Labour needs to learn from Boris Johnson and the SNP
LABOUR’S attempts to come to terms with its worst defeat since 1935 have been as painful as they are predictable. The party simply can’t understand how it lost to an Eton-educated Tory. Don’t voters know what’s good for them? We even offered them free broadband...
But people rarely vote on their own narrow material interest, rather on what they think is best for the country as a whole. They clearly didn’t think Jeremy Corbyn believed in Britain or had the nation’s best interests at heart.
Now, one of Mr Corbyn’s disciples, Rebecca Long-bailey, has recognised this. In her leadership pitch in the Guardian she has called for Labour to adopt “progressive patriotism” to bring the country together. She is suggesting that Labour’s electoral problem was not just opposition to Brexit but its ambivalence regarding the nation.
Ms Long-bailey doesn’t see why patriotism should be the property of the right. We should celebrate “Lancashire mill workers who supported Abraham Lincoln’s antislavery blockade of cotton from the American South”. But even this tentative and politically-correct version of patriotism proved too much for the guardians of Labour purity on Twitter. She was taken to task for spreading “loathsome nonsense...tory Lite...dog whistle nationalism”. “Progressive patriotism is an oxymoron”, said one critic, “like humane fascism.” For many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn love of country is irremediably toxic.
During the long Brexit culture war, this attitude finally alienated Labour’s older, socially conservative voters in the Midlands and North of England. The question is whether Labour has the will or the capacity to win them back. It would have to go a lot further than history lessons about anti-slavery.
Can you imagine Momentum activists saying how much they love Britain and its history? Can you hear David Lammy say that, actually, Britain is not a racist country? Mr Corbyn saying that the British Empire wasn’t all bad?
Imagine Ms Long-bailey saying that our armed forces are the best of British. Or that most men are kind and loving fathers and not part of an oppressive patriarchy. Twitter would go into meltdown if Labour started talking about controlling immigration.
I just can’t see Labour becoming patriotic in a way northern English voters would recognise. Stormzy would be furious. The Guardian would say it had gone populist, fascist, even.
But the inconvenient truth is that many voters just seem hard-wired to regard their community and their country with pride. It is a lot to do with accentuating the positive. The relentless miserablism of the Left leaves people with nothing to feel good about. It’s like watching a permanent Ken Loach film.
Scottish nationalists used to make the same mistake of revelling in miserablism. They banged on about how Scotland was impoverished and demeaned by England and how they’d stolen our oil. Then in the noughties they discovered positive nationalism and started talking up Scotland as a progressive country that could be a model for the world. Inclusive, democratic, equalitarian.
It worked. The SNP’S electoral dominance today is directly related to its celebration of Scotland. The 2014 referendum campaign, with its Yestivals and Saltires, was all about feeling good about being Scottish.
Could Labour learn from this? Or has Labour sold its soul to a version of liberal identity politics which loathes the very idea of nations? Labour intellectuals like Emily Thornberry laugh at flag-waving English patriots. Labour academics regard Britain as a neocolonial power, with blood on its hands, oppressing people abroad and racist at home.
This is why this General Election could be terminal for Labour. Unlike in Scotland, the English Left seems incapable of finding any positive dimension to nationalism. Britishness is seen as inherently right wing and racist – even though Britain gave the world parliamentary democracy, abolished the slave trade and led the defeat of fascism.
Boris Johnson’s One Nation Conservatism, by contrast, is a version of progressive nationalism that goes back to Disraeli. It even has similarities with contemporary Scottish nationalism. It is racially inclusive, for a start. Mr Johnson’s cabinet is far more ethnically diverse than the SNP’S. He is also articulating social democratic themes of redistribution and state intervention.
The Tory PM is dismantling the overtly racist, imperial nationalism of Churchill and Thatcher, in favour of the self-mocking, popular nationalism of the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. Danny Boyle’s pageant of English identity was of course authorised by Mr Johnson as London Mayor. It featured NHS nurses, Chartists and icons of popular culture. That’s the kind of One Nation Conservatism that Boris Johnson is grasping for, and is temperamentally capable of delivering.
It is about reflecting the nation in a favourable light, but it is also a way of doing politics. The Prime Minister is successful because he is relentlessly positive. He makes people feel good about themselves. Labour’s characterisation of him as a hardbitten racist demagogue doesn’t ring true. Mr Johnson is actually more in the hail-fellow-well-met mould of one Alex Salmond, who made the SNP what it is today.
Mr Salmond too was a gifted populist leader, a romantic nationalist who loved Scottish history and understood the importance of supporting the Scottish regiments, even the Queen. The media regarded him with suspicion, but many
Scottish voters loved him. He wedded nationalism to social democratic themes of inclusion and equality. In his 2012 Hugo Young lecture on progressive nationalism he hailed leftwing policies, like tuition fees, as the “social wage”.
Unlike Mr Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon does not like nationalism, and is quite obviously embarrassed by it. She’s even said she would like to remove the word “national” from the party name. But if she did she would risk throwing the cultural baby out with the liberal bathwater. The SNP was an early beneficiary of the wave of populist nationalism that has now swept England.
SNP intellectuals loathe the idea that Scottish nationalism might have anything in common with Brexit and English nationalism. But the similarities are too obvious to ignore. They were both populist rebellions against globalisation and neoliberalism by people who love their country and seek sanctuary within it.
How these two nationalisms, Scottish and English, learn to coexist – or don’t – will decide the future of the United Kingdom. Labour may have to learn the language of progressive nationalism to have any future at all.
Can you imagine Momentum activists saying how much they love Britain and its history?