helps too to fight for a state whose policies are at least cautiously egalitarian.
Liberal Universalists
A third difficulty is the widespread assumption among progressives, centrists and technocrats that patriotism of any kind is inimical to the universalist liberal values which, to their mind, are the final and triumphant expression of the communal instinct – an extension of comradeship, via technology and globalisation, to all the peoples of the world, and a trimming away of its parochial illogic that leaves an abstract egalitarianism, sleek with muscular rationality. Why feel attachment and solidarity to the co-inhabitants of your patch, let alone your country, when you could feel outraged sympathy for those whose human rights are being abused around the globe? It’s not so much that liberals regard patriotism as inherently toxic; it’s that they see national attachment as necessarily opposed to a rational and universalist sympathy for the citizens of the world. Patriotism can only warp natural sentiments of solidarity for human beings and their rights, rather than serve as the mooring of those sentiments, the delineation of the ground in which they might be expressed. This liberal view was firmed up as orthodoxy by Blairism, and New Labour’s embrace of the Thatcherite dissociation of nation from community. New Labour never shied from talking about Britain: in its first term Blair’s government celebrated a confident nation remade in a newly glossy, modern image. Yet even this optimistic rebrand of the post-imperial United Kingdom as Cool Britannia revealed an unease about nations and the particular attachments they might inspire. Modern Britain was portrayed as country gloriously resistant to embarrassing parochial sentiments. Britishness, in the Blairite mythology, stood for openness and exchange, for modernity; to be attached to Britain was to be attached to an absence of disabling, irrational and backwardly particular attachments.
A Tory Monopoly
Exploiting its separation from the idea of the communal, the Conservatives have captured British patriotism, representing it as an expression not of Coman’s leftist values but of personal right-wing feelings: love of freedom; worship of the past; aggrieved, defensive pride. The liberal intuition that patriotism and universalism stand in mutual tension suits the Conservatives perfectly. In Tory hands such tension is framed as a culture war, in which heroic nationalists who love Britain and disdain the world are assailed by deracinated snowflakes, at once hysterical and excessively unfeeling, who care too much about their causes and not enough about their country. The oppositional identities created by the Brexit referendum hasten the sorting of all political sentiments into two camps. Patriotism, in this view, is not pre-political, let alone apolitical; it’s a declaration of allegiance to the right-wing side of a binary conflict. As this culture war polarises all fealties and attachments, it also represents them as obvious analogies, or antitheses, of one another: love of country is analogous to wanting Britain to leave the EU, which is the polar opposite of concern for minorities, which is the same thing as wearing a mask. The Tory monopoly on British patriotism has allowed the conflation of patriotism and the right, as well as a deeper conceptual convergence of nation with state. It’s also confined patriotism to the realm of cultural attitudes, and the framing of debates about cultural attitudes as a war in which national attachment or its emphatic absence are secondary – simple derivations from primary stances on questions of openness or closure, co-operation or competition, tolerance or chauvinism.
The UK’s arcane electoral system means that Labour must secure a coalition of liberals and leftists to win a majority. How it recovers in Scotland is anyone’s guess, but in England it stands a chance, as its poll ratings at the end of 2021 indicated. Labour must loosen the Tory stranglehold on British patriotism in England, and to do this it might start by entertaining Coman’s proposal that patriotism is communitarianism in old colours, a nostalgic and – to liberals – unfamiliar expression of communal solidarity. It’ll face some of the obstacles described here: post-Thatcherite dissociation of nation from community; leftist unease with nation states; liberal embarrassment about the particularity of nations. Such obstacles have left patriotism in the hands of the Tories.
Reclaiming Patriotism, Reclaiming England?
Yet this is exactly what Labour must resist: the idea that patriotism is inherently conservative, and therefore something that can be appeased but not embraced. Labour’s position at the start of 2022 is strong, but Starmerism is still yet to capture the public. The party still has conceptual puzzles to solve, and one of these is patriotism. In February 2021 a presentation by the party’s head of strategy was leaked to The Guardian: based on some focus groups, it recommended that Labour figures make increased ‘use of the flag, veterans, dressing smartly at the war memorial etc’. Commentators from Labour’s international socialist and liberal left factions were quick to decry what they saw as a dangerous pivot towards nationalism. This misses the point, as there’s nothing particularly nationalistic, in the pejorative sense, about any of the signifiers in the list. The issue is the implication that patriotism is nothing more than nostalgic personal conservatism, an obsession with a homogenous set of symbols (Britain’s thousands of particular war memorials become a strange single archetype, unless it’s a hazy and slightly flippant reference to the Cenotaph). In this view the personal small-c conservatism of older voters, left-behind and Comfortable Leaver alike, can only be appeased, with all the unease implied by the strategy’s phrasing, which rushes quickly – ‘etc’ – over what these bewildering, embarrassing attachments might include.
In 2022 Starmer’s Labour must continue to engage with British nationhood, but resist both the Thatcherite interpretation of nationhood as dissociated from other communal attachments, and the pernicious contemporary framing of patriotism in terms of the culture war. He might well prove unable to articulate what has been called ‘radical patriotism’; perhaps the reconciliation this requires, between total egalitarianism and the nation, is ultimately impossible. But he must try at least to wrest British patriotism from the Tories, and the Tory way of understanding it. To begin with, Starmer must try to take advantage of how the pandemic has suddenly reintegrated the idea of the nation with the idea of a connected society, society as a body, and try to make that integration permanent and positive.
There’s widespread consensus that, if British patriotism is inherently reactionary, the English are to blame. To a large section of commentators in the UK and Ireland Brexit can safely be attributed to the rise of ‘English nationalism’. By this logic Britishness is the tempering force that keeps the English from descent into right-wing madness, and the only viable option as an object of national attachment for leftists and progressives. Labour, based on this received wisdom, must only ever talk about Britain when it talks about nationhood. But what if the received wisdom is false? What if the flag-waving, Thatcher-worshipping Brexiteers who have risen to the top of the Conservative party are not really the ‘English nationalists’ they are routinely supposed to be, but exponents of a new kind of Anglo-Britishness, a ‘muscular unionism’ impatient with the UK’s other national identities and their devolved administrations, concentrated wholly in England but dealing exclusively in the language and symbols of Britishness? What if attachment to England, and its communal life, is not the origin of the new nationalism in our politics, but is itself being smothered by a conservative and de-socialised kitsch-Britishness? What if Labour could talk freely about England?