The patriotism problem.
| Author | Stafford, James |
| Position | EDITORIAL |
For the five years that it has been my privilege to co-edit Renewal, and for a long time before that, the Labour Party's allegedly difficult relationship to questions of identity, nationhood and belonging has been a constant backdrop to our debates about the future of social democracy in Britain. Labour's anxieties about 'patriotism' have a Groundhog Day quality to them. No matter how hard successive leaderships - Blair, Brown, Miliband, and yes, Corbyn too - have tried to wrap themselves in the flag, significant sections of the press and public are always ready to condemn the party and its supporters as somehow alien to the nation. Hand-wringing party intellectuals, meanwhile, are all too ready to believe these transparently self-interested denials of Labour's legitimacy as a national governing force.
By turns shifty and condescending, Labour politicians then offer ritual sacrifices of principle, so as to display their allegiance to ideas of British identity that have no room for them and never will. These rarely do much to enhance Labour's political credibility, but they can have real policy consequences: the establishment, under the last Labour government, of the brutal principle of 'no recourse to public funds' for vulnerable asylum seekers; the 2014 vote to support the Immigration Bill that enabled the Windrush Scandal. As Eunice Goes observes in this issue, to win again, and to govern in line with its better traditions, Labour badly needs to articulate a British patriotism that does not rely on performative cruelty towards today's out-group of choice. The party must recall the 'stories of radical dissent that define progressive patriotism', and appeal to different national 'character traits such as gentleness, and respect for constitutionalism and legality'. The difficulty here, however, is that it is precisely this liberal idea of Britishness that has been systematically degraded by the rejuvenated right of the later 2010s. In its absence, the task of telling a progressive story of British nationhood is harder than it has been at any time since the Second World War.
The dystopia of Tory nationalism
To treat British 'patriotism' as a static set of 'values', that 'metropolitan' Labour has carelessly abandoned and must now rediscover, is to totally misread the political and cultural history of twenty-first century Britain. The story of our time is not Labour's abandonment of an English working class that has long been undergoing a wrenching process of decline and recomposition. It is the right's increasingly successful purge of both liberalism and social democracy from British political culture, leaving behind a plastic, misanthropic nationalism: one devoid of any real knowledge of British history or culture, and based on little more than blind deference to privilege, cruelty to outsiders, and contempt for our fellow citizens.
We know that the Tories do not care much for Britain and its people, because they regularly tell us so. Four current members of Johnson's Cabinet notoriously wrote that British workers were 'among the...
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