SINCE THE ROYAL Wedding in 2011, followed this year by the Jubilee and the Olympics, a wave of patriotism has washed through the UK, and the politicians have been desperate to turn it to their advantage. Keenest has been Ed Miliband and the Labour Party, a party not exactly known for its patriotic credentials.
Thanks especially to the Olympics it has discovered that the country isn’t completely inhabited by a race of ignorant, drunken, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, cigarette-smoking, burger-eating trolls. In response it has now appointed itself the task of “nation-building” to ensure we end up with an NHS-worshipping, non-Christian, tax-loving, all-inclusive, multi-ethnic, multicultural, multi-everything New Jerusalem of general Europeanised niceness. The sins of our imperial past will still remain before our eyes and we shall apologise in perpetuity for them and dissolve any sense of national distinctiveness in the community of international diversity and equality, but at least we’ll be allowed to wave the Union Jack.
It just that it won’t be as easy as that.
One difficulty is a problem of the politicians’ own making, i.e. the possibility of independence for Scotland and the subsequent break-up of the United Kingdom. That’s guaranteed to stir up nationalist feelings on all sides. The worrying thing for the political establishment is not the nationalism of the Scots (whose desire for independence rarely gets above 40 percent in the polls) but a renewed sense of identity among the English. English nationalism, in the progressive view, is always dangerous, rooted in history, language, culture and (for some) race. That rootedness is alway bad, not least because it can’t be controlled by rules, regulations and political correctness.
Another pest is the European Union. Successful as the British media may be in hiding its activities, the Project’s incessant over-regulation, its complete lack of democratic accountability and its ratchet approach to the destruction of nation states is nevertheless sensed at a visceral level by the British electorate, and they don’t like it. The political establishment as a whole is totally committed to the European Project, so any public pronouncements about national identity and sovereignty are lies of the boldest sort. National identity without sovereignty inevitably leads to conflict.
The final problem is the British people themselves, made up as they are of a mess of different groupings, who have proved they’re capable of overcoming their own failings and (eventually) getting on with each other without the constant interference of the state. Easy-going and law-abiding as they usually are, they aren’t always amenable to being treated as serfs. Despite years of politicised de-education at school and regular training in political correctness from the BBC they have somehow retained a streak of recalcitrant and atavistic patriotism.
So Mr Miliband is faced with trying to shape some form of Labourism that squares the circle of progressive, tradition-hating, history-rejecting internationalist supineness with old-fashioned, popular pride in a historic, self-determined national identity.
As a modern politician, he’s unable to do that either by himself or with the help of his MPs, so he’s got himself an advisor. Ironically, of course, he has hired a non-Brit: Tim Soutphommasane is an Australian, born of Laotion refugees in France, so he definitely has an individual perspective on national identity. A spell at Oxford has no doubt equipped him with an understanding of British nationhood.
Having read an article in the Guardian by Mr Soutphommasane I doubt his talents will prove any use to Labour, even though his talk is besprinkled with progressive buzzwords: multicultural, community, diversity, equality, pluralism, citizenship, forward-looking, etc.
Tim liked Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony because of its story of Britain as “the ongoing project of a New Jerusalem” – forgetting that the idea originated in a monocultural ethos that demanded assimilation from incomers. But in Tim and Ed’s New Jerusalem there’s no place for monoculturalism; it has to be replaced.
Tim thus argues that “the common ground of citizenship should be defined more by political than by cultural membership” and that citizens should share a “public identity”. There’s no explanation of what this “political” membership is and who is supposed to define it (best guess: it’s not the citizens), or how you can have a public identity that does not incorporate a cultural one. Or, indeed, how you can have a public identity that may be at odds with various subcultures.
IN TIM’S WORLD this flimsy construct is to replace what he calls “the one authoritative way of expressing one’s national identity”. The words are deliberately weaselled but the meaning is plain: there will be no single, unifying, historically defined identity, just a place with the name of a nation attached to it and bunches of different people within it all behaving as if they lived in the countries they came from.
It’s just the old divisive multicultural relativism trying to hide itself with a change of hat. The defining element of national identity is always cultural, especially in a country as old as Britain. None of this prevarication touches on the defining emotional attachments between people and the place in which they live. Emotion is what gives meaning to identity of any sort. Identity is not some carefully worked out intellectual standpoint, nuanced to fit in with the prevailing political orthodoxy. And it is most assuredly not loyalty to the apparatus of the state.
Advocates of the “progressive view of nationhood” can’t accept this, preferring the idea of identity-lite, based on nothing more than, say, having a passport and abiding by the “civic values” of the country you live in – as defined by and embodied in the state. Unfortunately, if you import cultures from one country into another without assimilation, at some point there will be a conflict of civic values, sometimes with fatal consequences, as we have already seen.
Mr Miliband’s party has already done great mischief to Britain by using mass immigration to manipulate national identity. Employing a policy wonk from Down Under to help him advocate the same policies wearing a different hat is hypocritical. After Gordon Brown’s pathetic failure to seize the patriotic ground by waffling on about Britishness a few years ago he ought to know this is dangerous territory for fairweather patriots.
