National pride has always been a vexed issue for the left. Too culturally close to patriotism to admire and too politically close to nationalism to emulate, we have too often ceded it to the right. Orwell summed it up for most of us when he said ‘Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.’ Neither is attractive.
But that particular St George was also clear that, despite England being a ‘family with the wrong members in control’, it was still a family and one that was worth defending. There was a place for national pride in Orwell’s concept of the left and there should be one in ours.
Tony Blair recently made the distinction between national pride, which is ‘a great thing’, and the United Kingdom Independence party’s brand of nationalism, which is ‘almost always ugly.’ He is right. Our pride in our country celebrates the things that bind us together, whereas Ukip’s nationalism revels in what pushes us apart. Where we offer an arm around the shoulder, Ukip give you a slap in the face.
In their hands, nationalism becomes exceptionalism. They will decide who gets to join them in the promised land; it is us and them. Englishness stops being a collection of shared memories and values, and becomes more exclusive, requiring the English to sign up to approved beliefs. Anyone who fails the test – like the audience in the ‘challengers’ debate’ last week – ceases to be English.
Our national pride can be confident, inclusive and open, but for them, nationalism has to be embittered and embattled, an exclusive creed of the chosen few. Threats are everywhere: the HIV-positive people who threaten our National Health Service, the immigrants who threaten our previously un-traffic-jammed roads, the gays who threaten our marriage. With each new threat, the net curtains twitch that little bit more. Englishness becomes something to be defended, not something to be celebrated.
Straw men need to be invented, each one making Ukip’s Englishness more shrivelled and pointless. Councils are banning Christmas, nobody can talk about immigration any more. Hyper-sensitive to any supposed slight, while ‘telling it like it is’ to everybody else, Ukip can only ever offer a one-dimensional, comic book version of national pride, with Nigel Farage as its lead character, a paranoid and plastered Billy Bunter.
We can do so much better than this. We can also do better than the purists on the left who do not want to dirty their hands with anything as sullied as national pride. In government, we should give voice to civic and cultural Englishness. The last 15 years in Scotland suggest that we are happier with civic pride than we are with cultural pride. There, we created the institutions that give voice to civic and political Scotland, leaving pride in cultural Scottishness to the Scottish National party to craft in their own way. Salmond and Sturgeon walked through the hole we left and have not looked back.
Creating mayors and devolving power to English regions will be necessary, but not sufficient. Former Labour supporters are not voting Ukip because they are clamouring for their local councils to have more powers. We will have to speak for England, not as an electoral tool, but because we really feel it. Our pride in England will have to be heartfelt if it is to be confident and welcoming. We cannot have open arms if there is a frown on our face.
Orwell understood that, and so did Bono: ‘One man come in the name of love, one man come and go, one man come he to justify, one man to overthrow.’ Our national pride does not have to be mean-spirited and small, it can be generous and broad. We do not need to rant and rave, to justify and overthrow; we can simply show pride in the name of love.
———————————
Mark Rusling is a Labour and Cooperative councillor in the London borough of Waltham Forest. He tweets @MarkRusling
———————————
One of the most abiding fallacies of British political discourse is that the Right is patriotic while the Left is not. Today’s British Right is very largely defined by how much it hates Britain. It is the Left that believes to the marrow of our bones in what is far and away this country’s most popular and unifying institution. It is we who love the railways. It is we who bemoan the fact that key parts of our national infrastructure, which we as a people used to own, are now owned by foreign states, as such.
It is we who do not regard the Royal Family as scarcely British at all, whereas that must be the view of those who subscribe to the UKIP and, for want of a better word, the Blukip view of who is or is not an immigrant. It is we who agree with the DUP about the Bedroom Tax, about uprating the minimum wage in line with inflation, about the need to protect defence spending, and indeed about controlling immigration properly in concrete terms.
It is we who have spent a Parliament opposing stringent cuts to defence. It is we who, in the forms of Sylvia Hermon and the SDLP, actively include MPs from both “sides” in Northern Ireland, whereas the Conservatives are not even allied to any from either, nor will they be on 8th May. It is we who do not secretly, if secretly, yearn for Scotland to leave the United Kingdom. It is we who do not regard Wales and the North of England as hilariously despicable and despicably hilarious.
It is we who are prepared to stand up to America, to Israel, to Saudi Arabia and her circle, to London’s Russian oligarchs, to Rupert Murdoch, to transnational capital, and to the non-doms, including the ones who own several newspapers. Not to make enemies of them. If that were to happen, then it would be their choice, not ours. But to remind them whose country this is.
Left, right, up and down, are not indicators of the pride I have in our mixed culture with shared values. No longer proud when the racists speak.
I think it’s How Many rather than Who. If one believes in unlimited immigration, then by definition, hundreds of millions have to be accepted. This would quite clearly be absurd, so most would agree there needs to be a limit. Which means it is simply a matter of where one sets the number, not a matter of principle. I believe that those who support our precious public services, and our capacity for housing, education, health and energy, would consider us very near that number already.