How and why the idea of a national economy is radical.

Being explicit and creative about the nation is a way of making Labour's whole programme credible, different and popular, as well as being true to its history. While it carries dangers, it is a necessary way of developing a politics, and an underpinning narrative, directed at making the country more democratic, fairer and more equal. However, the time is past when one could just assume the nation was 'Britain' or more properly the United Kingdom. The brief age of the British nation is over, with the legitimacy of the central state strongly challenged in the peripheries, and not only there.

The Anglo-British left has a problem understanding its own nationalism. Nationalism is in its view a bad thing, the antithesis of a proper British internationalism. The British left are descendants of British liberalism and British imperialism, both of which saw, correctly, that nationalism was the enemy, and they cannot see that there can be any such thing as British nationalism except on the right-wing xenophobic fringe. To complicate matters, today's British left (wrongly) sees imperialism as the purest manifestation of this British nationalism, and is blind to non-imperial British nationalism, not least that of the left. (1)

As in so many other parts of the world, British socialism and social democracy, at least after 1945, were also nationalist. From Bevan to Benn, and from Attlee to Wilson, the idea of a national economy and a policy of national reconstruction were central. In the 1970s and early 1980s the Labour left was nationalist and Brexiter, seeking, in effect, a return to the Labour policies, and British practices, of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Today's Lexiters thus stand in a grand tradition.

Labour was the party of the national critique of the Tories as the party of property and self-interest rather than the nation, and of the ruling class for having interests different from those of the nation. The nationalism, indeed patriotism, of the left was a critical one: it called out chauvinism; attacked elite special interests; and challenged those who misused the idea of the nation. This was not an anti-foreigner, but rather an anti-British-elite nationalism.

Indeed, the core historical-political-economic theses of the broader left have long been a nationalist critique of British imperialism, the City, and the globally-oriented elite associated with both. The power of this elite, it is argued, made national economic reconstruction impossible, or at least difficult, with negative consequences for the British economy and working class. Scottish and Welsh nationalism owes much to this critique, not least in attacking the nature of power in Whitehall/Westminster.

Dismantling the nation

The irony is that, while the left critique suggested that a programme of national economic reconstruction was impossible or difficult, such a reconstruction did in fact happen between 1945 and the 1970s. The UK had a programme of national reconstruction which transformed the nation. It was plausible in the post-war years to speak of 'One Nation', as both Labour and the Tories did.

Today this would be, at many levels, an absurdity. For the last forty years we have had a different kind of politics. Instead of a politics of productivity, equality and security, we have had a politics of property, of inequality, and of flexible workforces. This followed not from technology or globalisation, but from internal policy. There was a radical denationalisation of the economy--opening it up to the world, and to internal competition, reducing the power of labour and augmenting that of...