‘To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life.’ I very rarely agree with Cecil Rhodes – who once regretted that colonising the rest of the solar system was beyond the limits of late Victorian technology – but I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that he was right on this one. To be born English is to be part of a country that produced JMW Turner and Arsenal Football Club, Wendy Cope and the Beatles, where the weather may bore you but will never, ever kill you. No matter how many sporting disappointments or governments of the centre-right it might produce, I will always love England: land of wet winters and wetter summers, home of the Booker Prize and birthplace of the Greggs sausage roll.
Wasn’t that brave of me? I did that most radical of things: I praised England in a leftwing magazine. But for Labour, debating Englishness is like ordering the spiciest dish in your favourite curry house: it might be unusual but it certainly isn’t courageous. But unlike ordering the hottest meal on the menu, it is dangerous, because the most dangerous place for Labour isn’t in the heart of its comfort zone, safely immured in its old shibboleths. The most dangerous place for Labour is within sighting distance of where it needs to be, where it can convince itself that it has lanced its boils and slain its demons. Because, while Labour has a crisis in England, what it doesn’t have is a crisis of Englishness. Talking of the latter doesn’t lead to tackling to the former. It leads to ignoring it.
Let’s look at Labour’s crisis. If you drove west from the edge of the M25, counting the number of Labour seats on the fingers of your hand, you would reach Stoke before you were at risk of being pulled over for dangerous driving, and not because of the Conservatives’ reckless cuts to policing. You could drive east from London and circle back all the way to Land’s End doing the same in perfect safety. More troubling still is of the number of seats that Labour is even competitive in. Seats that were narrowly lost in 2005 were the scene of crushing landslides in 2010. In large swaths of the country, it is countercultural to vote Labour. That didn’t happen because we didn’t articulate an ‘English identity’. It happened because from 2006 until the election our most pressing concern appeared to be getting rid of our leader, because we oversaw a global recession, and because even in the good times people didn’t feel the benefits of the boom.
Regional exile has always been the danger for progressive parties in the United Kingdom. In 1895, as another Conservative-dominated coalition was putting the forces of the left to flight, Joseph Chamberlain – a Brummie Nick Clegg in a wing collar – described the departing Liberal government as ‘a faction of disloyal Irishmen, intolerant Welshmen, and extreme teetotallers’. It took over a decade for the Liberals to break out of their Celtic fringes; over a hundred years later, they are still waiting to do so again. The reality of the next election may well be the final extinction for that party, but the only party for whom that is worse news for than the Liberal Democrats is the Labour party, because that will hand dozens of seats to the Conservatives.
Labour’s crisis is most acute and most obvious in England, but it isn’t an English crisis. It is a private sector crisis, it is a small town crisis, and it is a rural crisis. It is organisational and it is philosophical. Our political answers rely on the arm of the urban and industrial state, our footsoldiers are located in our heartlands.
These are big and deep-rooted problems. The organisational battle alone is a big one. Even the comfortable solutions will lead to uncomfortable positions: a living wage for farm labourers will mean a more expensive weekly shop for the urban poor. Bromides about Chartists and cricketers won’t do it. Labour has to think hard about England: it should stop talking about ‘Englishness’.
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Stephen Bush is a member of Progress, works as a journalist, and writes at adangerousnotion.wordpress.com
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“a living wage for farm labourers will mean a more expensive weekly shop for the urban poor”
I’m not sure that’s true. For most of the crops we consume (cereals and potatoes) labour is almost irrelevant compared to capital costs. The costs are in the combine-harvester, not in the fellow driving it. Now true for fresh fruits and non-tuber vegetables it will put up the costs, but these things are already beyond the budget of many of the ‘urban poor’ anyway, who rely on cheap protein and starches. Hence my hot-dogs for lunch.
On the bigger issue, the party needs an emotional, as well as a technocratic response Stephen. If you want us to stop talking about Englishness, you’re going to have to come up with an alternative that appeals to the heart-strings. Maybe a flag. I hear red cloth’s cheap…
for all the crops we consume, the price is jacked up twice through EU subsidies and protectionism. get rid of the common agricultural policy and the poor could afford all the fruit and veg they need.
Your main theme is probably correct at a purely identity level. However are you telling me that large sections of the Labour are not uncomfortable, even hostile to the question of promoting a positive and inclusive English identity? There is no comparable progressive promotion of national identity in England in the same way as there is in Scotland and Wales by a majority of labour politicians. Many Labour people see Englishness as the other – what we are opposed to and equate it with traditional, tory and little England attitudes. Labour needs to think hard and in particular how it intends to ‘re-balance’ the constitutional settlement, which is unbalanced against England (i.e. the rest of England outside of Greater London the GLA). Why Labour won’t embrace a Constitutional Convention for England is beyond me.
Of course part of the reason Labour struggles in England is the current voting system – so it is more of a Voting System Crisis than anything else.
so an english conservative identity is “little englandism” but a celtic socialist identity is “progressive”
do you people listen to yourselves?
Read this, this is very good:
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2012/06/english-identity-and-the-left/
Yes we need to win in Southern England. I’ve lived all my life in Southern England. The Labour Parties’ perceived pinko-ism on matters of identity is a turn off for many people who should be naturally Labour.
Finding a way to talk to these people, even at the risk of being a bit small ‘c’ conservative on some issues, is a part (yes only a part) of a Labour revival.