Jim McMahon’s success in the Oldham byelection this time last week was unambiguously good news for Labour. The United Kingdom Independence party’s own expectations of a strong result were confounded (as were the fears of many of those who campaigned for Labour on the ground). But there are obvious dangers too.

One is to believe that splits do not matter or that this was a triumphant endorsement of the leadership. There may be more of a breathing space to sort things out than we had a right to expect, but voters will not forever be immune from splits and divisions in the party.

The second danger is to believe Ukip’s failure means we should not worry any more about all that English identity stuff. Embracing its English identity is about Labour’s ability to speak for the future of our nation, not a tactical response to the inroads of a populist rightwing party. While it certainly took Ukip’s incursions into traditional white working-class communities to alert many liberal cosmopolitan activists to the importance of national identity, the case for English Labour is much broader and stronger than that.

Social democratic programmes have traditionally had a strong strand of class politics. Yet it is hard to find examples of successful social democratic parties here or in the rest of western Europe that have won on a purely class-based appeal. Success almost always comes when those parties have also spoken to the future of the nation as a whole. While many in Labour will quibble at the description of the Scottish National party as social democratic, its success was undoubtedly founded on a combination of both a traditional social democratic message and the strong national story.

The power of Britain and Britishness as the symbolic expression of nationhood are in decline. The rise in self-professed Englishness is steadily rising. In England, Labour needs to speak for England if the party is to succeed. Britain and the union are not dead, but to speak for Britain and not for England will not work.

Ukip has always been a flawed vehicle for any sense of Englishness. For a start, many more people say English identity is important to them than have ever expressed even the vaguest interest in Ukip (over twice as many), and the peculiar personality of Ukip limits its appeal even to those who may share some of its sentiments. But a powerful political idea may live in the body politic even when it cannot find a vehicle for its expression. This is case with England, and Labour has the power to become its voice.

Of course, Labour cannot adopt an English identity tailored just to those voters who have been attracted by Ukip. A party that waves the St George flag on white council estates and quietly furls it away in a metropolitan city is not just doomed to fail, but deserves to fail. Our pride in our nation and our story of where we are going has to include all those making their homes and future here. Building our English nation together can be the glue binding us together; a glue that is missing from multiculturalism’s emphasis on difference, respect and unequal demands on different communities for tolerance.

This is not all about culture. It goes to the heart of many other areas of policy. Few will not have been angered by the latest revelations of tax-dodging foreign-owned companies, or the scant returns to British industry of our nuclear power programme or our rail investment. (John McDonnell’s unfortunate excursion into Mao deflected attention from very powerful argument about the undermining of our national economic infrastructure by the government’s underwriting of foreign investment). In the same way, few will not have wondered whether the inflow of the super-rich and tax-avoiding global elite into London is not distorting the capital’s housing market for our children every bit as much as the more publicised impact of poorer migrants on demand for homes. We may have headed off the impact of tax credit changes for a year or two, but we will never rebuild a social security system without a national sense of shared values and shared obligations. These big challenges require progressive and patriotic policies and the language to go with them. Even where policy issues span the union, it is the language of what this means to England that many voters increasingly want to hear.

The left often prefers to treat these as technocratic policy questions that do not require any particular national context or national language. The approach appeals to a rationalist, analytical strand of left thinking that is often uncomfortable with the idea of national identity. In reality, of course, policies on the economy, housing or welfare are always delivered in a national context. By failing to talk about the future of the nation we deny ourselves the chance to make a strong emotional and political connection with those voters who care about the future of their country

I would be cautious about writing Ukip off just yet. But the case for English Labour stands on its own merits.

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John Denham was member of parliament for Southampton Itchen from 1992-2015

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Photo: Stuart Bryant